SoHo as virtual theatre: performing gender, race, and class in 21st-century Colombia

ABSTRACT

In this article I explore the cultural significance of SoHo, a magazine produced by and addressed to the Colombian elite yet consumed across a wider urban social spectrum. I carry out an analysis of the magazine in connection with the broader political, cultural, and social context of its production and circulation during the period it was directed by journalist Daniel Samper Ospina (2001–2015). I argue that under Samper Ospina, SoHo played a significant role in shaping gender ideologies in 21st-century urban Colombia. Overtly addressed to a male audience (its title means ‘Only for Men’) and following the model of Playboy and Esquire, SoHo operated during the period studied as a ‘virtual theatre’ where the Colombian elite converged and where a sort of education in postmodern sensibilities of both men and women took place. Such an educational process took the form of a double-edged performance of gender, social class, and race: firstly, in Austin's sense, upon the women it portrayed; secondly, in the theatrical sense, by the (mostly male) members of the Colombian elite that actively participated in its production. As a virtual theatre, SoHo carries out a specific type of ideological work that seeks to ensure cultural hegemony and, through it, the perpetuation of a system of domination that goes back to the colonial period and whose keys are ‘the lettered city’ and the ‘whiteness device’ (All translations are mine).

KEYWORDS:

• SoHo
• urban Colombia
• performance
• ideology
• gender
• class
• distinction
• race
• the whiteness device
• the lettered city

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 After Samper Ospina's stepping down as head of SoHo, Diego Garzón, who had been general editor since Edition 78 (Oct. 2006), took up his position. The magazine is still being published on a monthly basis in Colombia and in the other countries where it was independently established under Samper Ospina.

2 As I show elsewhere (Giraldo Forthcoming a), a number of facts attest to the claim that SoHo was successful in converting consumers into value. Most notable of all is the fact that women that were already established as celebrities kept agreeing to being featured in it for free while non-celebrities went to great lengths in order to achieve this.

3 As an adjective, ‘virtual’ has been entirely absorbed by computer science and in that context, it refers to technological mediation that allows/encourages viewers' participation from the part of the viewer. Working from within this approach Giannachi defines ‘virtual theatres’ as ‘open works in which the viewer is variously participating to the work of art from within it’ (Giannachi 2004, p. 4). I am reclaiming a more mundane use of the term ‘virtual’ that puts the emphasis on the process of mediation, even ‘remediation’ (Giannachi 2004, 4 cited in: Bolter and Grusin 2000), while removing the technological aspect.

4 Note on the corpus. This article is part of a larger project on SoHo – comprising four to five more articles and a book chapter – whose larger argument is that at the turn of the century, SoHo operated as a powerful tool in the establishing of postfeminist female subjectivities and in the regulation of femininity in urban Colombia. In those pieces, I explore various texts and media events different to the ones studied here. The totality of the corpus for the period I am interested in is extremely large: around 150 editions amounting to more than 23 thousand pages (including articles, features, cartoons, profiles, chronicles, pictures, ads, etc.) for the fourteen years that Samper Ospina spent as head of the magazine. Yet, a qualitative analysis demands for close-reading which means that the number of pieces to be closely examined is necessarily low. Part of the analysis here remains at a general level and can be confirmed by just browsing any edition chosen randomly. The selection of the pieces for close-reading was made also almost randomly because examples that support my argument abound in the magazine. I proceeded by fixing one variable: the author of the piece to be examined. I chose two of the best established Colombian male writers who contributed to the magazine on a frequent basis (Héctor Abad Faciolince and Santiago Gamboa), one reputed journalist who contributed to it in several occasions (Felipe Zuleta Lleras), and a female actress and socialite turned writer (Isabella Santodomingo), who wrote a book upon which a very successful 2010 TV show (that could in fact be analysed in conjunction with SoHo because it mobilises the same kind of gender ideology) was based. I could have, however, chosen different authors: Alberto Aguirre (2004), Ricardo Silva Romero (2005), Antonio García (2007), etc. A different journalist: Daniel Coronell (2006), Gustavo Gómez (2010), Fernando Garavito (2004), etc. Or a different female writer: Margarita Posada (2009), Alejandra Azcárate (2014), Margarita Rosa de Francisco (2013a), etc. I could have also chosen different pieces by the same authors and/or media events rather than texts. In any of these cases, the core of the argument would have remained unchanged because the amount of available evidence supporting it is overwhelming.

5 While revising this article for resubmission, Boris Johnson was elected as Britain's Prime Minister in a land-slide. Those knowing what this means for the most disempowered layers of society and the new generations (though not for only them), have started reflecting on how him and the Tories could have got away with everything they have done since 2010 (including the 2019 campaign). Some of these people went canvassing during the last week of the campaign and someone who did this, and whose Labour constituency fell to the Tories, wrote about it. His reflections are a potent echo of my argument about the importance of recentring ideology and hegemonic culture in the current political climate: ‘The first and in my view the most disturbing issue that door knocking immediately raises is that of media influence [ … ] A huge amount of people regurgitated, verbatim, media attack lines about Labour and Corbyn’. The author also voices his concern, which I fully share, that the tendency in current cultural studies to emphasise ‘human agency vis a vis the media, have obscured the extent to which the media influences people’ and that in his view, ‘door knocking hits home the enduring strength of the propaganda model’ (Evans-Kanu 2019).

6 Emphasis in the original.

7 See Trentmann and Otero-Cleves (2017) for a recent article on the history of consumption in Latin America.

8 For my use of ‘modernity-coloniality’ instead of the original ‘modernity/coloniality’ (Mignolo 2000; Quijano 2000) within decolonial approaches see Giraldo (2016).

9 The juridical system was organised so that ethnic inequalities did not derive from subjective appreciations but were registered in the law, which situated individuals in its corresponding ethnic category through the issuing of certificates that guaranteed direct descendance from the first settlers (Castro-Gómez 2010, p. 73). The Universidad Tomística in Bogotá, for instance, included in the diploma issued to its graduates the statement Purus ab omnia macula sanguinis certifying the holder's blood was pure, i.e. 100% creole and hence untarnished by mestizaje (see Castro-Gómez 2010, p. 66–67).

10 Emphasis in the original in Spanish.

11 The ‘whiteness device’ is connected with the principle of the ‘purity of blood’ which was implemented in 16th century Spain in order to establish the distinction between Christians and convert Jews or Moors (Castro-Gómez 2014, p. 82–83).

12 The study of masculinity was on the rise during the eighties while the production of new masculine subjects, such as the ‘new father’, the ‘new man’, the ‘new lad’, saw an explosion at the turn of the century in mainstream academia (see Gill 2003). Contributing to the wider debate on masculinity and masculine subjects lays outside of the scope of this article. However, I admit that it would be interesting to explore how the various masculine subjects I claim are constructed and mobilised in SoHo – the traditional letrado, the metrosexual, the new lad – articulate within a broader cultural analyses that take into consideration the question of hybridity and the never ending modern-postmodern debate in Latin America.

13 Son of Daniel Samper Pizano (one of the most reputed 20th century Colombian journalists), nephew of Ernesto Samper Pizano (president for the 1994-1998 period), great-grand son of Daniel Samper Ortega (director of the National Library between 1931 and 1938 and behind the national programme of cultural dissemination implemented during the 20th-century Liberal Republic), Daniel Samper Ospina has managed to position himself as one of the most powerful figures dominating public opinion in contemporary Colombia (La Silla Vacía 2013). He achieved this partly through his family connections and through his work during the SoHo years and has maintained it through his work in Revista Semana (up to April 2020), his very active Twitter account (2,7 million followers), and through his YouTube channel (more than 700K subscribers).

14 For Foucault, the ‘universal intellectual’, a figure he dates back to the eighteenth century, ‘derives from the jurist or notable, and finds his fullest manifestation in the writer, the bearer of values and significations in which all can recognise themselves’ (Foucault 1980, p. 128).

15 Edition 173, the SoHo's fifteenth anniversary edition, features a full size picture of a nude Daniel Samper Ospina covering his crotch with both hands and looking shy, displeased, and almost terrified (SoHo 2014). He is far from embodying the metrosexual model of masculinity and is very proud of his being bald, ‘old’ (b. 1974), unfit, etc. In fact, this is one of his usual self-deprecation lines in his column in Revista Semana, his YouTube channel, and his Twitter account. See Giraldo (Forthcoming a) for an analysis of Edition 173 and of the ‘media event’ that constituted its production in urban Colombia.

16 Emphasis mine.

17 Racial statistics for Colombia show that Afro-Colombians are mainly located in the coastal departments. Moreover, all but one coastal counties have an Afro-Colombian population density of at least 10%, going up to 82% for Choco, 57% for San Andres, around 27% for both Bolivar and Valle del Cauca, etc. (Hernández Romero 2010, p. 30).

18 Emphasis mine.

19 Translation taken from an online source (Paz 1957).

20 This geographical hierarchical divide has always been in operation with national elites located in Bogotá, and local coastal elites occupying a subordinated position.

21 Emphasis mine.

22 The expression ‘gente de bien’, best translated as ‘people of quality’, refers to the old bourgeoisie and the intersection of cultural and economic capital.

23 Laisa Reyes is a fictional character from a popular telenovela (‘Los Reyes’) aired the year of publication of the column who comes from a lower class family that suddenly becomes very rich.

24 The female writers benefited too. It is widely acknowledged that, during the Samper Ospina years, SoHo became the platform for writers to make themselves known to the wider public and to those within structures of power.

25 Despite the inherent elitism in the notion of ‘literary talent’, it is true that both Santodomingo and Azcárate have limited writing skills, even from a perspective that only considers grammar. Also that the claim that their looks have been pivotal in their becoming celebrities and in allowing for their locating themselves at the borders of the ‘lettered city’ is founded (for a translation of Azcárate's infamous column, see Giraldo 2013). One could also argue that Santodomingo's Los caballeros las prefieren brutas was made into a TV series and became a success not because of the quality of the text but because it was a rabid antifeminist pamphlet that relied heavily on postfeminist discourse and ostensibly aimed at perpetuating patriarchy. The case of Margarita Rosa de Francisco is also worth mentioning because it was her European looks which opened her many doors. She started as a beauty queen, to become a singer, then an actress, then a TV presenter, and is now a writer. She has a regular column in El Espectador, one of the two national newspapers, and in early 2018 she wrote a text full of gibberish (de Francisco 2018a). The outpouring of angry reactions from many readers was harsh. They called into question that someone without the training and/or talent was given a blank slate by one of the two national newspapers to write such a column while many other people, with the talent and the training, were rarely given any opportunity. She responded bitterly a week later to relinquish her space at El Espectador (de Francisco 2018b), but in the end she kept it. All this points to what I argue in detail in Beauty, citizenship, and sex: 21st-century fantasies of the Colombian nation in relation to embodiment, beauty, and citizenship in neoliberal Colombia (see Giraldo Forthcoming a).

26 This media event, as I show in the article where I engage with it, constitutes yet another example of the ways in which SoHo, under Samper Ospina, aimed at a cultural transformation that maintained a very unequal social hierarchy along several axes (see Giraldo 2020b).

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Isis Giraldo

Isis Giraldo holds a PhD from the University of Lausanne (2017, honours). Her work belongs within the fields of cultural and media studies from critical approaches that recentre power and social justice. Empirically, it mostly focuses on Colombia and aims at showing how cultural hegemony has helped maintain stark imbalances of power along the axes of gender, race, and social class, and justify regimes of rule by a privileged few. Theoretically, it aims at connecting Northern feminist theories and postcolonial studies with critical thought on gender, race, and coloniality as developed from within Latin America. Giraldo's work has been published in journals such as Feminist Media Studies, Feminist Theory, and Debate Feminista.