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

1. Introduction

Entering the Colombian scene in 1999, SoHo became in 2003 – and under the direction of Daniel Samper Ospina (2001-2015) – the first publication in the country to offer semi-nude photographs of what they claim are ‘the prettiest women in Colombia’ accompanied by chronicles and columns by reputed local and international writers, journalists, intellectuals, politicians, and personalities of a diverse kind.¹

Overtly conceived as a lifestyle magazine (a commercial product with high-culture pretensions), yet, borrowing and relying heavily on the ‘cultural hybridity’ (García Canclini 1995) associated with Latin America at large, SoHo positioned itself during the Samper Ospina years as one the most powerful media in Colombia, the second most read magazine in the country in Zuluaga and Martínez (2012), and established itself as a brand in other countries of the region such as Argentina, Mexico, Panama, Ecuador, and Peru (SoHo 2013). Because a large part of the Colombian cultural, economic, and political elite were involved in its making during the period in question, SoHo managed to attain great social weight which, in turn, granted it cultural significance. Moreover, as part of a larger media company (Publicaciones Semana), it managed to commodify its readership so that both its male and female consumers were successfully converted into value (Iqani 2018, p. 276).² Hence, exploring SoHo, I argue, sheds light on a number of issues that are crucial for understanding cultural hegemony and consent in the context of Colombia because, as Chasteen puts it, ‘rule by the privileged few [ … ] seldom succeeds for long without widespread consent’ (Chasteen 1996, p. xiii).

As a ‘process of mediation’ (Silverstone 1999, p. 13), SoHo was social, historically specific, and political (1999, p. 4). Apart from aiming at being profitable, it also aimed at, first, training its readers on urban global culture, consumption, and lifestyle (Giraldo Work in progress), and second, at establishing itself as a powerful regulator of gender – the central explicit social signifier around which the magazine organised its editorial line – and along with it of social class and race. Despite its boisterous self-advertisement as apolitical entertainment, the cultural work the magazine did during the Samper Ospina era was wholly political (see also Giraldo 2020b; Forthcoming a Work in progress). Moreover, and in line with what Jancovich suggests with regard to Playboy, instead of ‘apolitical titillation’, SoHo's ‘sexual materials were not only integrated into its politics of lifestyle, but became the central signifier of its politics’ (Jancovich 2006, p. 72).

In this article I claim that under Samper Ospina, SoHo became a scene where a set of performances of diverse type and register took place: firstly, of gender (and race and class) – upon and by the women who agreed to be featured in its pages for free, despite the commercial character of the publication, and secondly, of class (and gender and race) – by those who participated in its production in one way or another. More than a tangible object that is simply traded and consumed, I consider SoHo to be a spectacle that spills over the material limits set by the medium to become a ‘virtual theatre’: a theatrical scene (which is a medium itself) mediated through another one (a magazine) and in which gender, class, and race are played out (in the theatrical sense) and delimited (as in Austin's speech acts theory).³

Such a spectacle, I argue, has the aim of carrying 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’ (Rama 1996) and the ‘whiteness device’ (Castro-Gómez 2010). While the first concept refers to ‘the urban nexus of lettered culture and state power’ (Rama 1996) which, I argue, operates in the 21st century through civil society, the second one to a figurative artifact based on the high-value of whiteness (established by colonialism) and that yet transcends skin colour so to encompass a person's type of wealth and social ranking. Indeed, being intensely implicated with modernity-coloniality (Giraldo 2016), SoHo constitutes a paradigmatic example of the enduring continuities between colonial New Granada and postcolonial Colombia and, as such, a powerful tool for the enacting and reinforcement of the ‘coloniality’ of power (Mignolo 2000; Quijano 2000; Castro-Gómez 2014) and of gender (Lugones 2007; Giraldo 2016).

I start by providing a theoretical discussion that includes justification for my drawing from the British tradition of cultural studies rather than the Latin American one, followed by an outlining of the general theoretical framework from within which I approach my object of study: one that sits in-between postcolonial studies (and its focus on representation) and decolonial critical thought (which assumes modernity to be the hidden face of coloniality). Then I present three case studies designed to exemplify the argument. Hence, the article has a twofold goal. A theoretical one that seeks, first, to make a case for the recentring of ideology, understood not as ‘false consciousness’ but as a set of ideas about how the world works and should work, and second, to introduce, re-work (by integrating gender), and deploy the concepts of the ‘whiteness device’ (Castro-Gómez 2010) and ‘the lettered city’ (Rama 1996) developed by two Latin American thinkers situated in the margins of the global circuit of knowledge production. These concepts, I argue along, are fitting to explain the continuities between the colonial and the contemporary post-colonial world. The second goal is empirical and aims at showing how and why SoHo (under Daniel Samper Ospina) was crucial in the shaping of ideologies of gender, race, and social class that have perpetuated Colombia's highly stratified social structure which, in turn, have outlined the political sphere.⁴

2. Recentring ideology and hegemonic culture

Part of my larger intellectual endeavour is to question the current ‘geopolitics of knowledge’ (Mignolo 2008) where Anglo-American scholarly academia occupies the dominant position (Giraldo 2016). Yet, I chose to analyse my Colombian corpus from within a framework closer to the Birmingham School of cultural studies, rather than follow the Latin American strand spearheaded by Néstor García Canclini and Jesús Martín Barbero, prominent scholars whose work has transcended geographical and linguistic borders.

Both García Canclini and Martín Barbero are interested in reading mass culture as communication. Their approach puts the emphasis on the potentiality of culture as a space for practices of symbolic production rather than as a univocal space for the reproduction of ideology (Martín Barbero 2002, p. 213), itself conceived in the Marxist sense of false consciousness. While García Canclini proposes ‘to reconceptualise consumption as a space where to think and where the greatest part of economic, social, political, and psychological structuration takes place in modern societies’ (2009, p. 16), Martín Barbero looks at ‘domination as a process of communication’ in contrast to ‘communication as a process of domination’ (Martín Barbero 2002, p. 19).

Thus, rather than on production, both authors are interested in what people do with the cultural artifacts they consume. Moreover, and as I argue in detail elsewhere (Giraldo Forthcoming a), both seem sceptical of approaches that recentre the question of power at play in consumption and communication and of those that prioritise gender and/or race. Their perspective seems to present two features that Mehita Iqani identifies in some approaches to consumption and the media: first, reticence to the idea that the process of communication has been profoundly altered by the rise of consumer culture and the logic of profit that permeates contemporary society, and second, a sort of romanticising of the possibilities for the increasing of cross-cultural understanding and democracy brought about by the expansion of communication technology (2018, p. 277–278).

The focus on resistance – which entails an emphasis on what consumers do with what they consume and is shared by both authors – is one that dominates virtually all fields of research in/on Latin America and I recognise the enormous value of such an approach. This focus is also prevalent in cultural studies and media studies, as a glance over the table of contents of a recent book titled Media Cultures in Latin America (Pertierra and Salazar 2020) will attest to. However, I consider that the study of cultural hegemony (which implies to focus on production) is, as Charles Chasteen claimed back in 1996, vital for understanding the whole picture because it forces us to observe the hegemonic power operating ‘at the level of people's basic assumptions’ (Chasteen 1996, p. xiii). These assumptions are the ones behind the election of political outsiders with overt misogynist, racist, homophobic, and/or quasi-genocidal political views – such as Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro – as heads of governments. Yet, we will not understand how these assumptions manage to become naturalised and widespread within the social body by solely focusing on the creative ways in which people craft identities through mass consumption or on how ‘consumption has altered the ways and possibilities of being a citizen’ (García Canclini 1995, p. 29).⁵

Hence, I situate ‘ideologies’, as Stuart Hall defined them – ‘frameworks of thinking and calculation about the world’ (Hall 2016 (1983), p. 131) – at the centre of my analysis. The goal of such an approach is to explore how ideologies are ‘reproduced in the so-called private institutions of civil society’, which Hall calls ‘the theatre of consent’ and which appear as if they were ‘outside of the direct sphere of play of the State itself’ (Hall 2016 (1983), p. 132).⁶ I expect to show the extent to which SoHo is a paradigmatic example of such a space. This is important because it allows for highlighting the relationship between a mass-culture product – now established as part of the urban Colombian cultural imaginary – and dominant ideologies of gender, race, social class, and sexuality that underlie consent and manifest themselves in the political terrain.

Widespread consent with regard to a specific kind of gender ideology – shared at both ends of the religious-conservative/secular-liberal spectrum (Giraldo Forthcoming a) – and to high social stratification has played a major role in recent political events of enormous significance in Colombia. Two examples are, first, the rejection of the peace agreement between the Juan Manuel Santos' administration and FARC in 2016 because of ‘the gender ideology menace’ (Giraldo 2017). Second, the blatant disregard from the part of the urban classes for the mass-murder of thousands of poor and helpless civilians by the army between 2002 and 2010. This can be explained, as I do in detail elsewhere (Giraldo Forthcoming b), by appealing to the historical ‘affective economy’ (Ahmed 2004) that has delimited Colombian citizenship on the basis of social positioning.

Because of Colombia's particular political specificities – the historical pervasiveness of violence and the length of the conflict –, research on media and discourse has mostly focused on how news-making and reporting frame and intervene in the conflict (Bonilla 2002; Ayala Osorio 2006; Bonilla and Tamayo Gómez 2007; Olave 2014) and/or on how mass-culture consumption helps making and remaking social relations (Martín Barbero 1991, 1992). However, research on the history of the expansion of consumer culture in the late 20th century and the 21st, on the one hand, and on hegemonic mass popular forms of entertainment from the side of production and from a perspective that recentres power (Foucault 1980) – while focusing on its restrictive aspect (potestas) rather than on its productive one (potentia) –, on the other, is yet to be carried out in Colombia.⁷ This article aims at starting to bridge this gap.

3. Modernity-coloniality, the whiteness device, and the lettered city

As a media-culture product, SoHo offered patterns of behaviour (proper and improper), ‘moral messages’, social and political ‘ideological conditioning’ all within a package of ‘pleasurable and seductive forms of popular entertainment’ (Kellner and Durham 2006, p. ix). Further, being a lifestyle magazine whose target audience are the 21st-century urban classes in Colombia, ‘modernity’ – understood in dominant approaches as ‘the natural unfolding of world history’ (Mignolo 2013, p. 13), a narrative of human development in which Europe is located both in the origin and at the centre and where concepts such as ‘civilization’ and its derivatives – civilised/uncivilised-savage, ‘civilizing process’ (Elias 1994) are key – is a central issue.

In the advanced capitalist West, and from approaches where modernity (as defined above) is not only humankind's inevitable goal but its most desirable aim, ‘lifestyle media become crucial guides to living within, and with, modernity’ (Bell and Hollows 2006, p. 4). Given that under modernity the individual (rather than the community) is the one being enhanced, understanding the self as a project that requires constant work, regulation, and improvement (obtained mostly through consumption) is crucial. This, in turn, demands for ‘expert knowledge and guidance’ (see Slater 1997; Bell and Hollows 2006), which the lifestyle magazine provides.

The debate on ‘modernity’, even from non-critical approaches to it, is far from straightforward in the context of Latin America. The quest for modernity has been key to the historical specificities of Colombia. Although conventional accounts and Colombian intellectual and political elites have mostly assumed a non-critical approach to ‘modernity’ – overwhelmingly read in positive terms and taken to be a definite goal to attain (see for instance Bushnell 1993) – the one I take here is aligned with critical perspectives. These understand it as being intrinsically connected to ‘coloniality’, therefore its writing as ‘modernity-coloniality’.⁸ Both are concomitant, the latter being the hidden face of the former. From this approach, while modernity refers to a global phenomenon that originated on October 12, 1492, posited Europe at the centre of the world – ‘the Point Zero’ in Castro-Gómez's terminology – coloniality refers to ‘the invisible threads of power that emerge in colonial situations but extend well beyond a strictly colonial setting and period’ (Giraldo 2016, p. 161). It refers to ‘the symbolic, invisible and indelible traces of the colonial experience’ (Giraldo 2016, p. 161).

Derived from Aníbal Quijano's notion of the ‘coloniality of power’ (2000) – a tool to describe the macro-sociological relations established with the colonisation of Abya Yala –, the concept of coloniality is more useful if explored, as Castro-Gómez suggests, as a set of local, specific, and situated practices rather than as an abstract and totalising notion (Castro-Gómez 2014, p. 79). Further, and while acknowledging that coloniality emerges in the past, it might be more interesting to explore how it operates in the present so that we might understand the extent to which the contemporary moment is profoundly marked by the colonial legacy (Castro-Gómez 2014, p. 80). This legacy manifests itself in ideologies of gender, sexuality, race, social class, and citizenship and impinges upon the politics of representation – in which the role of modern-day letrados is key – and of social organisation in contemporary Colombia.

In this article I partly aim at examining this by taking SoHo as an exemplary case in point: as a lifestyle magazine SoHo does not simply bear the marks of such a legacy but rather invigorates and perpetuates it. Indeed, whiteness constituted the worthiest and most esteemed cultural capital for the learned creole class in the New Granada (18th-century Colombia): first, it guaranteed their access to the scientific and literary knowledge of the time; second, it established the social distance between themselves and the ‘colonial other’ (Castro-Gómez 2010, p. 15).⁹ Hence, the dominance of creole elites over subaltern groups required the construction of an imaginary of whiteness that legitimised (in the eyes of everyone) a social order around the ethnic difference (Castro-Gómez 2010, p. 73). This made of whiteness one of the cornerstones of social organisation in 18th-century Colombia. Yet, as Castro-Gómez (2010) convincingly argues, rather than as a discreet value in a skin-colour palette, ‘whiteness’ was to be understood as a device that goes beyond skin colour so as to encompass a person's type of wealth and social ranking (2010, p. 71). Moreover, whiteness was primarily ‘a lifestyle performed publicly by members of the higher social strata and yearned for all other social groups’ (Castro-Gómez 2010, p. 71).¹⁰

For my analysis of SoHo and borrowing from Castro-Gómez, I approach the ‘whiteness device’ (dispositivo de blancura) through ‘habitus’ and ‘cultural capital’, both taken from Bourdieu (1979) and closely linked to lifestyle, distinction, and social stratification.¹¹ Castro-Gómez is interested in the ways in which European Enlightenment was translated and enunciated in the New Granada and in the role of the whiteness device in this. In contrast, I am interested in exploring how ‘whiteness’ – as a device rather than skin colour and thus encompassing ideas of race and social condition – is deployed by core and marginal members of the lettered city in the pages of SoHo, first, as a strategy to mark out their own distance from others and, second, as a way to ensure the maintenance of the social order. Additionally, I am also interested in emphasising the inherent maleness of ‘the lettered city’, which, however, operates beyond gender. Thus, in analogous manner to how a mestizo can deploy the ‘whiteness device’ to individually benefit from the hierarchy established along the skin-colour palette and, in turn, entrench the power of whiteness, a woman can accommodate herself within the ‘lettered city’ so as to benefit from it while, in turn, entrenching patriarchy.

4. Gender as SoHo's key political signifier

In this article I am focusing on ‘the gendered dimension to mediated consumer culture’ – which, some authors argue, should be given renewed attention (Iqani 2018, p. 281) – and I am doing so from a perspective that aims at revealing ‘the links between colonialism, developmentalism and mediated consumer culture’ (Iqani 2018, p. 283) in contemporary Colombia. This means that I am reading my object of study from a discursive approach that considers consumer culture to be ‘a product of the intersections of power, knowledge, and communicative technologies’ (Iqani 2018, p. 279).

Gender, though in connexion with social class, race, and sexuality, is SoHo's key political signifier. Thus, given that the magazine is a commercial product whose main aim is the maximisation of economic profit (therefore dependent on advertisement), its prima facie reading points to its work on the construction of a type of masculinity that mostly hinges upon (material and symbolic) consumption and interpellates upwardly mobile individuals. Under this premise, and following the line of women's magazines, this would suggest that SoHo mainly aims at tutoring men in practices of consumption while encouraging them to approach and ‘see the marketplace as a vital tool for self-transformation’ (Cieply 2010, p. 154)). Further, that while being overly conscious that the marketplace and consumption have both been usually understood as ‘a gendered space defined by a female-consumer/male-producer dichotomy’ (Cieply 2010, p. 154), SoHo follows the line of the men's lifestyle magazine in that it seeks to appeal to a new brand of male-consumer that is open to new types of masculinity: the metrosexual, who adopts ‘self-care and sartorial behaviors’ traditionally associated with femininity or homosexuality in some cultures (Coad 2016, p. 1). The ‘new man’, characterised in some accounts ‘as narcissistic and highly invested in his physical appearance’ (Gill 2003, p. 37). The ‘new lad’, who is ‘hedonistic, post-(if not anti) feminist, and pre-eminently concerned with beer, football and shagging women’ (Gill 2003, p. 37).¹²

A finer reading, however, reveals a more complex picture. First, that although explicitly addressed to men, SoHo is also implicitly addressed to women because gender, which is relational (Connell 2005), is one of the central signifiers around which the magazine builds its social and cultural narrative (see Giraldo Forthcoming a Work in progress). Second, that there is another type of masculinity at work in SoHo which is at odds with those types that heavily rely on material consumption and which would constitute the ‘hegemonic’ model (Connell 2005) in the Colombian context. This model is embodied by a majority of male writers – most of them belonging to a close circle of Colombian letrados – that frequently contribute to the magazine. Moreover, this type of masculinity is also overtly and proudly embodied by Daniel Samper Ospina (the magazine's director during the period under study), who is a very public and powerful figure in urban Colombia and who – when accepting the job – undertook it as his own personal project.¹³

Considering gender as relational, rather than static, implies that the pattern of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ (Connell 2005) I identify in SoHo and that, I argue, is constantly performed by those men writing for it takes shape in relation to subordinated models of masculinity, on the one hand, and to dominant and subordinated models of femininity, on the other. A gender ideology in which gender operates as a binary opposition around the male/female pairing, which is itself an instance of coloniality at work (Giraldo 2016), is central to SoHo both as a mass-media product and as a cultural project. Thus, in the magazine's order of things, femaleness – which is decidedly material because femininity is constructed as a bodily property (Gill 2007) and the female body the focus and the locus of female subjectivity (see Giraldo Forthcoming b) – is mostly to be associated with nature. On the other hand, maleness – constituted through consumption (of things, experiences, women, and a specific type of female beauty) and intellectual labour – is mostly to be associated with culture. Further, SoHo's gender ideology is constructed and performed around ideas of compartmentalised types of capital. While men are interpellated as beings whose sense of subjecthood should depend on both economic and cultural capital (because consumption practices are in agreement with class habitus and convey an accurate idea of class status (Featherstone 2007, p. 18), women are primarily interpellated on the basis of body capital, though also hierarchised with regard to economic and cultural capital.

Connell (2005) defines ‘hegemonic masculinity’ as the configuration of practice that embodies the accepted answer to the legitimacy of patriarchy which guarantees that men retain a position of domination while women one of subordination (2005, p. 77). This is crucial for the gender ideology SoHo builds, supports, and seeks to maintain: one that perpetuates the logics of patriarchy. In order to do so, their work on the regulation of gender – which apart from relational must also be understood intersectionally, that is, in connection with race, social class, and sexuality – is intense. Hence, SoHo not only sets standards with regard to how masculinity (and femininity) should be, but discredits those who fall short from those standards, which is a vital aspect for securing hegemony (Cieply 2010, p. 152).

While the masculinity I identify in SoHo as ‘hegemonic’ is not structured around the consumption of tangible goods but around the production and consumption of ideas and culture, it is still closely connected with lifestyle and with the habitus of the upper-classes. As such it further emphasises one main issue concerning distinction: the objective distance to needs (Bourdieu 1979, p. 59), which in the Colombian context is also structured along racial lines. This is paramount in a society of late literacy (Silva 2012, p. 55) that is additionally highly hierarchised, which implies that legitimate culture functions as cultural capital and therefore as an instrument of domination (Bourdieu 1979, p. 252–253). Such a context is fertile ground for the intellectual to play a key role in the shaping of dominant ideologies.

Under Daniel Samper Ospina, SoHo became precisely this: a space where intellectuals imparted opinions about how the world works and should work as well as judgements on culture, taste, behaviours, and gender, among other things. He managed to convene a select group of reputed local writers – which in Colombia still operate in Foucault's sense of the ‘universal intellectual’ (1980, p. 128) –, such as Héctor Abad Faciolince, Fernando Vallejo, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Santiago Gamboa, etc., and from Latin America at large, such as Rodrigo Fresán, Juan Villoro, Roberto Fontanarrosa, etc., to frequently contribute to the magazine.¹⁴ In fact, it is accepted that by the time he left the magazine (2015), Samper Ospina had already cemented a reputation as ‘the man who had managed to persuade beautiful women, renowned writers, and a wide range of readers that discussing sex was not tasteless, that a nude could be erotic rather than vulgar, and that intellectuals had interesting things to say on daily matters’ (Jet Set 2014). In other words, and this is my close-reading of the previous quote, he had managed to make of SoHo a place for the (mostly male) intellectuals to perform their intellectuality in front of an audience (the readership) and, in a positive feeding loop, increase the legitimacy they already held (in the Colombian context) to explain and shape the social world.

5. SoHo's gender ideology: male intellect/female body

Since gender is one of the central aspects around which SoHo as a cultural product is constituted, it is also one on which the intellectuals writing for the magazine constantly impart their opinions either explicitly or implicitly. In line with the gender ideology the magazine mediates – i.e. the association of men with culture and women with nature –, this is further extrapolated by making the intellectual sphere a mostly male dominion, while physical spectacular beauty a female one. Moreover, as that area where worthy womanhood is fully realised, even for those women who operate in the intellectual realm.

SoHo's effort to systematically connect maleness with intellect, and femaleness with bodily materiality – which, as I claim somewhere else (Giraldo Forthcoming a), inflects in its pages as ‘spectacular femininity’ (McRobbie 2009) – takes on different forms. First, most of those writing for the magazine are men. For instance, the twelve editions published in 2009 (a year selected randomly), had 28 women contributors out of 150, which amounts to around 19% of female writing contributors for the whole year. Further, many of the columns written by women trade in gender clichés (see Ochoa 2004; Posada 2009; Azcárate 2014, etc.) or heterosexual sex (see Ruiz-Navarro 2009; de Francisco 2013b 2013c; Guerrero 2013, etc.). The female authors writing about sex (not only in the examples just cited) are also women that fit the minimum beauty standards set by the magazine itself and, when they have the body capital and agree to it, they also feature semi-nude in some of the editions. Margarita Rosa de Francisco – ex-beauty queen, whose body capital opened her the doors of success so that she later became singer, actress, is now a writer and has been one of the most popular Colombian celebrities since the late eighties – was the cover of Edition 151 (SoHo 2012), whose theme was ‘How to get old with dignity’. Catalina Ruiz-Navarro – who stands now as one the most high-profile Colombian feminists in Latin America – was featured semi-nude in the photographs accompanying a text she wrote on the experiment she was asked to carry out (to test six condoms), with both text and pictures clearly aimed at the explicit sexual arousal of heterosexual male readers (Ruiz-Navarro 2009). During the period in question, the magazine also featured a monthly column on sex always written by a woman, usually behind a pseudonym, for a sustained period of time: Conchita (Margarita Posada), LoLa, Alexa, June, etc.

Second, most of the women (regardless of what they do for a living) are invited to feature in SoHo because they embody ‘spectacular femininity’ (McRobbie 2009). Apart from models, actresses and tv presenters – all of whom need to be spectacularly feminine and beautiful to operate professionally in those domains – SoHo prides itself in finding commoners that also embody the type of beauty and femininity they trade in. Hence, plenty of women of varied professions have been featured in SoHo: dentists, lawyers, public servants, writers, psychologists, stock brokers, sports women, dancers, politicians, etc. Edition 118, for instance, has a B side whose cover features a female politician, María Fernanda Valencia, in underwear, high heels and a blazer, promising to accept to be featured nude in SoHo's edition 120 if she gets elected to Bogotá's House of Representatives. Daniel Samper Ospina, after a short introduction where he implies they accepted her offer because she definitely had the body capital, interviews her at length and allows her to explain her programme (Samper Ospina 2010). It remains unclear whether she paid the magazine for the interview since it clearly constitutes political advertisement. According to Edition 120, she did not get enough votes (though apparently was close) and despite SoHo's pleading with her to accept being featured nude anyway, she refused to do so (SoHo 2010).

Third, when it comes to women writers, they are praised for their intellectual work – their capacity as subjects of thought – yet, whenever possible (i.e. when they have the minimum body capital in SoHo scale), almost immediately recast mainly as worthy of notice because of their embodying a femininity that is approved of – their capacity as objects of sexual desire (SoHo 2008 2009; Ruiz-Navarro 2009). This can go even further: Edition 178, just before Daniel Samper Ospina stepped down, features an article (which would be worth a close-analysis) by a male writer ranking ‘the top five prettiest Colombian female writers’: Margarita Posada, Carolina Cuervo, Margarita García Robayo, Carolina Andújar, Marianne Ponsford (Palacio 2015).

Fourth, various of the ‘received’ intellectuals that contribute frequently to the magazine find ways of addressing what they claim are their own physical inadequacies, as opposed to their intellectual abilities, these latter being the reason why they are what they are and do what they do. This is done in a tone that betrays pride because in the end ‘intellectual labour’ in the Colombian context is what constitutes the very essence of distinction – ‘the infinitely varied art of setting distances’ (Bourdieu 1979, p. 70) – which in turn translates into power along all social axes (culture is capital and hence functions as an instrument of domination (Bourdieu 1979, p. 252–253)). Examples of this also abound.¹⁵

I will provide the close reading of a text to exemplify my argument: ‘Mi trauma con el baile’ by Héctor Abad Faciolince, one of Colombia's most prominent and influential writers who also fulfils the role of ‘universal intellectual’. Having dancing as its theme, the text serves Abad as an alibi to perform the role of incompetent dancer, yet, competent intellectual (‘I cannot dance [ … ] but I am capable of writing disquisitions on dancing’ (Abad Faciolince 2007, p. 296)). Starting from the assumption that the human is structured around the mind/body binary opposition, where mind has historically had the upper-hand, the author speculates that the capacity for dancing must be located in ‘a hidden place outside of the mind, i.e. within the pure and mere body’ (2007, p. 296). However, given that the text is published in an edition dedicated to music and that as worldly man Abad knows about the social advantages of being a good dancer in the Colombian context, specially for heterosexual courtship, he needs to adopt an attitude that appears as humble. Thus, he claims that he ‘loves dancers because he admires them, yet, also hates them because he envies them’ (Abad Faciolince 2007, p. 296). Nevertheless, he undoes the compliment immediately afterwards by making clear that the value of good dancing (which entails from the mastery of the body) is well below the value of books (which are the product of the mastery of the intellect):

I would trade half of my books for learning how to dance a vallenato. Would I? No, not right now [ … ] but during one of those nights where everyone is dancing and the prettiest woman in the party asks me to dance with her and would love me if I do (and despise me if I don't), then yes. In that case I would trade six of my books for being a capable dancer (2007, p. 296).¹⁶

Hence, dancing well, even in a what in his eyes would seem a wonderfully ideal situation – which involves attracting the party's prettiest woman and having the power of making her fall for him – is worth the equivalent of ‘six of his books’, which is quite a low price. And this despite the fact that, he claims, in his teenage years when his peers saw him dancing they would call him ‘the robot’ and that they were right because when it comes to dancing ‘a robot is more graceful than myself [ … ] even a Swedish man […in fact,] a German man, would appear as skilful as a costeño if dancing by my side’ (Abad Faciolince 2007, p. 296).

The reference to the coastline culture (costeño) is not anodyne and allows him to explicitly address his own incapacity for dancing in racial-geographical terms a few lines later:

[ … ] unlike the good Caribbean and Colombian dancers, I was not born in the coast or in tierra caliente but in a hilly region that is sad and violent and far more interested in work, resentment, and circumspection. And although I have managed to dominate those tendencies (sadness, resentment, violence), I am still incapable of dancing in the lively and distracted way of costeños (Abad Faciolince 2007, p. 297).

Hence, he is plainly explaining his lack of dancing skills through his geographical origins (which goes hand in hand with racial ones) and the sociocultural implications this entails.¹⁷ He had previously made the reader know that his ‘wives, girlfriends, and sisters’ – these latter sharing both genetics and socio-cultural upbringing with him – have been and are good dancers (2007, p. 296), which adds a gendered aspect to his already racialised theorising on dancing. Hence, although giving the appearance of self-deprecation, what Abad does is the opposite: he is associating himself with the pole that has the upper-hand (‘mind’) in the Western binary opposition ‘mind/body’ upon which he is basing his whole digression on dancing, while associating his social others (women, non-whites, non-intellectual labourers) with the inferior pole (‘body’). This is amplified by further claims. For instance, that the utter command of the body required in dancing constitutes ‘a going back to a state of pure nature that precedes the development of the frontal lobe and logical reasoning, because a dancing body is a body that returns to a kind of happy thoughtlessness’ (2007, p. 296). Since the author's own inability to dance is one of the markers that distinguishes him from the good dancers, whom he identifies mostly as costeños and from tierra caliente, he is associating his racial others with the terms I am writing in italics and their lexical fields: nature as opposed to ‘culture’ (the terrain of the intellectual par excellence), a sense of receding to an early stage of evolution (before the development of the pre-frontal lobe) and before the scientific revolution (the development of logical reasoning). In short, he is associating the capability for dancing with human underdevelopment, a link further emphasised by another statement about ‘dancing [being] the licence the mind grants the body to happily return to its animal phase’ (Abad Faciolince 2007, p. 296).¹⁸ Thus, his overt avowal of being incapable to dance goes hand in hand with his connecting the mastery of dancing – by costeños, people from tierra caliente and women (such as his ‘wives, girlfriends, and sisters’) – with primitivism and intellectual immaturity, on the one hand, and with his own performance as a man of logic, reasoning, and theory, on the other.

The strategy of self-deprecation relied on by Abad Faciolince is one that Benwell identifies in his analysis of the men's lifestyle magazine loaded in which masculinity oscillates between two types: heroic, ‘represented by muscularity, physical labor, outdoor settings, heroic activities, sport and violence’ (2003, p. 157), and anti-heroic, which uses ironic-knowingness ‘as a shield against the explicit marking of masculinity’ (2003, p. 162). This ‘continual oscillation between aspiring hero and anti-hero’ has the effect of ensuring ‘that a position for the magazine male is never stable enough to be available for clear definition’ (Benwell 2003, p. 162).

While this point is also valid for SoHo, my analysis shows that the ‘politics of irony’ here – and in contrast with what Benwell says with regard to the textual examples he analyses from loaded – pay ‘out a clear patriarchal dividend’ (Benwell 2003, p. 162). Indeed, the constant association of men with mind and women with body, of which Abad's text is but one example of far too many, has effects in this regard. Firstly, it reinforces the already outsized power of the letrado, mostly a male that can brandish the whiteness device, which encapsulates both class and race: it perpetuates the lettered city. Secondly, prioritizing the intellect in the construction of hegemonic masculinity reinforces the idea that getting old and/or bald and/or fat, does not threaten a man's worth. Thirdly, and as a mirror effect, prioritizing the body in the construction of femininity, i.e. making of ‘spectacular femininity’ (McRobbie 2009) a bodily feature (Gill 2007), entails the broad acceptance in the social imaginary that getting old and/or fat, threatens a woman's worth. These effects are intertwined and contribute to the same goal: to reinforce and perpetuate patriarchy, which is intersectional by default.

6. The male intellectual performs gender, race, and class upon the female other

I am reading the role of Colombian letrados from Castro-Gómez's approach of ‘the point zero’ (2010). In his work on how the Enlightenment (as a process that is global and not exclusively European) is enunciated in 18th century New Granada, Castro-Gómez identifies the point zero as the one in which epistemology originates (2010, p. 25). Yet, the significance of the point zero goes beyond because it translates into ‘having the power to put in place, represent, and create a picture of the natural and social world that is recognised as legitimate’ (Castro-Gómez 2010, p. 25). Thus, the ‘point zero’ is where contemporary Colombian intellectuals are located and as such evinces the continuities between colonial New Granada and post-colonial Colombia I identify in this article.

The previous section addressed SoHo's gender ideology focusing on a text that exemplifies how the ‘whitened’ male intellectual locates himself in the point zero to explain the racial and gendered structure of the world taking dancing as an example. This section focuses on another text by an author with a similar social positioning (a prominent whitened male intellectual) that performs gender and social class explicitly and race implicitly upon a female other: a profile of actress Martina García, who features as cover of Edition 61 and stars in the film based on the novel Perder es cuestión de método (1999) by Santiago Gamboa, who is also the author of the text in question.

Roughly structured in what I identify as four thematic sections (eight paragraphs), the piece represents García for the audience in ways that constitute a set of meta-performances of gender and class by the author himself (masculinity and upper-class intellectual ‘labour’) and of gender, class, and sexuality (femininity and upper-class cosmopolitanism) upon García. All these performances invoke and depend on the whiteness device.

The first section sets the tone by appealing to senses, feelings, and manners. After inkoving diverse musical styles such as bolero, bossa nova, cha-cha-chá and guaguancó the author chooses salsa which he says suits García's character because she is one of the most lively and beautiful woman he knows. Moreover, beauty, when it comes to García, is to be understood as going beyond a set of physical features, hers ‘border perfection’ (Gamboa 2005, p. 124), so as to include a way of being in the world, a sort of ‘education of feelings’ (‘educación sentimental’), and refinement (Gamboa 2005, p. 126). This opening encapsulates the text's main point, which is performing the type of femininity SoHo is in the business of constructing in the Colombian imaginary upon García: one that subsumes spectacular beauty and middle-class manners and taste while rupturing the association of female prudishness with upper-class habitus, which is part of the cultural transformative task carried out by SoHo (see Giraldo 2020b).

Section two can be read as an exercise in (embedded) meta-representations from the part of Gamboa. Explaining the context of his two encounters with García – both times in relation to her role in Cabrera's film based on his own novel –, Gamboa engages in a self-portrayal (auto-representation) as an experienced, well-read, savvy, and travelled worldly-man, while casually marking out the borders of the male and female spheres. The first encounter – when García meets the film director, two of her co-stars, and Gamboa for a reading of the film's script – is articulated along a crucial distinction that involves age (consistently constructed in SoHo as inescapable, yet, honourable for men but as an inevitable misfortune for women): the four men present at the reading (born in the fifties and sixties), are curtidos (‘weathered’), a term that encompasses both age and worldly experience, while García (b. 1981) is young and ‘fresh’ (Gamboa 2005, p. 126). Further, it is her freshness and beauty (both intrinsically connected), along with the self-assurance they provide her with, which grants García some power – made effective through brief intimidation and silence (Gamboa 2005, p. 126) – over them. As she read her lines Gamboa claims he saw Quica – her character in the film – materialise in front of him. He describes Quica, as he originally conceived her in the novel, as ‘a combination of angel and daemon’ and ‘prostitute and fragile young-woman’ – which implies that in the author's own representation of the world the categories of ‘sex worker’ and ‘fragile young-woman’ are mutually exclusive – whose role is to nuance the male protagonist Víctor Silanpa's descent into hell (Gamboa 2005, p. 126).

Gamboa moves to qualifying García's black straight hair, round cheekbones and cat eyes (2005, p. 126) as slightly uncanny signs that she was Quica's revelation in the flesh. This, he continues, made him think of ‘Maupassant, the great French short story writer, who went insane when he stumbled upon some pieces of furniture he had lost in one of his stories up for auction somewhere in Paris’ (Gamboa 2005, p. 126). This quite-out-of-the-blue reference to French literature and culture – as his citing (and alas, misspelling) in Italian the comments he claims the Venice press made about García at the 2004 International Film Festival (‘bellisima [sic] essordiente’) where he met her for the second time – serves Gamboa's performance of class and intellectuality in front of his readership: it allows him to show the reader that he is a sensitive, well-read, and worldly man that is on a par with a 19th-century France writer whose name has been securely established in the Western literary cannon for quite a while. Yet, it does something else: it places Gamboa's Quica in García's flesh at the level of Maupassant's pieces of furniture. This – as well as the fact that she is representing a sex worker whose job is mainly to please men – points to the common trope of ‘woman as object’ which, despite the fact it is rendered more complex in SoHo's order of things (see Giraldo Forthcoming a), still holds.

Since Quica is a sexual worker – ‘prostitute’ in Gamboa's and SoHo's vocabulary – from the lowest social strata, and the author claims the actress is the character's very physical crystallisation, some repair work seems necessary because in the end, the profile is about García rather than Quica. The third section does just this by placing all the emphasis on García's social positioning in the upper tiers of the social ranking. This is done by highlighting, through a long string of cases in point, the extent to which her lifestyle is postmodern, urban, travelled, and cosmopolitan, i.e. quite the antithesis of the lower class Colombian sex worker's lifestyle she represents in the film. Otherwise put: it reassures the reader – who is also the consumer of the ten photographs that accompany the text, which is indeed a pretext – that although she represents (is the embodiment of) a ‘prostitute’ – with all the social baggage that term and profession entails in the Colombian imaginary – García's actual social positioning is a very different one altogether. The reader thus learns that she is a vegetarian, likes Indian food and that her favourite place to party in Bogotá is upscale Galería Café Libro. She also likes the ‘Befeeter [sic] gin, which is made from ginger – a root she discovered in Zanzibar – and which she uses to prepare Dry Martini, Jeanne Moreau's, Ava Gardner's, and the likes, favourite cocktail’ (Gamboa 2005, p. 126). Additionally, she is also fluent in various languages and, given she is interested in Eastern philosophies, she believes in spirituality and even reincarnation (Gamboa 2005, p. 126). While the previous section closed by placing García at the level of Maupassant's pieces of furniture, this one finishes by placing her at the level of some twenty century Western cinematic divas thus making clear that García is an educated, distinguished, and cosmopolitan young woman that has both economic and cultural capital (apart from the body capital).

The final section moves to García's photographs which are the very reason behind the text's existence. Since García was invited to be cover of the edition, these are placed in SoHo's most important section titled ‘Símbolo Sexual’ and portray her in a BDSM setting and attire. The sexual thematic is explicitly suggested and thus Gamboa borrows a verse from Octavio Paz's ‘Sunstone’ (1957) that, in very imperial fashion, sets the tone by placing García's body as a land to be discovered: ‘I travel your body, like the world, / your belly is a plaza full of sun, / your breasts two churches / where blood performs its own parallel rites’ (Paz 1957, cited in: Gamboa 2005, p. 131).¹⁹ Paz's lines are the compass that helps Gamboa start his travel along García's represented and imagined body which is there to be discovered by the photographer (Carlos Gaviria), the writer (Gamboa), and SoHo's readership.

By means of prosopopoeia Gamboa holds an imaginary conversation with García's body parts each of which becomes metonymy for her and guides him through the hypothetical sexual encounter. Her eyes warn him that ‘if he tries to think about anything else she will find out’; her hair – described metaphorically as a fern and who metonymically and self-referentially declares ‘is my [García's] only vegetal part’ – orders him to ‘get lost in it’. Her breasts – which ‘as in Paz's poem, are two pretty churches’ and which Gamboa praises for being small (in contrast to the dominant and class-inflected trend in Colombia in the late nineties and early two-thousands) – tell him to ‘prepare himself for the ritual and for the acquisition of a new faith’. Her thighs, which he says look like an eastern silhouette, invite him to ‘rest his head and dream they are his’. Finally, her lips tell him ‘that he does not have to think of her if he finds that to be possible or perhaps to close his eyes and evoke something strong because they are [she is] going to kiss him’ (Gamboa 2005, p. 131).

Since Paz is one of the few Latin American Nobel Prize Laureates in Literature Gamboa's invocation of Piedra de sol – whose main theme is ‘the encounter between a man and a woman's body’ (Guerrero 2014) – serves him both as inspiration and legitimation of his metaphorising of García's body as a land to be discovered, conquered, and possessed, itself a trite colonial trope. Further, they reframe García's representation within the context of Quica's character: a ‘prostitute’ – a profession and cultural referent profoundly marked out by social class and the whiteness device in the Colombian imaginary – whose job concerns the sexual pleasing of men. Finally, Quica's character (in both Gamboa's novel and Cabrera's film), as well as García as represented by Gaviria's photographs (for SoHo's Edition 61) and Gamboa's profile, all constitute paradigmatic examples of a patriarchal fantasy that subjugates the woman's body ‘to the imagined dominance of male phallic power’ (Edwards 2008, p. 98). They are patriarchal fantasies that derive from a socially hierarchical context, across every possible social axe, at the same time that they further legitimise and secure the perpetuation of the very system that allows for their existence.

All the male subjects involved with García in one way or another for the production of SoHo's Edition 61 – Gamboa as creator of Quica (the novel's character), Cabrera as director of the film based on Gamboa's novel, Gaviria as the photographer, and Samper Ospina as director of the magazine – perform gender, sexuality, and class upon García while showing the extent to which the symbolic capital of whiteness which, in 21st century Colombia is revealed through the same means that in 18th New Granada, i.e. through ‘the ostentation of signs that need to be exhibited publicly’ (Castro-Gómez 2010, p. 84). This is what (whitened mestizo) Gamboa's performance of gender and distinction (which encompasses both cultural and economic capital), on and by himself and upon García, is about: a public ostentation of signs that allows to locate them both in the higher tiers of the very hierarchical Colombian society, while locating her in a subordinated position with regard to him and the other men consuming the pictorial and written representation of her body.

7. Keeping the higher-social ground: meta-performances of class

This section's heading hints at SoHo's central paradox: as a product trading in the politics of culture the magazine has both transformative and conservative aspirations. Being a lifestyle magazine – which operated during the Samper Ospina years as a postmodern version of conduct books (Giraldo Work in progress) – its cultural agenda has aimed at transforming old forms of behaviour while introducing new ones. In doing so, it has also aimed at revising approved forms of desire (Armstrong and Tennenhouse 1987) with regard to female beauty, aspirations, and sexuality as well as the subjectivities of both men and women. Yet, its political agenda (tacit but central to its cultural one) aims at maintaining ‘power in the hands of already privileged groups’ (McRobbie 2005, p. 6). This point here lies at the heart of my reading of SoHo as a virtual theatre where the performance of distinction takes place, a reading that follows a Bourdieusian approach to ‘cultural differentiation as a powerful means of actively proliferating divisions and inequities through modalities of symbolic violence’ (McRobbie 2005, p. 124).

While in the previous section I discussed performances of gender (and social class) by a male subject and upon a female object, in this section I focus on meta-performances of class by both male and female subjects that aim at delimiting the social space and maintaining its (historical) hierarchies. Whereas the performances of gender discussed above partly operated through the praising of the hypersexualised female other – within a postfeminist framework that aims at ensuring the entrenchment of patriarchy (Gill 2007; McRobbie 2009; Giraldo 2020a) –, the ones discussed now function by means of shaming strategies. These strategies simultaneously derive from and effect disgust – an aversive emotion associated with feelings of revulsion or loathing (Tyler 2013, p. 21) – which is ‘saturated with socially stigmatising meanings and values’ (Ngai 2005, 11 cited in: Tyler 2013, p. 21). Accordingly, they serve to delimit social spaces and/or maintain their hierarchies when certain of those spaces are opened up to those deemed to not truly belong.

The first example comes from Edition 79 whose theme was ‘beauty’ and which counts with one ‘humour section’, among others, entirely dedicated to bashing the Miss Colombia. Titled ‘Nine reasons to end the national beauty pageant’, the section hence features nine heavy weights of journalism and opinion-making in Colombia each of whom writes a column treating something about the event they particularly dislike. The authors of the columns are six men and three women and although they focus on aspects of the pageant of different type and register they (supposedly) dislike, seven of them stand out because of their explicit remarks on the issue of distinction. Two central aspects serve as the axis of this articulation: first, the clear divide between the metropolitan centre (Bogotá), where the authors live and operate, and the periphery, the coastal regions of which Cartagena, where the pageant takes place, is the pinnacle.²⁰ Second, the question of ‘narco-culture’ (Rincón 2009), a term coined by the Colombian media and cultural elites during the peak of drug-trafficking in the eighties ‘to describe the cultural practices of the lower-class/newly rich drug lords’ (Rojas-Sotelo 2014) which aimed at re-configuring power through consumption in an attempt to make room for themselves in old structures of power. A close-reading of one of theses columns, by Felipe Zuleta Lleras, journalist at El Espectador, will suffice to make my point.

Zuleta (Lleras) posits the president of the pageant, Raimundo Angulo (a costeño from the local Cartagenian elite), as the main reason for abolishing the Miss Colombia in a text that is, from beginning to end, a battering of Angulo. The first paragraph introduces the target of his derision as someone who

will never go unnoticed because he has the appearance of a run-down cachaco [someone from Bogotá] that disguises himself with a bogus dinner jacket – similar to those Dominican Republic dictator, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, used to wear – so that when seeing him, it is difficult to decide whether one is in front of a waiter from Girardot or a trumpet player from the Lucho Bermúdez's orchestra. Or, as in multiple selection tests, all of the above (Zuleta Lleras 2006, p. 105).²¹

Focusing on Angulo's dress, this opening sets the tone of the whole text which Zuleta – who not only comes from Bogotá but is a member of the Lleras family, one of the Colombian so called (creole) ‘presidential dynasties’ – uses entirely to denigrate Angulo by pointing out the countless forms in which the latter (but also the misses) fails to convince him that he is ‘gente de bien’.²² In one single paragraph – which opens with a line that characterises Angulo (a costeño) as a downgraded version of a cachaco – Zuleta synthesises the tension with regard to class and distinction between the metropolitan centre and the periphery: that true distinction only belongs to the ‘proper’ bourgeoisie which is the one that comes from Bogotá. The corollary is that the most someone from the periphery – even if they belong to the local elites, like Angulo – can aim at is to perform class and that such a performance is necessarily doomed to fail. That Angulo performs and fails is made clear by Zuleta's use of the term ‘to disguise’ (‘disfrazarse’) in lieu of ‘to dress’ (‘vestirse’). The hint at his unintended imitation of Trujillo (a man reputed for being extravagant in excess). The comparison with, first, a ‘waiter’ (‘mesero’) from an unsophisticated place in Girardot, a rural minor town in Cundinamarca which is not only peripheral in relation to Bogotá but to Cartagena itself; second, a trumpet player from an orchestra (the Lucho Bermúdez's) which although famous, plays folk music. Worse: an orchestra of cumbia and porro, both Caribbean folk rhythms from African and indigenous origin thus, the very antithesis of distinction.

The opening paragraph makes use of similes and metaphorical associations to make clear the extent to which Angulo is not what he wants and pretends to be. The body mostly focuses on the Misses' typical hypercorrection, a wide-spread socio-linguistic phenomenon that derives from the country's highly-hierarchised social organisation and the unqualified dominance of the lettered city but which Zuleta decides to blame on Angulo's personal training of the Misses. The closing paragraph, in turn, is much more explicit in its making the point Zuleta set himself up to make: that he is looking forward to the moment when the Miss Colombia is no longer organised ‘con lobería de etiqueta calentana’ (i.e. with the bad taste inherent to the etiquette from hotter regions) and watched over by ‘a pretentious fine man de tierra caliente’ (Zuleta Lleras 2006, p. 105).

Though Zuleta is not providing guidance about how to be (one of the functions of the lifestyle magazine), he is definitely imparting judgement about how not to be. As someone located for historical reasons on the ‘point zero’ – a white man of creole lineage, born, raised, and located in Bogotá – he is granting himself the right of representing the other, whom despite also being a man and also coming from the higher tiers of society, he reads (and from the other articles in the section one gets he is not the only one to do so) as having failed in his deployment of the whiteness device.

A second example is worth close-reading because it works as a mirror of Zuleta's with regard to social class while showing one crucial point made by black feminist theorists: the importance of looking at social categories intersectionally (see Lorde 2007). If Zuleta's is a text in which an upper-class man shames another one on the basis of the author's perceived failed deployment of the whiteness device by the object of his scorn, the second example is a 1,036 words long text entirely dedicated to the lambasting of an imagined lower-class man by an upper-class woman. Titled ‘El derecho a ser lobo (Una defensa con mucha garra)’ and written by Isabella Santodomingo – actress and socialite – the text is an ironic defence of ‘the right to be tacky’, which is the rough translation of the original title. This text is an illustrative example of how in contemporary postmodern culture, which disingenuously assumes social categories are no longer operative, irony is frequently used as a tool for shaming others because it allows for the agent of the ironic shaming to have it both ways: ‘expressing unpalatable sentiments in an ironized form, while claiming this was not actually meant’ (Gill 2007, p. 159).

In self-referential mode Santodomingo opens by observing that ‘although it might strike some as an utter non-sense, it fell precisely upon her rather than upon, say, Laisa Reyes, to be in charge of leading the defence of what in popular [Colombian] parlance is known as lobo’ (Santodomingo 2007).²³ Though originally a noun, the term lobo or loba (‘wolf’) in Colombian Spanish is also used as an adjective (or an abjectivised noun) implying tackiness, vulgarity, cheapness and which encompasses both working-class and ‘narco-culture’ aesthetics. Starting her ‘defence’ by admitting that she once dated a lobo, the text is an endless succession of class-inflected insults – lobo, ñero, guiso, boleta, brocha – and exaggerated clichés (so extreme it is obvious she is making the story up) about lower classes tastes and lifestyles which evince the profoundly stratified structure of Colombian society.

The text is roughly organised in three sections. In the first section Santodomingo explains the context and makes clear that although she dated a certain ‘Ferney’, a heavily class-inflected name, they actually ‘NEVER left her flat’ except for once when she took him to a Halloween party and forced him to wear a Fox's mask (‘because it was better to be seen dating a fake fox than a real lobo’ (Santodomingo 2007, p. 106). She ‘dated’ him because he was a really good sexual partner which made up for: a ‘golden tooth’, an allusion to his misreading and misusing of signs of distinction. His wearing of ‘a pendant of the Deportivo Cúcuta’, a very marginal team of the already quite low-quality Colombian league. His beloved ‘Bersachy jeans’, an allusion to how the intersection of lack of economic capital and cultural capital translates into the acquisition of conspicuously ersatz goods (Santodomingo 2007, p. 106).

The second section lists the supposed advantages of dating lobos (Santodomingo 2007, p. 108). This is done by means of pretended humorous comments that lambaste what she identifies as terrible bad taste and a lack of worldly knowledge in a mode of narration that intends for the contrast with her own tastes and lifestyle to appear as stark. These ‘advantages’ all point to how by dating a lower-class man, the upper-class woman might increase her power over him: allusions to bad taste and fashion ignorance, which translates into being able to constantly impress him (‘whatever she decides to wear, even when it comes to a foul piece of clothing, the lobo will be dazzled because he will think the piece in question is the most recent fashionable item’). Stratified labour at the heart of unequal social structures, which translates into a basic aspect of social power (‘entrance to discos will always be free because the lobo always knows somebody who works in that kind of place’). Utter lack of gastronomic knowledge, which translates into being taken for a great cook and into reducing the house's food budget (‘the lobo takes tuna cans for fresh salmon’ and ‘is incapable of distinguishing beef fillet from beef neck, red wine from raisin juice, and a kiwi from a sapote’ (Santodomingo 2007, p. 108)). The final section aims at concluding with somewhat contradictory comments on how she sees the relationship between economic and cultural capital (without using those terms) and closes with an intertextual reference to a book she wrote titled Gentlemen prefer them stupid which was made into a very successful TV series in 2010: ‘Now that I think of it, I will title my next book Ladies prefer them lobos’.

While the text is aimed at savaging an imaginary lower-class man, the pictures that accompany it shame lower-class women. They show Santodomingo in a heavily class-inflected attire: a black dress with a deep cleavage, open at the back and shorter in the front of her legs, a very thick plastic-looking belt crowned with an oversized buckle, and what appears to be a diamond on her tooth added with Photoshop. Both text and pictures can be read as a chain of meta-performances of gender and class: she is an upper-class woman that is performing her upper-classness by means of performing lower-classness on a imaginary man (represented in words) and an imaginary woman (represented in pictures).

Santodomingo's own performance of class and distinction also seems to spill over SoHo as the theatre of such performances and into real life. Indeed, she is a very marginal member of the Santo Domingo family, one of the richest and most powerful in Colombia. Yet, unlike some of the core members of that family, who not only appear in the Forbes list because of their enormous wealth but who now make part of the British and Monegasque royal families (Hola.com 2016), her fame and social positioning is far less impressive and confined to Colombia. Thus, unlike her second cousin, Tatiana Casiraghi (née Santo Domingo), which changed her last name because she married Andreas Casiraghi, fourth in the line of succession to the Monegasque throne, Isabella recurred to a more artificial method of deploying the whiteness device: officially changing her original first name, Miriam Isabel, both Colombian and unfashionable, for the Italian version of the second item (see Jordan 2018). Santodomingo's meta-performances of class both in the text and in real-life are instances of that form of difference that is mimicry – almost the same but not quite (Bhabha 1994, p. 127): she is almost a real Santo Domingo (although she spells her name without the space) yet not quite and she takes issue with those who aspire to sophistication (which is certainly not-Colombian by default, therefore the importance of replacing Isabel for Isabella) but hopelessly fail because they are too truly Colombian, that is, lobos in excess.

It might be important to address whether engaging with a text written by a woman complicates my argument about the inherent maleness of the ‘lettered city’ and SoHo's gender ideology which, I claim, equates femaleness with nature, and maleness with intellect. This inherent maleness does not preclude women from positioning themselves within it, in the same way that the ‘whiteness device’ can be deployed by subjects who are non-white. Indeed, and as mentioned above, SoHo featured female writers though some caveats were in order (see p. 10). This granted the magazine some benefits:²⁴ first, it pre-empted feminist critiques on that respect. Second, it endowed the magazine with the patina of contemporary worldliness and postmodern style that was always actively pursued. This is crucial because SoHo has always been enmeshed in postmodernism and neoliberalism, whose politics of inclusion and diversification commodify difference (transforming it into lifestyles) while actively hindering the dismantlement of the structures of power. Third, it helped reinforcing the ‘postfeminist regime’ (Giraldo 2016 2020a) the magazine was in the business of establishing (Giraldo Forthcoming a). The postfeminist regime, in turn, constituted the crucial point around which SoHo articulated its teleological aim of bringing about a cultural transformation that maintained the social hierarchies unchanged (for a fuller development of this last point, see Giraldo 2020b; Giraldo Work in progress).

More importantly, the women writing for SoHo were controlled in ways the men were not. If they were to fall out of line, the backlash was ruthless. In 2012, for instance, one of the women that contributed in a number of occasions to SoHo, Alejandra Azcárate, published in Aló a pretended humorous diatribe – badly written and concatenating insult after insult in a poorly performed pseudo-ironic tone – against fat women (Azcárate 2012). While she deserved the wide backlash she received, the event provided an opportunity for certain male core members of the lettered city to put her in her place. Thus, Ricardo Silva Romero wrote a column for El Tiempo explicitly likening Azcárate's ‘lack of literary talent’ with that of Isabella Santodomingo's.²⁵ In it he asserted that although he had not read Azcárate until then, he already knew she used to deploy (in her shows) ‘the very demanding approach of political incorrectness without having the competence to do so’ (Silva Romero 2012). Though Azcárate's defence included explicitly comparing herself to Daniel Samper Ospina (in his Revista Semana weekly column), Silva Romero was quite clear he thought she had a nerve for doing so (Silva Romero 2012).

Another example is provided by María Jimena Duzán, a reputed female journalist, colleague of Daniel Samper Ospina at Revista Semana, and who contributed on a number of occasions to SoHo during the period of study. In 2011 Duzán dared writing a column for Semana where she criticised some young female radio journalists who agreed to be featured in SoHo's edition 136 (Duzán 2011) and Samper Ospina responded (in his respective column in Semana) by personally savaging her (Samper Ospina 2011). Elsewhere (Giraldo 2020b) I show that his response was, from beginning to end, a vicious attack against Duzán structured around four features he assigned to her: prudery, hypocrisy, pomposity, and sexual non-desirability. This last point, he suggests, would entail from her being ‘ugly’, a term never mentioned, yet, ostensibly present, and from a supposedly outdated aesthetic sense, which he implies would derive from her being rather oldish (Giraldo 2020b).²⁶ Hence, although the borders of ‘the lettered city’ might appear as fluid, they are rather rigid for those who do not truly belong. Any attempt (by the non-core members) to challenge the rules of the game, will be punished.

Zuleta's and Santodomingo's texts can be read as their respective authors strategies of cultural distancing. In Bourdieu's terms, they highlight those ‘symbolic manifestations whose sense of worth depend both on those who perceive it and those who produce it’ and constitute therefore ‘privileged signs of social class at the same time that they become the tool par excellence of strategies of distinction’ (Bourdieu 1979, p. 70). They also emphasise the ideology of ‘natural taste’, which grants two things to those who are supposed to have it: first, a self-assurance that translates into the certitude of having cultural legitimacy, and second, the ease associated with excellence and which derives its effectiveness from its capacity to transform the differences in the acquisition of culture into differences of essence (Bourdieu 1979, p. 70–71). They further constitute examples of the colonial continuities in postcolonial times by showing how the ‘whiteness device’ and ‘the lettered city’ are still fully operative in the contemporary Colombian context. This highlights that what is at stake in these strategies of cultural and social distancing is the keeping of the structure of social inequality unaltered because equality reduces the social distance that is necessary for distinction to be operative. In other words: they exemplify the cultural strategies deployed by the upper-classes aimed at keeping the higher social-ground.

8. Conclusion

This article aimed to make some contributions. Firstly, it aimed at recentring and showing the relevance and theoretical potential of the concepts of ‘the lettered city’ and the ‘whiteness device’ for explaining the continuities between colonial New Granada and postcolonial Colombia. While the lettered city is a concept mostly operative in Colombia and Latin America, the whiteness device has the potential to be applied beyond. Secondly, it aimed at providing the first analysis of a media product of great contextual importance and thus contribute to the study of consumer culture in Colombia at the turn of the century. Thirdly, and in contrast to dominant approaches to media and cultural studies in Latin America at large, it intended to carry out a discursive analysis of a media product that posited ideology (in Stuart Hall's terms), the question of power (from a foucaultian perspective), and hegemonic culture at the centre stage.

I constructed my argument on the basis of a number of interconnected claims (supported by the respective analyses) of what SoHo has been and has done in contemporary Colombia. These claims are: first, that it operated during the Samper Ospina years as a ‘virtual theatre’ – a theatrical scene mediated through a magazine – where performances of gender, class, and race took place. These performances are partly theatrical – thus take place through the deployment of the ‘lettered city’ and the ‘whiteness device’ – and partly linguistic – they put in effect the performativity of language (Austin's theory of speech acts), and second, that SoHo has been a mise en abyme of how the ‘lettered city’ (Rama 1996), which implicitly encompasses the ‘whiteness device’ (Castro-Gómez 2010), is a powerful tool to enact distinction in the highly stratified Colombian society. Third, that the magazine has explicitly aimed at ‘educating’ men and women in postmodern sensibilities in order to carry out a social transformation that, paradoxically, also aims at keeping social hierarchies (of gender, race, social class, sexuality, etc.) unchanged. In short, that SoHo is an example of what Foucault denotes as ‘a synaptic regime of power’, that is, one in which power is exercised ‘within the social body, rather than from above it’ (Foucault 1980, p. 39).

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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.

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).