Governing the Female Body: Gender, Health, and Networks of Power

9 Disciplining the Ethnic Body: Latinidad, Hybridized Bodies and Transnational Identities

206 In recent years, as the number of Latina and Latinos living in the United States have increased, Latinidad—the cultural state and process of being, becoming, or appearing Latina or Latino—has become not only a widely culturally intelligible identity but also a culturally desirable ethnicity, style, and corporeal practice. Recently and historically, the construction and transformation of Latinidad has been produced and mobilized primarily, though not exclusively, through mass mediated discourse and other modes of public culture. This chapter examines the popular culture narratives and symbolic strategies surrounding the signification of Latina bodies against the background of contemporary and public discourses about Latinas to interrogate the tensions of policing and producing racialized and gendered bodies. In particular, we focus on Latina women with widely circulated media representations and analyze these popular narratives by engaging with Foucault’s concept of normalization as an instrument of power and discipline to theorize through the tension between racial and ethnic hybridity/multiplicity and racial and ethnic homogenization/fragmentation. Given the way mass communication is both informative and informed by the contemporary U.S. discursive formation about race, ethnicity, gender, and identity, we conclude by contextualizing our analysis within the terrain of public talk about Latina health and bodies. Decades of research on ethnic, racial, and feminist studies demonstrate that active mediation and production of racialized and ethnicized bodies are traversed by gendered power relations. In other words, the sign of “woman” often functions as a stand-in for objects and concepts ranging from nation to beauty to sexuality, and in contexts that often relegate feminized images, bodies, and the objects to which 9 Disciplining the Ethnic Body Latinidad, Hybridized Bodies and Transnational Identities ISA BEL MOLINA GUZM Á N & A NGH A R A D N. VA L DI V I A University of Illinois Disciplining the Ethnic Body 207 they are connected, to less powerful positions than their masculinized counterparts. As a result, the body that becomes both racialized and feminized is the product of a double-edged construction of “otherness.” For example, if Latino bodies can be said to be generally devalued and feminized, then Latina bodies are doubly displaced in that they fall beyond the margins of both Latino culture generally, and the mainstream of femininity and beauty. Additionally, the culturally powerful discourses of border crossing contamination and excessive sexual reproduction singles out Latina bodies as symbolically impure and dangerous bodies requiring state-sanctioned inspections and medical interventions. This is the contemporary context for the study of gender and Latinidad in the United States and in the many places across the globe where U.S.produced cultural products circulate. This chapter draws on feminist media theories and Latina and Latino Studies to explore recent writing surrounding the representational politics of hybridized bodies and transnational identities. Through an exploration of the politics of Latinidad the chapter investigates the dual processes of producing and policing the Latina body and alternative forms of corporeal beauty. Furthermore, we investigate how these public and spectacularized bodies are traversed and disciplined by homogenizing European narratives of origin and binary racialized prescriptions of the body, such as those that surround Latina migration, immigration, and health. At the same time, the chapter explores how the hybridized body (i.e., the Latina body) characterized through discourses of multiplicity connects to broader transformative notions of transnational bodies and identities to put these European and racialized narratives into question and to push beyond them. Drawing on Shohat’s and Stam’s (1994) notion of “ethnicities in relation,” this chapter explores the relational construction of gender, nation, race, and class. At the same time, the chapter engages the Foucauldian (1979) concept of “normalization” as an instrument of power and discipline to theorize the contemporary tensions between hybridity/multiplicity and homogenization/fragmentation to address the useful formation of new and productively globalized corporeal practices toward the manufacture of alternative embodiments and identities. Contextualizing Latinidad in U.S. Public Culture Recent historical shifts, including global economic transformations, geographical migrations and diasporas, and newly forming global identities have brought previously minoritized cultures to the foreground . In particular, demographic and cultural changes in racial and isabel molina guzmán & angharad n. valdivia 208 ethnic diversity mean there is both an empirical and representational growth in Latina and Latino bodies. Recent increases in population, market power, and cultural influence demand that the U.S. Latina and Latino population be acknowledged in its richness, complexity, and multiplicity. According...