Anti-colonial Feminist Ramblings About Everything and Anything

Marrero, María Teresa. “Out of the Fringe? Out of the Closet: Latina/Latino Theatre and Performance in the 1990s”. TDR, Fall 2000, Vol. 44, No. 3, Pages 131-153. Marrero tries to reconstruct art histories of Latino performance in the 1990's, cautiously admitting this can only constitute a partial project. She argues that following Diana Taylor, we can assert that performance, both as art and political practice have the effect of transforming cultural repertoires, thus expanding possibilities for representation. Initially Latino/a theater was oriented towards the building of communities and much too often relegated issues of gender and sexuality, privileging and implicit male, heterosexual identity, while female roles were often limited to traditional and passive women. This prompted the emergence of new forms of theater and performance that subverted women's traditional identities, as well as made visible the diversity of sexual identities within Latino/a communities, which was...

Tinsman, Heidi. Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality and Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950-1973. (2002) Tinsman explores the ways that two decades of Agrarian Reform (1950-1973) shaped meanings about gender and sexuality in rural Chile, and more broadly reflects on the ways that gender and sexuality are mobilized to enable or oppose political projects. The Agrarian Reform was a contested negotiation between state discourses (which were in turn also contested within the state) and the actors that exercised their agency, accommodating and stretching these meanings for themselves. In their everyday lives, campesinos negotiated meanings over respectability and equality with their bosses, partners, and children. Patriarchy operates then as a series of multiple, local arrangements that make it heterogeneous and contradictory rather than a universal monolithic system of domination. Even though the Agrarian Reform operated directly on men as heads of households for ...

Rosemblatt, Karin Alejandra. Gendered Compromises. Political Cultures and the State in Chile, 1920-1950. Introduction pp. 1-25. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. This book revolves around the argument that the modernizing project in Chile during the first half of the twentieth-century was formulated as a gendered project, in which the state drew a line between respectable men (workers), respectable women (housewives and mothers), and the undisciplined "other". Moreover, they opposed rationality —linked to modern citizenship— to uncontained sexuality. This was in turn linked also to the racialized aspect of the national project: the whitening of the nation. Thus, trough the control over sexuality the racial boundaries of the nation were to be sustained. Rosemblatt analyses diverse sources, such as state documents and fiction, to document the project of the popular front (the center-left coalition that governed in Chile between the 1920's a...

Velasco, Juan. “Performing Multiple Identities: Guillermo Gómez-Peña and His “Dangerous Border Crossings”. Latino/a Popular Culture edited by Michelle Habell-Pallan and Mary Romero. New York, London: New York University Press, 2002. Velasco looks at Gómez-Peña body of work which comprises performance and writing, and points at several issues raised by it: - commodification of indigenous identities - connections between the production of the 'authentic Other' and the new world order - performative nature of identity - colonial discourse as relying on a binary between colonizers and colonized identities - strategies by which colonized subjects can subvert this binary Anzaldúa has previously constructed the notion of the 'border' as a site for articulation of a 'new mestiza consciousness', a type of subjectivity that refuses to be on one side or the other. Gómez-Peña however, seems to be more skeptical about any 'positive model of cultural hybridity' since...

Smith, Carol A. “Myths, Intellectuals, and Race/Class/Gender Distinctions in the Formation of Latin American Nations”. Journal of Latin American Anthropology . September 1996, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 148-169. Smith examines how "mestizaje" emerged linked to nationalist ideology but has also been appropriated in different ways by the identity politics of some "new social movements" in Latin America. The myth of mestizaje entails at the same time the illusion of homogeneity and the affirmation of internal racial hierarchies. Hegemonic national culture needs to be produced and controlled by state institutions. Mestizaje is presented as the "natural" or biological basis for the project of a national culture, and it is then a key ideological and mythical component of nation-building processes in LA. However, as subaltern subjects have more access to the means of production of images and discourses about them, they can manipulate these meanings. Smith is specially in...

Stephen, Lynn. “The Construction of Indigenous Suspects: Militarization and the Gendered and Ethnic Dynamics of Human Rights Abuses in Southern Mexico”. Perspectives on Las Américas: a reader in culture, history and representation. Edited by Matthew Gutmann. Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2003. Stephen examines the gendered and sexualized patterns of militarization and torture in Oaxaca and Chiapas, and how in these processes, long held myths and stereotypes about women and indigenous peoples are mobilized in what she calls "the cultural packaging of violence", that is, the construction of subjects who can be targets of violence. She notes based on her ethnographic work that gender and ethnicity are critical for the construction of the worthless, subversive, dangerous subjects of violence (for the analysis of violence in Chile, we would need to add class as another critical factor, and the racialization of working-class subjects). She also points at the continuity of colonial ...

Stephenson, Marcia. “The Architectural Relationship between Gender, Race, and the Bolivian State”. The Latin American subaltern studies reader edited by Ileana Rodríguez. Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2001. This article tackles the relationship between narratives of nationhood in Bolivia, race, gender and space. It argues that the idea of Bolivia as a modern nation-state requires to put in place the ideology of mestizo identity (the progressive whitening of the population), the "othering" of indigenous populations, and a gendered and racialized conception of space to domesticate the heterogeneous social body. Taking as a start point the planning and development of rural houses, Stephenson analyzes the ideological implications of their spatial distribution: hegemonic discourses of modernity and citizenship carry gendered distinctions between the inside/domestic and the outside/public, as well as the demand for the acculturation of indigenous communities, who are expected...

Rodríguez, Juana María. Queer Latinidad. Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces. New York and London: New York University Press, 2003. Rodríguez emphasizes "place" and "space" as sites for the articulation of identities, and sees place as critical to understand performative practices of identity as situated. Inspired by Foucault's notions of regulatory practices and disciplinary discourses, as well as by Judith Butler's idea of gender as performative, she regards subjectivity more as a product of discursive practices rather than pre-existing them. Also quotes Alarcón's notion of "subject-in-process" to point at the paradoxical and contradictory character of identities. Every particular space contains pre-existing discourses and narratives in which subjectivity is embodied in a —culturally specific— intelligible way; however, there is no discourse of identity that can contain subjectivity, there is always an excess of the subject that resists to ...

Arrizon Alicia. Queering Mestizaje: Transculturation and Performance. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2006. On the other hand, Latinidad is a notion that is subjected to different power regimes than mestizaje, and that in the context of transculturation in LA, relates more to the Western/North fantasies and to the commodification and fetishization of racialized bodies. [I had done the experiment of googling for images of "latin american" versus "latina" women and had realized about this before too, on the first case I got Frida Kahlo, in the second, Salma Hayek, JLo, and a bunch of pop-up porn ads featuring Latinas]. However, Arrizon is interested in asking for example, how can Latinidad be linked to queer desire, and to understand how different cultural productions —from Hollywood movies to experimental performance— create particular genealogies, "marking counterhegemonic systems that reassert the possibilities of culture and ideology in representation...

Arrizon Alicia. Queering Mestizaje: Transculturation and Performance. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2006. Queering relates to refusing or resistance to occupy or be identified with a single subject position. Queer subjects occupy an identity “in between” (hybrid), which is useful to de-essentialize identity. Mestizaje, as a postcolonial condition, has been both an ideology linked to nationalist narratives and to an (oppositional) identity linked to power struggles over representation, autonomy and authenticity in Latin America. On one hand, mestizaje provides a narrative that gives meaning and direction to colonial violence and processes of transculturation through the idealization of Spanish and Indigenous blood (note that the blood is the metaphor to talk about filiation and genealogies of race) and gives historical meaning to racialized bodies. This narrative represents the colonial encounter as a racialized and gendered romance between the male Spanish conquistador and ...

Nelson, Diane. “Introduction: Body Politics and Quincentennial Guatemala”. A Finger in the Wound. Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala. . Pp. 1-40. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. In her study of race relations between Mayans and "ladinos" in Guatemala, Nelson makes some very key observations that can be used to analyze the situation of Chileans dealing with political violence at the aftermath of Pinochet's dictatorship. For instance, the fact that racial differences are portraited by the state as dangerous for national unity. Also, that individual bodies are disciplined so as to produce the "body politic", because efforts to form a national "whole" require material proof on material bodies by racial, sexual and gender marking. In the attempt to "fix" conflictive racial relations, the state circulates the metaphor of the family and of conviviality at home: we all have to live in the same house. This metapho...

En la foto: Comandanta Ramona Stephen, Lynn. “Gender, Citizenship, and the Politics of Identity” in Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 28, No. 6, Power, Policy, and Neoliberalism (Nov., 2001), pp. 54-69. Sage Publications. Stephen discute la tensión entre las críticas a las políticas de la identidad —afán des-esencializador que atribuye a los estudios culturales— y las políticas concretas de las organizaciones de base. Usando como ejemplo el movimiento de madres (CO-MADRES) en El Salvador y la organización de las mujeres indígenas en México, Stephen demuestra que estas mujeres reconocen y negocian permanentemente sus diferencias y la variedad de significados asociados a su identidad, pero que deliberadamente proyectan una identidad homogénea y esencializada (que dice que tiene un componente performativo en el espacio público en el caso de las organizaciones de madres, pero yo creo que en los dos casos, porque las zapatistas se enmascaran y eso tb es performativo) en un proceso activo de...