Of Beasts and Beauty: Gender, Race, and Identity in Colombia

Notes

nOtes intrOductiOn 1. What is now Colombia was known as Gran Colombia from 1819 to 1830, Nueva Granada from 1830 to 1863, and Colombia thereafter. I will use the name Colombia to refer to the country regardless of the official title at the time. 2. South American nations like Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay have all placed well in such championships and have built part of their twentiethcentury national and international reputations around them. 3. Colombia won the Miss Universe pageant in 1958 out of the ashes of La Violencia and at the beginning of the National Front; Venezuela won in 1979, 1981, 1986, and 1996 as bipartisan liberal democracy unraveled, and recently in 2006 and 2009 during the Chávez administrations; Brazil won in 1963 as civilians pushed aggressive reforms and in 1968 during a full-blown military dictatorship. 4. A series of experiments in the 1980s found that infants as young as three months old preferred faces deemed by adults to be attractive to others rated unattractive . See Linda A. Jackson, Physical Appearance and Gender: Sociobiological and Sociocultural Perspectives (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 75–77. 5. Miss Puerto Rico has won Miss Universe five times (1970, 1985, 1993, 2001, 2006) in an elite group, only trailing Venezuela (six titles) and the United States (seven crowns). As both culturally Latina and nationally American—the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico is U.S. territory—the selection of Miss Puerto Rico in 1993 could be seen as a synthetic candidate who represented both Latin America and the United States at a moment of greater economic hegemony, sparking nationalist concerns for protective sovereignty. Research on beauty and identity in Puerto Rico would be fascinating. 6. A regional, national, and international analysis of the impact of the rubber boom in northwest Amazonia: Red Rubber, Bleeding Trees: Violence, Slavery, and Empire in Northwest Amazonia, 1850–1933 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998). 7. It strikes me that a study of the notion of beauty among the blind would be fascinating . I found John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972) a useful primer on how to analyze visual texts. 8. See Eccehomo Cetina, Jaque a la reina: mafia y corrupción en Cartagena (Bogotá: Planeta, 1994); and Pedro Claver Tellez, El lado oscuro de las reinas: sus amores, sus pasiones, sus intimidades. (Bogotá: Intermedio Editores, 1994). 236 nOtes tO Pages 6–15 9. Las mujeres en la historia de Colombia, vol. 1, Mujeres, historia y política; vol. 2, Mujeres y sociedad; vol. 3, Mujeres y cultura (Bogotá: Editorial Norma, 1995); see especially volumes 4, 5, and 6 of the Nueva historia de Colombia (Bogotá: Planeta Colombiana Editorial, 1989). 10. See Suzy Bermúdez Q., Hijas, esposas y amantes: género, clase, etnia y edad en la historia de América Latina (Bogotá: Ediciones Uniandes, 1992); Catalina Reyes Cárdenas, La vida cotidiana en Medellín, 1890–1930 (Bogotá: Colcultura, 1996); and Patricia Londoño Vega and Santiago Londoño Vélez, “Vida diaria en las ciudades colombianas,” in Nueva historia de Colombia, vol. 4 (Bogotá: Planeta Colombiana Editorial , 1989), pp. 313–399. 11. Lois W. Banner, American Beauty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 3–5. 12. Amelia Simpson, Xuxa: The Mega-Marketing of Gender, Race, and Modernity (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993). 13. Ellen Zetzel Lambert, The Face of Love: Feminism and the Beauty Question (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995); Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women (New York: Doubleday, 1991). 14. Colleen Ballerina Cohen, Richard Wilk, and Beverly Stoeltje, eds., Beauty Queens on the Global Stage: Gender, Contests, and Power (New York: Routledge, 1996). 15. Jackson, Physical Appearance and Gender. chaPter 1 1. For geographic introductions to Colombia, see Frank Safford, The Ideal of the Practical: Colombia’s Struggle to Form a Technical Elite (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976), pp. 21–24; and Krzysztof Dydyński, Colombia, a Lonely PlanetTravel Survival Kit, 2nd ed. (Hawthorne,Victoria: Lonely Planet Publications, 1995), pp. 28–30. 2. For a short but insightful overview of twentieth-century Colombian history, see Brian Loveman and Thomas M. Davies, Jr., “Colombia,” in Che Guevara, GuerrillaWarfare :With Revised and Updated Introduction and Case Studies by Brian Loveman and Thomas M. Davies Jr., 3rd ed. (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1997), pp. 233–267. 3. Raymond Leslie Williams and Kevin G. Guerrieri, Culture and Customs in Colombia (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), pp. xvi, 26, 29...