Indianizing Film: Decolonization, the Andes, and the Question of Technology

4: Gender, Complementarity, and the Anticolonial Gaze

4 y Gender, Complementarity, and the Anticolonial Gaze When viewing indigenous fiction and documentary films, it is striking how often they frame women as cultural guardians and men as the victims of the self-denigrating effects of colonial discourse. Documentaries and fiction shorts highlight the way cultural practices, religious beliefs, and knowledge are transmitted in embodied ways. Women become the symbolic bearers of indigenous identification; they are the ones with privileged access to indigenous languages, stories, and ethos; they are the ones transmitting social memory. Even ethnically marked clothing is frequently (but not exclusively) associated with women rather than men. In the fiction shorts men often appear as those who no longer believe in the stories and myths told by their wives. The male protagonists, who favor more secular and rational perspectives , are criticized for their loss of faith in the animate lifeworld and the social ethos that storytelling transmits. Their views mirror the lettered city’s long-standing discourse that disqualifies indigenous belief systems as superstitions . In fiction shorts like Qati qati and Loving Each Other in the Shadows, women, in contrast, become the tragic heroes who die violent deaths, thus redeeming their husbands and lovers along with indigenous cultural tradition at large. At first sight, the salience of gender in indigenous video seems to contradict the way some Latin Americans have understood power to be constituted in the context of colonialism. The principle of race, says Aníbal Quijano, “has proven to be the most effective and long-lasting instrument of universal social domination, since the much older principle—gender or intersexual domination—was encroached upon by the inferior/superior racial classifications. So the conquered and dominated peoples were situated in a 1 10 ndianizing ilm natural position of inferiority, and, as a result, their phenotypic traits as well as their cultural features were considered inferior. In this way, race became the fundamental criterion for the distribution of the world population into ranks, places, and roles in the new society’s structure of power (“Coloniality ” 535). Quijano identifies race as the crucial lynchpin of power relations in the global world system.1 According to this understanding, we would expect indigenous video, like the anticolonial cinema of the sixties and seventies, to focus on racial discrimination and exploitation. Why do indigenous media insist on gender instead of race? On the one hand, highlighting women as the bearers of indigenous knowledge and culture and juxtaposing them with men who no longer believe in the relevance of traditions, corresponds to lived experiences. The imposed (and self-imposed) deculturation of the aboriginal peoples (pueblos originarios) in Bolivia has a gendered dimension that has affected differently “how one is indigenous,” whether in rural communities, in the cities, or in indigenous movement organizations (Rivera Cusicanqui, “Desafíos” 17). On the other hand, when the videos construct masculinity and femininity as two distinct forms of subjectivity that relate differently to the pressures of colonialism, they also respond to the way the cinematic gaze—as part of a lingering colonial discourse—has intertwined constructs of race and gender. Does the indigenous enactment of femininity as closer to home and traditions hence mirror the dilemma of Asian and African anticolonial movements, where prescriptive dual gender relations rendered women the safeguards of tradition, inhibiting their struggle against patriarchal oppression? Or does women’s participation in the indigenous movements and in the social practice of video making (on and off screen) constitute a kind of revolutionary action? Paraphrasing Frantz Fanon, one might ask if indigenous media create women that are no longer silent, whose sacrifices and fight for liberation develop new values governing sexual relations? Has woman “ceased to be a complement for man?” Has she “literally forged a new place for herself?” (Fanon, “Dying” 109). Finally, what are the pitfalls of juxtaposing femininity and masculinity? What becomes of those who do not fit neatly into either category? Must not decolonization itself overcome dichotomous thinking? The Patriarchal Gaze of Empire Certainly, racial thinking has become paramount since the conquest. Racial difference has been inscribed and enacted through discourse, social ender and the nticolonial aze 1 1 1 practices, and visual representations. The idea of race, before it was even called such, evolved from the debates over the humanity of the people that Spanish and Portuguese conquerors and clerics encountered. The debate has been transformed since the...