Dangerous Curves: Latina Bodies in the Media (review)

Isabel Molina-Guzmán’s Dangerous Curves: Latina Bodies in the Media maps out contemporary configurations of Latina women in US and global media. She justifies her focus in the introduction, demonstrating how “Latina performers, producers, and audiences” (1) are an integral component of global media while outlining the demands Latinas face both to represent their community and to “serve the economic imperatives of globally integrated media industries” (2). As there is a paucity of scholarly work on Latinas in contemporary media, Dangerous Curves makes a much-needed intervention in the field.

The book is also distinguished by its mix of industrial, textual, and response-oriented approaches. In her introduction, Molina-Guzmán explicitly situates herself within a Foucauldian tradition of discourse analysis. The author understands mainstream media as an ambivalent site privileging dominant (white) power relations (what the author calls “symbolic colonization”) while also containing subversive or critical elements (“symbolic rupture”). Racial formation theory is integral to this discussion: Molina-Guzmán presents racial and gender identity markers as fluid and mutable. This theoretical framework will be useful to critical race and gender scholars beyond Latina studies.

The book is organized topically. The chapters comprise five case studies, which Molina-Guzmán uses to elucidate the various ways Latina bodies are constructed in mainstream media—and how audiences respond to them. The first chapter analyzes the role of news media during the controversial Elián González custody battle, an event the author describes as a touchstone for understanding how the media shapes notions of cubana womanhood. Molina-Guzmán analyzes US news coverage from both mainstream sources and ethnic news media to show how the identities of Elián’s mother Elisabet and aunt Marisleysis were differently constructed along lines of gender and race. At first Elisabet (a white cubana who died en route from Cuba to the United States) is portrayed as a “virginal self-sacrificing mother,” a sympathetic narrative in which Elisabet’s whiteness played a key role. Yet in death Elisabet’s body became a site of discursive struggle. Later media reports contested her whiteness and reconfigured her as an ethnic “other” in a new narrative of an abused woman coerced into making a fatal departure from Cuba. Such mutability is also at issue in Molina-Guzmán’s analysis of the shifting representations of Marisleysis, from a mature, white, middle-class Cuban to a hysterical black “other.” Molina-Guzmán argues that the Elián González media frenzy “signals the completion of US Cubans’ transformation from celebrated political, ethnic exiles to marginalized racial minorities” (25). The interaction of gender and race is evident as Molina-Guzmán demonstrates Latinas’ liminal position in the American social consciousness.

This liminality is evident again in Molina-Guzmán’s discussion—which comprises chapter 2—of Jennifer Lopez as a star whose Latina body has been heavily surveyed in the popular media. Looking at tabloids published between 2002 and 2004—a choice she explains by noting that these years represent “the height of Lopez’s cultural visibility” (53)—Molina-Guzmán explores the possibilities and limits of Latina stardom. She supplements this with a critical reading of audience responses on Blogcritics Magazine. The chapter emphasizes Lopez’s oscillations, within the US cultural imaginary, between subversive Latina sexuality and sanctioned Latina femininity and between whiteness and blackness. Such oscillations are evident in the way tabloids and fans responded to her romantic relationships with Puff Daddy, Ben Affleck, and Mark Anthony. Molina-Guzmán determines that Jennifer Lopez has been publicly disciplined into performing the role of a loving Puerto Rican wife. This reminds us that, though media conceptions of female desirability have diversified over recent decades, cultural ideals of acceptable feminine beauty and behavior remain heavily racialized.

Chapter 3 similarly engages with the limits and construction of acceptable Latina representation in a discussion of the film Frida. Molina-Guzmán blends discussion of the...