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Abstract
The presence of the Marian icon and the ensuing encoding and disruption of its regime of visibility is a constant presence within the contemporary Latin American cultural scene. This is particularly true vis-a-vis the depatriarchalization of bodies undertaken by feminist and queer collectives in the region. This essay addresses precisely the performative practice of Mujeres Creando, a Bolivian collective that puts forward performances based on disidentification with the Marian icon. More specifically, this piece analyzes how Mujeres Creando displaces both the virginal maternal body and the categorical imperatives of heterosexuality on reproductive bodies. This movement exposes the historical sediment that shapes the becoming of bodies with reproductive potential into feminized bodies. The analysis includes two performances: La Virgen Barbie (The Barbie Virgin, Citation2010b) and La Virgen del Cerro (The Virgin of the Mount, Citation2011), both directed by María Galindo. On a methodological level, the essay draws on the theoretical underpinnings of performance studies, visual and image studies, feminist and queer theory, and Latin American decolonizing thought.
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Notes
1 The figure of the Virgin Mary is found in a constellation of recent feminist productions in South America. For instance, in the world of feminist film, there are some examples such as Madeinusa by Claudia Llosa (Peru), Empaná de Pino by Edwin Oyarce (Chile), and La ciénaga by Lucrecia Martel and El niño pez by Lucía Puenzo (Argentina). In the literary field there are many examples; two of them are the novel Mapocho by Nona Fernández, and the book of poetry La virgen de las antenas by Begoña Ugalde.
2 I understand the regime of visibility from the perspective of Jacques Rancière in The Politics of Aesthetics. The distribution of sensibility involves a complex of relations between politics and art. For Rancière, art is a possible phenomenon that produces space, time, and specific types of visibility. This form of distribution of the sensible allows us to observe the existence of a sensible commonality that defines artistic practices (Citation2004, 12).
3 I prefer to speak of feminised bodies or nonbinary bodies in order to highlight the process of subjectivisation and the performative becoming of sexuality and gender. Accordingly, I do not adhere to any ontological or essentialist notion of womanhood or maternity.
4 I developed these ideas in a previous article (Arcos Citation2018), through the concept of the “biopolitics of maternity” from the nineteenth century to the present.
5 Lavrin’s (Citation1995) Women, Feminism, and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890-1940 is a central work on this subject.
6 In this article, Kristeva develops a historical trajectory of the Virgin Mary figure in European Christianity. She also explores the influence of this figure in the process of hegemonic identification between the feminine and the maternal. Kristeva further labels this process “consecrated motherhood”. This identification would respond to an illusory vision anchored in primary narcissism (Kristeva and Goldhammer Citation1985).
7 I make this point because in general, when I refer to the implications of the Virgin Mary in the Andean region, comparisons with the Virgin of Guadalupe tend to arise. The matters of the cult of Guadalupe and Mexican nationalism are beyond the scope of this essay.
8 In “Against Marianism”, Marysa Navarro (Citation2002) summarizes very well the controversy with this concept. Other authors are Silvia Marina Arrom, Susan C. Bourque, Kay Barbara Warren, Carol Browner, and Ellen Lewin.
9 Other texts from later that same decade – e.g. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976) by Adrienne Rich and The Reproduction of Mothering (1978) by Nancy Chodorow – included the feminist ideas of the second wave that were already circulating in the United States.
10 All translations from Spanish to English are my own, unless otherwise specified.
11 I prefer to keep the Spanish words mestizo and mestizas, because the meaning in English can be confusing. Originally, mestizo was a colonial category that was used to refer to people of mixed European and Indigenous descent. However, Latin American critical theory has refashioned the term mestizo to contemplate the complex racial structure operating in our regional postcolonial history.
12 The MAS, Movement for Socialism, is a Bolivian left-wing, indigenist political party led by Evo Morales and founded in 1998. Mujeres Creando has been the organisation most critical of the gender policies of the MAS governments. They have also publicly denounced Morales’s sexism and pedophilia.
13 In contrast, there are intellectuals like Eichmann (Citation2007) who question the idea of the Cerro Rico paintings and their identification with the Virgin as a hybridization of Christian and Indigenous beliefs. Eichmann further argues that the figure of the mountain to designate Mary appears in patristic texts, in a Russian iconographic tradition linked to them, as well as in literary traditions of the Golden Age, both in Spain and in America (34).
14 This system of exploitation established labour quotas and a compulsory tribute to the Spanish Crown that the Indigenous population paid to the Corregidor, the administrator of the Spanish Empire in American territory.
15 The Andean word pachakuti can be translated as an upheaval of the universe, whether as renovation or catastrophe.
16 Ayllu roughly translates to “community”, These were family and territorial units that made up the basic social units of Andean life.
17 “Yo no recuerdo mi nombre, pero sé que no me llamo América/sé que no soy Hispanoamérica tampoco/para cambiarme el nombre no me bautizaste, sino que violándome/me impusiste otro nombre”.
18 Historically, the word chola was used as a racist epithet to vilify Aymara and Quechua women who lived in Bolivian cities. Today feminist Indigenous women have resignified the word to represent the urban experience of racialized women, but now from a decolonial and antipatriarchal position.
19 “Dedicado a todas las niñas del mundo entero bautizadas con el nombre de la virgen María” and “Vírgenes, indias, putas, locas y lesbianas juntas y hermanadas”.
20 “Ya no quiero ser la virgen Barbie, ya no quiero ser la patrona del racismo, ni la protectora del capitalismo”.
21 “Quiero (…) olvidar mi condición de virgen, olvidar mi condición de bella, de blanca y de virtuosa, que detrás de mí el capitalismo se derrumbe y pierda hasta los dioses y las vírgenes que lo sustentan, que detrás de mí se desmorone el racismo y el color blanco que lo sustenta”.
22 “No quiero enseñar a las niñas a odiar sus cuerpos morenos”.
23 The antipatriarchal communal feminists, among whom Adriana Guzmán stands out, have noted the naturalisation of the gender disparity that the government policy of chachawarmi has brought.
24 In contrast to Lugones (Citation2007) – who describes and understands gender as a colonial imposition through the articulation of the concept of gender colonialism – Segato (Citation2011, 40–42) considers that gender as a central category of the modern colonial order does have a precolonial existence (she calls it the pre-intrusion world). Precolonial gender relations worked according to a hierarchical duality (she defines it through the concept of complementarity) in which a low-intensity patriarchy operated. Gender coloniality in the present intervenes and transforms gender and sexuality through a binary, hierarchically violent heteronormative dynamic. Modern colonial patriarchy establishes not only the pornographic nature of the colonizing gaze on females and feminised bodies, but along with it, the femicidal machinery of modernity.
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Carol Arcos Herrera
Carol Arcos Herrera is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Literature at University of California, San Diego. She holds a PhD in Latin American Studies from the University of Chile. Dr. Arcos specialises in feminisms, gender, and sexuality studies in Latin America. Dr. Arcos is the author of several research articles and book chapters published in Chile, Brazil, Mexico, Spain, Peru, and the US. Her latest published articles include “The Uncanny Law of the Mother in Mapocho (Citation2002) by Nona Fernández”, in Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World (2022), “Rosario Orrego (1831/34–1879) and the Proto-feminist Writing Scene” in A History of Chilean Literature (Ed. Ignacio López-Calvo, Cambridge, 2021); “Biopolítica de lo materno: familia y feminismo tras la guerra del Pacífico” in the edited volume Ni amar ni odiar con firmeza. Cultura y emociones en el Perú posbélico (1885-1925) (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2019). and “Latin American Feminisms: desire, body and biopolitics of the maternal” in Debate Feminista (2018). Also, she was the coeditor of the Historia crítica de la literatura chilena (LOM, 2017–2019).