Lenguas Afiladas:
Ambivalence, Eroticism, and Violence in the works of
Nadia Granados and Deborah Castillo
Carolina Alejandra Velasco Cevallos
2020
rMA Thesis Cultural Analysis
Faculty of Humanities
University of Amsterdam
Supervisor: Murat Aydemir Second reader: Joost de Bloois
siguen haciendo, sin formación previa, con la pasión por la escisión y la ruptura de todas las unidades que nos capturan y cancelan en taxonomías de identidades, géneros, propiedades, geografías. Un impulso por diferir de tanto sermón, sentencia, discurso que hace callar porque atemoriza o porque incita a hablar compulsivamente bajo los términos de su legitimidad.
Poets, activists, theorists, essayists, I urge you to practice the deslengüe [untonguing], as many already have done and many others continue to do, without previous training, with a passion for the split and the fracture of all the unities that capture and cancel us in the taxonomy of identities, genres, properties, geographies. An impulse to differ from so much preaching, dictum, discourse that silences us because it frightens or because it impulses us to speak compulsively under the terms of its legitimacy.
Introduction ... 4
Lengua Afilada [Sharp Tongue] ... 6
i) Lengua Afilada at the Border ... 7
ii) Lengua Afilada as the Organ ... 8
iii) Lengua Afilada that Wounds –Interruqciones ... 9
Two Untamed Tongues ... 11
Chapter One: Multiplying Borders in Chupada Antimperialista ... 16
Between Words and Moans ... 21
Financial Orgasm ... 26
In the Interstices of Translation ... 30
Conclusion ... 35
Chapter Two: An Encounter with Slurs in Boca Sucia ... 37
Profanadora de la Patria–A Constellation of Symbols ... 41
The Improper Mouth ... 46
Realigned Words ... 50
Conclusion ... 56
Conclusion ... 58
Introduction
“Poesía: hacer de trips corazón” is one of the Aforritmos in the poetry book Bilingual Blues (1995) written by the Cuban American poet Gustavo Pérez-Firmat (57).1 The similarity of the shape and sound of the word tripas, which in Spanish means guts, and trips, a word written in English, turns the meaning of a very popular saying (hacer de tripas corazón) into a phrase that connects Pérez-Firmat diasporic experience with his way of writing poetry. Much of my thinking concerning the politics, materiality, and bordered experiences of language come from a fascination with the way that border poets, latinxs in the U.S., turn the immigrant and diasporic experience of language into a poetic of puns. Poetry in Spanglish, or other hybrid languages, has found written ways to illustrate parts of the experience of moving from one language to another, which is a political gesture against the conceptions on mastery over a language and national ideologies of purity in literature. The embodied experience of accents, mistakes, and misunderstandings turns into a poetic of the border — not only in content but in forms— for poets like Pérez-Firmat, Sandra Cisneros, and Guillermo Gómez-Peña.
My interest in material language explorations and their political consequences has made me seek more and more forms of enacting and challenging western delimitations of language and the body, which consequently expose the former in its hierarchical and violent history. In my attempt to discover other forms of thinking about language and the body, my interest shifted from literary explorations to other media wherein the body has a more evident presence. I took this interest to the field of performance art, as it allowed me to understand the embodied experience of language when considering its many facets and varied
understandings on the form that language can take.
My approach to these questions is situated in Latin America. First of all, because I am more invested personally in these contexts—as I am from Ecuador—but also because there is
1 The literal translation would be “Poetry: to make trips your heart”. But the meaning comes from the popular
saying “hacer de tripas corazón” that literally translates to using your guts as your heart. The saying is used to express the need to become brave to do something that seems difficult. Gustavo Pérez-Firmat makes a pun by changing tripas (gut) to trips. “Aforritmos” is a neologism made by the poet that comes from mixing the word
aforismos (aphorisms) with ritmos (rhythms). In this section of his poetry book, he changed the meaning of many
popular sayings and phrases playing with the sound and meanings of the words in different languages. For example other Aforritmos in the book are: “No solo de puns vive el hombre.”, “All roads lead to roam” and “Publish or Pérez” (58, 59). With this short note I want to introduce my role as a translator in this thesis. I will continue to appear in the footnotes in my double role in this work: author and translator.
a strong engagement with these issues in Latin American thinking due to its history of language struggles. There was first a violent and strategic imposition of Spanish, and more recently, English has had an imperial expansion as the legitimized shared language in the world. Questioning the history and hierarchies of language also involves challenging the imposition of western thinking as the only valid way to produce knowledge. So my research shares in the idea, as explained by Paul Preciado in his essay “Saberes Vampiros” (2013), that: “there is no language that is not the product of translation, contamination, of trafficking” (4). This quote helps me understand language historically to debunk the naturalized ideas around the purity of language and its correlation with the nation. Preciado situates this thinking as part of a collective project to “delegitimize the purity, the teleology, and the unidirectionality of the knowledge produced by the representation of the sexual-colonial modernity” (5). This thesis takes part in this greater and collective project of finding
strategies to trace other paths and forms of knowledge production. In the specific context of Latin America, it means to rethink the discourses around coloniality and emancipation and recognize the many other forms of knowledge that are conflictingly in contact in the territory.
The interest in questioning these ideas with language and the body, and the colonial imposition of languages, has mostly taken place in the field of literature. As Walter Mignolo has explained in his writings about decoloniality based on a mapping and historicization of the uses of language, the correlation between languages, territories, and literature was
naturalized from the nineteenth century as part of the project of emancipation (221). In order to destabilize this correspondence, I have decided to move these reflections from literature to performance art in the hope that it will provide new insights into thinking about language in different terms. To do so, I will do a close reading of two video performances made by two Latin American women, Chupada Antimperialista [Antimperialist Blow] (2013) from the Colombian artist Nadia Granados (1978) and Boca Sucia [Diry Mouth] (2017) from the Venezuelan artist Deborah Castillo (1971). I will do a comparative reading that seeks to understand the similar and different ways in which each of these artists engages with the power that is expressed in the modern colonial system, and replicated in their specific contexts. Part of my methodology will be to think about these issues through the ongoing translations that I will need to do in order to write this thesis in English. My reflections on my own embodied bilingual experience of language will allow me to think more deeply about the
politics and processes of language; something that will be reflected mostly in the space of the footnotes.2
My aim with this thesis is to ask: how do these two video performances complicate binary understandings under the gender/colonial system through their enactment of different registers of language and the body? What strategies of political engagements with power are they using? Moreover, what connections are being made between the broader colonial history and the specific contexts in which each performance is situated?. To do so, I will use a
concept of my own construction to think language and the body together: that of lengua afilada. So, in this introduction, I will first describe the aspects of this concept that are helpful for my analysis and then give more context and information about the two performances, including how I situate them.
Lengua Afilada [Sharp Tongue]
In Spanish, the word lengua means both ‘language’ and ‘tongue.’ So a strategic use of the multiple meanings of this word will act as a foundation from which to question the limits of these two meanings. Furthermore, the expression lengua afilada or lengua viperina
characterizes a mode of speaking that is excessive, gossipy, offensive, or inappropriate, and that is often used to describe the way women speak.3 This figure of speech allows me to expose the power exerted on speaking (who can speak, how much, and on what terms), and at the same time, its connections to the body. The stimulation and proliferation of meaning— both in its English and Spanish version—of the two words allows me to incorporate multiple understandings of the body and language. The three aspects of the concept lengua afilada for
2 My practice of translation has been entrenched in political understandings of translation. That is, the
recognition that translation involves two languages in hierarchical positions, and its historical uses as a way to assimilate and limit other cultural production. In the specific context of this thesis, I will translate from one colonizer language to another, Spanish to English, but under the recognition that recent process of globalization have made English the most legitimized language of knowledge production in academia. However, I hope that my work as a translator manages to leave marks and traces of other forms of thinking and writing on this hegemonic language.
In that sense I have taken a proposal from the Antena collective, to perform what they call an Ultratranslation. In the Ultratranslation manifesto one of the points reads: “Translation is an asymptote: no matter how close we try to get, there’s always a space between the two bodies and that is the space where we live. The space where we transpose, or are transposed.” (1) In a sense, my research is placed in the middle of that in-between.
3 In other figures of speech these two meanings of the word lengua come toguether. For example: morderse la
lengua (to bite one’s tongue to stop saying something you are not supposed to), aflojar la lengua (to loosen the
tongue, meaning to speak, it is usually used when telling secrets or gossiping), ser lengua larga (to have a long tongue, and as a result to not be able to stay quiet, or said of someone who gossips). Many of these figures of speech are used to characterize women’s speech, as there is a common understanig that women are ofter talking more than they should and about irrelevant topics.
my analysis are lengua as bordered, language in its physical and embodied constitution, and an understanding of the sharp tongue in its capacity to wound or interrupt.
i) Lengua Afilada at the Border
Afilar, the verb of sharpening in Spanish from which afilada derives from the word filo, which is a sharp end and is also used to describe an edge or border. So, I take the image of afilar as the verb to describe the constant and repetitive act of making a border Lengua afilada comes from the effort of working from the border as a place of thinking. Gloria Anzaldúa, a lesbian Chicana writer, uses her bordered subjectivities to think about and question the politics of language in her own poetic and essayistic endeavor. At the beginning of the chapter “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” from her book Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), she narrates a visit to the dentist. There Anzaldúa recounts her dentist’s insistent protest because, according to him, her tongue kept getting on the way, making it hard for him to work (53). The confrontation between Anzaldúa’s tongue and the dentist prompts a reflection on the history of the silencing of women in Latin America that she recounts from her childhood experiences, the control of her speech by her family, and in academia.
Although Anzaldúa writes in her book about her specific experience and the U.S Mexico border, she also considers it in other contexts. In the preface of the book, Analdúa explains: “The Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other” and later characterizes it as a “place of contradictions” (Preface). This is a space that keeps enacting colonial and imperial wounds and from which she claims the possibility of what she calls a mestiza consciousness, as a consciousness of the Borderlands formed by the “ambivalence from the clash of voices” (78). Following Analdúa, I will use this idea of the border in many forms in which two cultures edge each other in the context of the video performances that I am analyzing. So, I take this proposal of thinking about the border as a place where multiple languages and expressions are simultaneously in contact and contesting meanings.
This understanding of the border has also been part of Walter Mignolo’s project on thinking about decoloniality with language, and more specifically, addressing heterogeneity and hybridity as forms of enunciation (256). In his reading of Gloria Anzaldúa, he has claimed that she is part of the social and cultural productions that question the “one to one relationship between language and territory” and “people speaking a given language and their
sense of identification with themselves and their territory” (257). That is, her positionality allows her to make a poetic that enacts a bordered position in writing itself, where the correspondence between identity, territory, and language destabilizes, which produces other forms of thinking. As Mignolo has explained: “changing linguistic cartographies implies a reordering of epistemology” (147). That is, these other language constructions shift how knowledge circulates, creating opportunities for historically silenced populations. My
construction of lengua afilada comes precisely from these reflections of the border as a place where cultures edge to produce other forms of knowledge. Furthermore, Mignolo also sees an embodied use of language in the writings of Anzaldúa, which brings me to the next aspect that I recognize as part of the concept that I am constructing—language and embodiment.
ii) Lengua Afilada as the Organ
The other aspect of lengua afilada entails the possibility of thinking of language as embodied and in connection with other body practices. Gustavo Pérez-Firmat, the poet that I already mentioned, from his own bordered subjectivity, writes about the different affective
relationship that bilingual (Spanish-English) writers have with the languages they use. Pérez-Firmat established a distinction between idioma (idiom), lenguaje (language), and lengua (tongue). He defines lengua as “language incarnate, as body part, an organ rather than a faculty” (Tongue ties: Logo-eroticism in Anglo-Hispanic literature 14). I am not interested in the distinction of these three words to explore their kinship with language, as my work
focuses on the power struggles between these understandings of language. However, I do find his distinct terms useful to think about an approach to language that considers it an embodied experience—one that is not only based on meanings and mastery but on the processes of production (the materiality of the reverberation of the voice, its origin in the throat and mouth, and the material conditions for writing and speaking), a language’s physical constitution, and connected to the specific subjectivity of the enunciator.
In a similar note, valeria flores in her writings about poetry and the tongue have also repeatedly used images and metaphors that help construct lengua as an organ of language. As Macky Corbalán wrote in the introduction of one of her books, Deslenguada: desbordes de una proletaria del lenguaje (2010), what she does is: “not articulate the body into the
language, but to make the body be the language” (17). This distinction is crucial for me, as it creates an understanding of body and language that is not based on their absolute distinction. That is, it helps conceptualize her writings as an expression of her body. These
conceptions around language that prioritize meaning over materiality, or that conceive of language as an act of reasoning above all. As my approach to lengua afilada seeks to include in these conversations aspects and expressions of the body that can be perceived with other senses, I will address reflections on the voice and mouth.
Both, Adriana Cavarero en Brandon LeBelle, write more concretely about the
physical body in connection to language. Adriana Cavarero, in the book For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression (2005) exposes how, in Western
metaphysics, the different aspects of the voice have been separated and gendered. There she argues that reason—which corresponds to the masculine—is prioritized over the body— which corresponds to the feminine. However, speaking itself has also been separated in the semantic meaning that is prioritized over the other aspects of the voice (the sounds, the tones, the fleshy origin in the throat). Cavarero explains that this dichotomy has provoked the devocalization of logos (40). In the use of the concept lengua afilada I will include this understanding of the voice as a site of ambivalence, in which there is a contested position between the rational expression of language and the bodily reverberations of the voice.
On the other hand, Brandon LaBelle has also taken his studies of the voice to the body, particularly in his interest in the mouth. In his book Lexicon of the Mouth: Poetics and Politics of Voice and the Oral Imaginary (2014), LaBelle thinks of the embodiment of the voice not only in terms of sound but also in the mouth, as a site where other forms of expressions come together. He explains: “The assemblage of the voice and the mouth thus dramatically brings together the texture of oral surfaces with the vocal reverberations of the cavity” (10) and further on “speech is housed within a greater collection of oral behaviors, forcing a continual play and politics of meaning” (11). Placing the voice as part of an
assemblage of other expressions will help me in my analysis to further my reflections around language and the voice. Lengua afilada then works as a way of dissolving the distinctions of the body and language and takes into account the multiple connections that are brought from the mouth. Consequently, language is not deemed as an experience outside of other bodily practices or external to the other material expression of the sound of the voice and the gestures of the mouth.
iii) Lengua Afilada that Wounds –Interruqciones
I first thought about the potential of imagining a sharp tongue after an encounter with the poetic manifesto “Pensamiento Puñal” [Dagger Thinking] (2012) from the Mexican
performer Lechedevirgen Trimegisto. I wanted to imagine his poetics of the dagger in terms of the tongue. In the manifesto, he refers to the formation of his own body as wounded by the many forms of violence that he had to live as a brown gay person in Mexico. Based on that, he described dagger as a “critical space of radical thinking,” as an operation rather than an identity, to stab “gender, classist discrimination and racism, the abuse, the exploitation and the control over minds and bodies.” However, his understanding of the stabbing and its effects is not only based on the idea of wounding, but also on imagining other forms of configurations of the body. So, as he explains the logic of the dagger is one of “the dagger-endeavor, collage, the cut-and-paste” (lechedevirgen.com). These operations imagined by Lechedevirgen take the possibility of violence, of stabbing, of wounding, as a form of rearranging pieces in a different order. Furthermore, his way of writing acknowledges that it is precisely his lived experiences, his wounds, that make him capable of thinking differently and creating more borders.
These figures of speech that relate writing to stabbing or cutting, also appear in valeria flores’ text to describe her poetic operations that seek to challenge the imposition of certain writing norms.4 She has been advocating for forms of writing made by mistakes, ambiguities, and opacities that have been rejected, repressed, and delegitimized. In her book
Interruqciones: ensayos de poética activista escritura política pedagogía [Interruqtions: essays on poetics of activism, writing, and political pedagogy] (2013), she made the gesture of changing the composition of the word interrupciones to interruqciones (interruptions to interruqtions) as a way of changing the composition of the word, which works as a metaphor for her approach to language. She writes: “interruqtion: poetic mode of cutting into a
conversation into which you were not invited but of which you are the object of their diction” (3).This quote forms the operation of interruqtion to introduce the historically related bodies into a conversation, into writing, and speaking. I then take these understandings of wounds that cut to create new language configurations, using the concept of cutting to access the operations of the lengua afilada. I need to highlight that this interruption works materially and that in the process, it changes the terms and the formations power structures—like the letter q altering the word “interruption” and forming a new word that has a different sound
4 In the book Interruqciones: ensayos de poética activista escritura política pedagogía (2013) written by valeria
flores she describes the reasons why she uses lower cases in her name. There she writes: “The lowercase in the proper noun, a strategy of minorization of the proper name, of problematization of the grammatical conventions, of displacing the hierarchization of letters, a call for the text before the signature of the author, percieve the proper noun as a spasm of a fiction called “I””(5). I find it important that many of her ideas rethink language not only based on the poetic form of her writing but also in the material gestures of writing.
when spoken, and requires a different movement of the hand when written. Parting from that, I will now introduce the performances that I will analyze through the concept that I just described.
Two Untamed Tongues
Both Deborah Castillo and Nadia Granados have an extensive body of work that addresses the mouth and the use of language, and both have been interested in addressing and
challenging the discourses of the state in their countries. The perspective of these artists allows me to do what Walter Mignolo has called a double critique. He describes it as “a critique of the imperial discourses as well as of national discourses asserting identities and differences articulated in and by imperial discourses” (69). That is, Mignolo recognizes that the national discourse, even though they have been thought of as a project of emancipation, is still complicit to the imperial discourses. With these two artists, I will engage in an analysis that recognizes the colonial system in a broader sense, but also how it is reproduced in the management of power in both Colombia and Venezuela. From their work, I chose the video performances Chupada Antimperialista [Antimperialist Blow] (2013) and Boca Sucia [Dirty Mouth] (2017) as they use language in surprising ways, like in the form of an invented language or little golden three dimensional letters. I will discuss each of these performances in each chapter of the thesis.
La Fulminante, the protagonist of the video Chupada Antimperialista is a character created and embodied by Nadia Granados. La Fulminante brings together the stereotypes around overly sexualized Latin American women, and uses live and video performances to criticize the systematic violence of institutions like the state, the medical apparatus, and the mass media. She does so by using pornographic formats and employing metaphors for the institutions that she criticizes, such as phallic objects that she touches, sucks, and plays with (like a syringe and a gun). The character speaks in a language that she invented herself, and whose origin cannot be traced to any western linguistic family. The language only exists in a spoken form, and it is only known to her. La Fulminante has a web portal with videos, images, and texts that explore form her subjectivity her critiques to the masculine colonial system. However, in this thesis, I will specifically focus in the performance Chupada Antimperialista, as I think that it conveys an exciting intersection of concepts: the invented language and its connections to other forms of bodily expressions and the subtitles that address the violent commercialization of death in Colombia with sexual metaphors.
In this chapter, I will explore how the invented language and the subtitles appear together in tension, and how they provoke a particular positionality in the viewers. To do so, I will introduce and refer to the context of Colombia, which has a history of presence of
paramilitary forces, an army that has been denounced as criminal, and a historical problem with the violence brought by drug trafficking and the influence and presence of the U.S. In 1999 the USA and Colombia implemented a common plan named the ‘Plan Colombia’ in order to supposedly help the latter with their armed and drug trafficking conflicts. However, this plan has been denounced for hiding the real intention of intervening and deploying the U.S military in the Colombian territory and actually provoking forms of extreme violence that affected mostly people with greater social disadvantages (teleSUR/KP). Chupada Antimperialista engages with these forms of violence through the use of the body and language, to expose how they work and their complex construction.
In the second chapter, I will do a close reading of Boca Sucia from Deborah Castillo, whose tongue has been the protagonist of many of her performances. She uses it to confront the traditional male figures of Venezuela’s history and the symbolic production of the nation, like in her famous bootlicking performance Lamezuela (2011) or in the performance video El beso emancipador [Emancipatory Kiss] (2013) where she kisses a golden statue figure. In Boca Sucia her mouth is framed to show the interaction between her tongue, lips, and teeth with little gold letters that spell many insults used for immigrant latinxs and women. The insults that appear in different places of her mouth are then licked, disordered, and intaken. This particular use of the tongue, and the format of the video, takes on a very different tone and political strategy than the one from La Fulminante, which will allow me to understand the different ways in which the concept of lengua afilada operates and becomes complicated. I chose to work with this performance because it an encounter with the tongue, but this time not with a symbol of the nation and instead with literal words. This will allow me to think about language in its materiality in a written form, and contact with her tongue and mouth.
In Boca Sucia, the high-resolution camera, and the close-up framing of the mouth clearly exposes the textures of its elements: the thickness of saliva, the crevasses of the tongue, the creamy lipstick, and the physical composition of each letter. I will carefully analyze this video to see how the different elements interact and explore the possibility of the body in confrontation with words. To do so, I will first engage with her past performances to gain a better understanding of her strategic use of the tongue and how it is related to the Venezuelan context. Deborah Castillo, in her many performances, has been addressing the
way in which the symbols of the nation during and after the presidency of Hugo Chávez has been used to produce a homogenized idea of the citizens. With a populist mode of doing politics, he claimed to be the new liberator of the nation; that is, he used his own “Revolución Bolivariana” as a new form of Spanish Independence although, in this case, in relation to the U.S. I will thus discuss how the discourses of the nation with which Castillo has been
engaging guides my reading of her encounter with slurs, which also seem to take part in the national discourse of Western countries.
Together, these two performances will allow me to think about the specific positionality of being a woman in Latin America. Moreover, although their approach is different, both share a positionality that I think is crucial for their political work. In broad terms, both of these performances address what this position means. So I will now quickly introduce an understanding of gender as part of the colonial gender system and develop on the tensions between identity and subjectivity.
In her incisive writings on gender and coloniality, Maria Lugones explains that the colonial and gender systems are constitutive of each other. In the article “Heterosexualism and the Colonial / Modern Gender System” (2007), Lugones expands her reflections on the way that gender was used as part of the strategies of domination. There she explains that “Gender was a colonial imposition” (93). This helps clarify the impact of the imposition of gender on colonized territories. She claims that the process of colonization involved the construction of gender and race in ways that are constitutive, which consequently means that gender is racialized, and that race is gendered; something particularly important when thinking about how feminist movements have operated. As Lugones claims, the process of colonization produced very different ideas of femininity in white subjects than in racialized and colonized ones: while for white subjects it meant an idea of purity and privacy, the characterization of colonized women was one of animalization and aggressive
hypersexuality. These reflections are critical in my thesis as they frame the position of the artists that I am writing about. That is, their critical perspective tackles the position of femininity as constructed by the Gender/Colonial system and the different statuses it is endowed.
These considerations are essential to situate the works of these artists in the broader background of performance art in Latin America, where the dichotomy of reason as a masculine expression and the relegation of the body to the feminine takes a specific shape.
This is to say that the characterization of the feminine body in racialized women as
hypersexual has been used to legitimize violent sexual practices and in the exoticization of their bodies. In that sense, Julia Antivilo, in her extensive and thorough research on feminist Latin American art, points out too that the control and violence expressed in the body have made it pivotal in the subversive expressions of feminist art (27). Antivilo recognizes that performance art has worked as a way of resisting those controlling powers over the body, from the body itself. Feminist artists in Latin America have been keen on resignifying and taking control over the representation of their own bodies. The video performances I will analyze are directly in conversation with these cultural productions and working to
destabilize the categories of what it means to be a woman and to be from Latin America. So, I will briefly explain that my position with these identities is complicated and in tension.
Both of the artists that I am working with deal with normative constructions of femininity and nationality, questioning the limits and rigidity of these identitarian categories. In order to better understand the way in which they confront and stretch the possibilities of that positionality, I will take into consideration the reflections of Nelly Richard on identity in Latin America. As part of her theoretical practice, Nelly Richard addresses the historical approaches to writing about Latin America in academic Cultural Studies and refers to the academic work that, following the surge of postcoloniality, has been found in Latin
America—an exciting place or topic to perform analysis ("Intersectando” 346). In her view, these analyses reproduce the colonial configurations that place thinking (theory) in the Global North and the metropolitan centers and experience (objects) in the periphery and the Global South. She also critiques that, in this sort of academic works, there is an expectancy and understanding of identity categories as transparent and univocal, that is, assuming that they represent their specific social group and have to act in accordance with it politically (347).
I consider it important to take into account these reflections and acknowledge my positionality of writing a thesis about Latin American art and thinking while studying in a European capital. In that sense, I will not only take into consideration the identity
categorization of both artists, but also my own, trying to include in my analysis the tension between these categories and the complex, ambivalent, and contradictory aspects of the positionality they take in their performance work and how I relate to it. To do so, I will take the understanding of identity that Richard has developed in the same article:
If identity and difference are categories-in-process formed and rearticulated in the intersections—mobile and provisional—opened by every subject between the given and the created; if identity and difference are not a fixed repertoire of natural attributes, but interpretative plays that draw on multiple staging and dramatizations, we should not let that the requirements of a “politics of representation” close all of the gaps of indetermination that keep the categories happily in suspense and as
incomplete knowledge. (356)
With this quote in mind, I will navigate the video performances under the consideration that each of the performances deals in particular ways with the intersection of their contexts and offers strategies that are diverse and complex, exceeding any simple categorization.
Furthermore, understanding the processual character of categories will allow me to develop arguments that do not seek the univocal conclusion of a political gesture, but that converses with the political ideas of each piece. I will now start my close reading of the video
Chapter One:
Multiplying Borders in Chupada Antimperialista
I type lafulminante.com and enter the portal of La Fulminante, a website with a design that could be from any pornstar. The upper buttons in red, over a black background, show the possible trajectories: VIDEOS, IMAGES, STREETWALKER, LIVE, CABARET. While going further down the homepage, it becomes evident to me that this is not a conventional porn site. At the center of the page, there is a GIF of someone in high heels squirting over an image of the face of the Colombian ex-president Álvaro Uribe5. As I keep scrolling down, I find twenty-five little rectangles with erotic images of La Fulminante, showcasing her long straight blonde hair, details of her mouth, and an array of sexy outfits that, when clicked, open each of her videos. The portal site from 2011 and the character La Fulminante are a creation of the Colombian performance artist Nadia Granados (1978).
La Fulminante has been described as the following: a “pornographic body like the feminine figurations that feed the patriarchal violence” (Castillo 101); a “sexually
provocative woman, from the erotic phantasies made by pornography” (Milano 114); and an appropriation of “the Sexy Hot Latina that has been assiduously sold in the contemporary cultural imaginary (a residuary of the racialized woman constructed under colonial times” (Valencia "Interferencias" 4). On the webpage, the body of La Fulminante works as an articulation of the imagery, stereotypes, aesthetics, and strategies of conventional straight porn’s treatment of racialized women, while simultaneously speaking against the
institutionalized patriarchal and racist violence (see fig.1). One of her strategies to embody this denunciation of conventional porn is to use a language that she invented herself, which only exists in a spoken form, and which is accompanied by subtitles in Spanish.
5 Álvaro Uribe was the president of Colombia in 2002-2006 and 2006-2010. His presidency has been widely
critiqued for the pervasive and criminal uses of violence in response to an already violent country and for supporting the U.S political, economic, and military intervention. During his presidency, the National Army implemented a plan that resulted in the massive extrajudicial executions of young people—later termed “false positives”. The practice of killing innocent people was defended by Uribe, who claimed that they were
In the image below, the corset of La Fulminante is covered by the faces of mythical masculine figures of the Left, like Che Guevara or Fidel Castro (fig.1). Furthermore, on her underwear is the face of Simón Bolivar, the heroic figure of emancipation in many countries of Latin America, which I will discuss in more detail in the next chapter. This, together with the sign “Libertarian Orgasm,” expresses Granado’s stance on revolution. To her, such an idea is made possible by a subversive use of sexuality and the body challenging the
masculinist conceptions of politics that are based on normative gender constructs on which systemic violence relies. Hence, in this chapter, I will discuss Granados’ alternative to the notions of politics, particularly by analyzing one of her videos: Chupada Antimperialista [Anti-imperialist Blow] (2013). The video, embedded from Vimeo on the webpage, rests over a background pattern of fishnet against skin and takes the form of an amateur porn video made with a low-quality camera and with a high-contrast effect. In it, La Fulminante moves her body fervently, touching herself, speaking in her invented language, and sucking and licking a condom-covered gun. The subtitles, written in a condescending tone, address how the construct of masculinity is deployed by people in power to exploit other male bodies for money.
Figure 1. An image found in lafuminante.com. The text on top translates to: Libertarian Orgasm
In this chapter, I will analyze how La Fulminante’s body is, in part, constructed through her invented language, as well as the ways in which the video’s subtitles disrupt this expressive construction of her body to propose an alternative way of engaging with politics. The concept lengua afilada will guide me in considering how the use of language, voice, and the body can destabilize existing meanings of politics and pornographic bodies to rearticulate a political discourse of desire. Furthermore, I will also use lengua afilada as a way of
understanding the border of Spanish, and its colonial history, and La Fulminante’s invented language. First, I will focus on the way that La Fulminante embodies her invented
language—dissolving the separation between language and other bodily expressions. Subsequently, I will address the confronting character of the subtitles and La Fulminante’s embodiment that brings together the configurations of sexuality and violence in the
Colombian sociopolitical context. Finally, I will delve into on the subtitles as translations, to explore the bordered positionality of La Fulminante. However, I first reflect on two notions that are central to my argument: ‘Pospornography’ and ‘Gore Capitalism.’
Nadia Granados’ exploration of pornographic forms reconfigures desire and questions binary thinking and gender roles within the pornographic genre. These reflections come from the acknowledgment of popular pornography as complicit in the configuration of
heteropatriarchal violence. Alejandra Castillo, in her consideration of artistic works dealing with body politics, has written about how pornography operates using the logic of
exhibition—a sensibility that presumes to position female bodies as objects of consumption for male entertainment.6 Castillo explains that there is a paradox in the representation of women in contemporary patriarchal societies that is in the double logic of the concealment and exposure, which produces the idea of the obscene in the “staging, putting into light what should be hidden, in darkness.” As a result, Castillo writes: “In a way, women only exist in the exhibition of that “object” that is herself” (53, 54). In an effort to change the status of the “exhibition” and of the ensuing commodification of female bodies, many artists have
appropriated the pornographic genre to create other forms of sexual media.
6 Although in this thesis I am using the word “female”, I want to be clear that this is not a closed category. I am
not necessarily thinking about “female” as a strict identity position, or absolute grouping. In this context, I am specifically referencing the ideologies (and language) of the gender binary. Furthermore, it is also my
argument that these sorts of artistic, body-political expressions challenge such normative identity classifications and make possible diverse ways of thinking about gender and embodiment.
This movement has taken the name of Pospornography.7 This sexually dissident movement that primarily produces videos and performances aims to expose the violent representation of bodies in straight mass pornography and seeks out political expressions of desire and sexuality. As Lucía Egaña explains, posporn “can be considered above all a way of critically questioning the parameters from which the representation of sex and desire has been presented” by the people that have been a “passive object of pornographic representation” (9). Granados takes part in this movement by transforming her own body into one of these stereotypical representations, then uses that position to make evident the violent
characterization of racialized women of Latin America. Moreover, she relates this sexual imagery to other forms of violence that are also sustained by the racist and misogynistic systems of pornography production. The amateur porn aesthetics of the video Chupada Antimperialista prioritize an alternative expression of desire and provoke what Nadia Granados herself, in her essay, has called a “freeing eroticism” (“Performando” 235).
The commodification of bodies is explored in the video not only in the form of pornography but also in the video’s subtitles, which denounce the commercialization of violence in Colombia. This violence is tied to a long history of drug trafficking, the actions of paramilitary forces, and the intrusion of the U.S in the so-called War on Drugs. The subtitles repeatedly use the expression “cannon fodder” to describe the masculine figures taking part in the violent dynamics of mercenaries and soldiers that kill for money for the benefit of a few powerful people. “Cannon fodder” perfectly explains how the militarist system deems some people (that is, bodies that are in a lower hierarchical rank) mere objects—expendable in the state’s pursuit of a commercial objective. These bodies are, in this context, the ones of young people with minimal structural opportunities who have the need to prove their
masculinity.
7 Laura Milano, in the first footnote of her book Usina Posporno (2014) explains that she uses the word
pospornografía as the translation of postpornography because it is a way of appropriating the word in the
Latin American context. Removing the letter t from “postpornography” is a gesture of linguistic deviance that I also want to explore in my writing. So, as I am engaging with the scholarly and artistic work of pospornography in the Latin American context, I am retranslating the word from Spanish to English and leaving behind a trace of that translation (by eliminating the t and writing it as posporn and pospornography). Translating a term from Spanish to English, though it was originally coined in English, has made me think about how translation leaves its marks on language. Making this process visible has helped me introduce my own bordered position of writing a thesis in English while reading mainly Spanish-speaking authors and writing about Latin America. Following what the Antena collective call ultratranslation: “Ultratranslation lures translators out of invisibility and onto the streets, into the margins, into the footnotes, into annotation, into activism, into failure and into irrationality, the intuitive, a channeling.” (2). I take this place in the margins and in the footnotes to introduce my own bordered subjectivity.
The sociopolitical context that Granados references can be better understood with what Sayak Valencia terms Gore Capitalism: a way of conceptualizing capitalism to describe the extreme violence that it produces and the way it turns death into merchandise in the Third World (Gore Capitalism 15). Although Valencia’s work centers in Mexico, the concept helps to illustrate what La Fulminante describes in the video subtitles as the perverse violence that objectifies certain bodies. Valencia asserts that, in the places where Gore Capitalism
generates a “perverse empowerment, entrenched in the necropolitical commercialization of murder, that evidences the dystopias that bring in the avant la lettre compliance of the pact with the (masculinist) neoliberalism and its objectives” (19). In these contexts, the ideals upon which neoliberalism operates—the evaluation of subjects based on their capacity to consume, and the model of the self-made entrepreneur—are extended in the form of extremely violent commercial exchanges, particularly in contexts wherein this strategy is presented as the only possible method of social and political advancement. The “perverse empowerment” of state violence functions in part because of the recognition and value granted to the violent construct of masculinity—which is to say, the value granted to perceived qualities of strength, bravery, independence, and heterosexuality. These forms of commercialized violence expose the devastating consequences of the commodification of not only all aspects of life, but also of death.
The video of La Fulminante manages to reveal how the commodification of bodies in pornography and Gore Capitalism is sustained by a logic of consumption—entrenched in the colonial categorizations of bodies. Hence, these two concepts will help me analyze how the video Chupada Antimperialista portrays the tensions between languages and the uses of the erotic body to confront men’s compliance with a system that objectifies women, but also potentially themselves and end up being destroyed by what Valencia refers to as predatory uses of the bodies (Gore Capitalism 140). In this chapter, I will analyze the use of the tongue in the video to think about the politics at play from a broad perspective, but also to reflect on how this relates to the particular political context Granados is critiquing. Furthermore, linking the concepts of posporn and Gore Capitalism seems to offer a compelling perspective on the reproduction of systemic violence through the gender binary. I will base my analysis on the concept of lengua afilada to address the strategies of La Fulminante, in her uses of a bordered tongue, to make explicit the structure that connects the violence of racialized and feminized bodies in porn, and of the men that are used in the accumulation of capital. I will start my
analysis addressing the use of the invented language of La Fulminante in the video performance.
Between Words and Moans
Chupada Antimperialista starts with a shot showing La Fulminante’s tongue rushing from one corner her lips to the other. It is reminiscent of a snake flicking its forked tongue, an animalistic movement that anticipates her wild performance. This clip works as a sort of signature in her videos, as it displays big fire-patterned letters that announce her name. In the next shots, La Fulminante appears in front of the camera - which is placed on the floor - on her knees, moving closer to the camera to show her mouth and breasts in seductive and ferocious movements. As her mouth opens, I hear the strange sequence of sounds that comprise her invented language, while at the bottom of the video subtitles pass in Spanish. As the language is entirely unrecognizable, the subtitles become an intrinsic part of the video rather than an optional addition. From the beginning, I experience a sensation of strangeness, as the relationship between the text and La Fulminante’s embodiment and voice feel
dissonant.
Her sexual movements, the tone of her voice, and the format of the video allude to the possible meanings of her speech. However, surprisingly, the subtitles instead read as a
straightforward denunciation of male violence in the neoliberal system. This conflicting sensation makes me move my attention from the text to the body in an attempt to reconcile them. But the tension never dissipates, which allows the video to construct a complex dialogue between different tongues. My fragmented perception of the video triggers me to separate the different aspects of the performance that are simultaneously occurring. So, in this section of the chapter, I will address the way that the language invented by La Fulminante destabilizes conceptions about the voice and the body and after, the consequences of the use of this language in the construction of the character as well as in the presumed entanglement between territory and language.
As La Fulminante starts speaking, I become attentive to the sounds and the modulation of her voice. I recognize at first the seductive tone that accompanies the
movements of her hands over her body. As she continues, the arousing voice fades into a tone of anger. I try to catch patterns in the sound and rhythms to see if I can understand a bit of this unfamiliar language. I cannot recognize any of the sounds, but I note the repetition of some sounds and the shapes of her mouth. My connection to her language is created through
my attention to every aspect of her voice, which makes me consider its physical origin in her mouth and throat, and the muscle movements that constitute her speech. As I explained earlier Adriana Cavarero, in her book For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression (2005) reflects on the gendered understandings of the voice, which suggests the prioritization of certain types of vocal expression over others. In Cavarero’s theory, this gendered understanding of the voice has historically worked under the pretense that the creation of meaning exists primarily in the realm of masculine reasoning which makes speech also be separated between the semantic (as the masculine way of expression), and the vocal aspects of the voice (deemed to be more bodily and consequently feminine).
Ultimately, her objective is to consider the political importance of thinking about voice differently by recognizing the voice in its physical and material aspects. Cavarero explains: “logocentrism radically denies the voice a meaning of its own that is not always already destined to speech” (13). In this consideration of the voice, as Cavarero further explains, certain aspects of the voice work just as a reminder of the body, as leftovers, or as an excess of the voice beyond the meanings of speech (12). In the video, the voice embodies this strange division. While the speech of La Fulminante does produce a meaning, as it is signaled by the subtitles, it is a meaning that is inaccessible in its original form. The subtitles offer part of the meaning, but the uncertainty of the accuracy of the subtitles, and the
inaccessibility to knowing the language, makes it impossible to know the full meaning. Hence, the voice in the video calls for a mode of listening that unavoidably fixates on the sound itself. As a result, the speech of La Fulminante conveys the tensions between this drive to seek the meaning of the words—meanings that, to some degree, appear in the subtitles—
and the reverberating voice. The gesture can be thought of as keeping these “leftovers” of the voice, that is, not reducing the voice to the meanings in speech, or as a language of excess— an excess of the body. Thus, her speech is neither completely unintelligible nor only aimed at producing meaning, and in that sense, it cannot be localized as an expression of one gender. La Fulminante navigates the binary thinking by claiming to have a voice, but a voice that does not acquire value for its logocentric tradition.
The blurred distinction between the body and her languages also appears in the sounds of her speech blending with other sounds. In some parts of the video, the sound of the speech fuses with the sounds of her moans. However, the impossibility of distinguishing which sounds belong to her invented language, and which sounds are, in fact, external expressions of desire, dissolve this distinction between moan and language. The result is that the blurring of meaning and sound become even more blurred as the paralinguistic sounds of pleasure cannot be thought of as separate or external to speech. In this language, it is not necessary to make such a distinction. This lengua can be a version of what valeria flores imagines when she writes about the tongue as a genital organ, and then writes: “Desire lurks in the creases of its rough texture, the excrescences of an unbridled and amazonic erotism” (Deslenguada 28).8
In this quote, flores uses the polysemic meanings of lengua to describe a mode of writing with the textures and erotic connections of the tongue.
The language that she imagines is constituted by the bodily experience of a desire that takes over the meanings of language. These understandings of embodied language help me do a reading on the expressions of desire in the video, not only interrupt the flow of the speech but as taking it over, becoming the language itself. The unintelligibility of the invented language—that is the inability to define its limits as language, or what sound can be thought as words—make possible these overflows of bodily expressions that ultimately turn into that language. The sounds of pleasure, of licking, of the saliva in her mouth, are part of the lengua, and therefore do not exist as secondary modes of expression. The video does not dissolve only the sonic aspects of the voice but also brings in other oral expressions. The centrality of the mouth in the video allows me to see how the gestures and shapes of the mouth affect the sounds of the voice and the other way around. Throughout the video, the
8 From now on, I will reference what I have described as the invented language of La Fulminante as her lengua.
As I have reflected in the introduction of this thesis, the use of lengua is useful for me because it allows me to think about language in a way that is not separated from the body. In this video, the use of language is blurred with other expressions of the voice and the body. So, by calling it a lengua I also recognize that the use of this term works precisely to blur the two meanings of lengua: language and the organ of the tongue.
mouth of La Fulminante gets special attention as it becomes the place where her speech is materialized) and the center of the sexual acts she performs (see fig. 3). In many parts of the video, La Fulminante brings her face closer to the camera to show that her teeth are
threateningly clenched. Furthermore, her lips open and close with intense gestures. The movements of her mouth set the rhythm of her speech. For instance, when she quiets down to show her teeth or speaks slowly to make her mouth move exaggeratedly.
Moreover, when she licks the gun or puts it in her mouth, the sounds of her voice gets distorted and muffled. As a result, the gestures of the physical tongue assume an essential part of the speech. The pivotal role of the mouth in the performance connects the embodiment of La Fulminante to her lengua and the sound of the voice. The positioning of the mouth allows her to break the hierarchy between a mouth that moves to speak, and one that moves to lick—a hierarchy between what is considered to be an expression of masculine reasoning and the bodily manifestations of sexuality. The mouth of La Fulminante is not only powerful for its ability to speak and create meaning, but also for its potential to express sounds of pleasure, to bite, to shrug, and to suck. It is crucial to recognize here that these other
movements of her mouth take part in the construction of her invented lengua, as a radically embodied language.
I have discussed the way that the lengua that was invented by La Fulminante merges with her embodiment through other vocal sounds and mouth movements. However, this lengua does not only produce a different way of thinking about the body, but it also destabilizes the
presumed correlation between language and territory, and between language and national identity that Mignolo signaled (221). In Colombia, as in most Latin-American countries, the process of nation-building was constituted with recognition of Spanish as the official
language. For that reason, even though there are many other languages spoken in the same territory, the legitimized language of knowledge production and public politics is Spanish. That hierarchy of language, formalized during nation-state building, solidifies many of the colonial ideas around what types of language are most valuable.
In relation to this, Walter Mignolo has been thinking about the correlation between knowledge production and imperial languages. That is the historical use of language during colonization and the erasure of other forms of thinking that after became in the construction of state ideologies (218). Hence, he has claimed that turning to knowledge production in historically overlooked languages is an opportunity to question those imperial forces. He writes:
An “other tongue” is the necessary condition for “another thinking” and for the possibility of moving beyond the defense of national languages and national ideologies—both of which have been operating in complicity with imperial powers and imperial conflicts. (249)
Mignolo makes it clear in this quote that the defense of national languages has also operated as a way to reproduce the totalizing logic of erasing other forms of expressions, and
consequently of thinking. The use of Spanish as the language of the nation shows how nation-building cannot be understood as a process of complete emancipation. In the national states, the colonial classification of languages was kept in place but with a transformed meaning. The use of Spanish, as the national language, became a nationalist symbol of emancipation. Hence, in this quote, this “other thinking” represents the possibility of finding alternatives to the colonial production of knowledge that has produced violent hierarchical categories of identities, and that has been kept in place despite the triumphalist discourse of mestizaje9. In
9 Mestizaje is a word that, in the nation-building discourses of some countries in Latin America, has been used
to describe the mixed racial and cultural constitution of every citizen. It is claimed that everyone is mestizo, that is, a mix between indigenous and Spanish. However, this conception erases the ongoing racial struggles that continue to reproduce white power, as it works under the pretense that “we are all the same”. But, Latin America remains deeply racist and heteropatriarchal. I remember when I was a kid, there was a national census in which one of the questions was: “what race you consider yourself to be?” I, of course, looked to my parents expecting instructions on how to answer. They undoubtedly responded, “mestiza, we are all mestizos”. This early introduction to racial classifications, and the erasure of more deep, complicated, racial relations are the ones that have made it so difficult to have conversations of privilege, and of our racial identities.
the next chapter, I will more closely address the nation-state building emancipatory
discourses and how they continue to replicate colonial forms of power in the reproduction of the Independence hero-figures.
This line of thinking brings attention to the ongoing language struggles in Latin America. Furthermore, it helps to clarify that, although Spanish has been claimed to be a national sign of Independence, its use as the only legitimized language of knowledge
production continues the cycle of colonial violence. In the video, the use of this other lengua makes it apparent that there are other possibilities of producing knowledge. That is, the kind of “other knowledge” that is produced here is one that imagines the body, language and their limits in totally transgressive ways. This does not mean that Spanish is wholly eradicated in the video, but in the performance, it does not appear as the only possible language.
Furthermore, the cohabiting of the two languages disrupts the narrative of Spanish as the only language of the territory and as the prescribed language of emancipation.
What also seems to be important in the prominence of this “other language” is that its use does not correspond with the preservation of nationalism—a defense of territory—but rather with a sense of individuality. That is, it does not work based on the logic of
geographical separations of territories and languages. Hence, the lengua resists this kind of group identification or classification. This is important when noticing that the global politics of what Mignolo calls the “monolithic purity of national languages”, which often neglect the complex tensions of language hierarchies in a territory (243). As a result, the invented lengua of La Fulminante can avoid any attempt of ownership, claims of mastery, or control using the rules of grammar. These forms of control of a language expressed in the policing of the ways it is used and spoken are entrenched in the racist and imperial classifications, as they have been used to silence people. So, the use of this lengua is a form of expression that ultimately dismantles the monolingual construction of national identity. To continue my analysis of the politics of language that are at play in the video, I will turn my attention to the subtitles, first, to analyze their confrontational discourse and how that interacts with the embodied language.
Financial Orgasm
In the last section, I explored how the embodied lengua of La Fulminante re-imagines the limits of speech and the territorial and hierarchical relationships of language. Now, I will analyze the way the subtitles interrupt my perception of the video and how that interruption adds another element to the configuration of the tongue. Usually, videos employ subtitles as
an extra layer placed in front of a video and produced by an external translator to make the content available to other audiences. Here, as La Fulminante is the only person that speaks her language, the subtitles become an intrinsic part of the video. Thus, I will first analyze the content of the subtitles, and then the translated relationship they have with the invented lengua.
While the body of La Fulminante is moving provocatively and her voice expresses both anger and sexuality, the subtitles confront the viewer with the accusation of participating in a system in which the lives and deaths of men are exploited for the accumulation of
money. The first phrase that appears in the subtitles is: “In the savage capitalism, it is usually difficult to be a man and having to embrace a suicidal behavior to prove it.”10 The tone of the text and the direct acknowledgment of masculinity in capitalism feels discordant. Having these two simultaneous registers—voice and subtitles—at play throughout the video changes my reading of her body and contributes to making the video a bordered space. In this section, I will discuss how the metaphors and the tone of the subtitles critique the objectification of the racialized female body in pornography as the underlying discourse that also creates the violent dynamics of Gore Capitalism.
The character of La Fulminante, as an amplified version of a pornographic body, exposes the violence of the commodification of Latin American women. Granados uses her body to expose the colonial characterization of racialized women, which has been characterized as aggressive, hypersexualized, and wild. The strength of her voice and the movements of her body materialize those historical constructions. However, the subtitles open the opportunity to transgress positions that have been historically silenced. In the video, La Fulminante is not the passive subject of the pornographic gaze, as she places her face directly in front of the camera and addresses the viewer directly with the subtitles. The subtitle text makes La Fulminante’s mode of expression resonate on multiple registers. Although seemingly
10 As part of my methodology of analysis of the video, I made a translation of the text based on the subtitles of
the video. On the same webpage where the video is displayed there is a link to a transcription of the subtitles in Spanish. In this transcription, the subtitles are presented as a complete text. The exercise of translating the subtitles as one fluid block of written material helped me recognize that the presentation of the subtitles in separate parts also interferes with the way I see the video. While I was translating, I started to imagine how I could see traces of La Fulminante’s translation in the transcription—the stylistic marks of her language. I imagine her working through the translation and thinking about how to maintain her voice in the text. Being unable to learn her language leads me to an almost compulsive position of speculation. I find myself
wondering what is from the original text and what is from the translation. I also imagine in my own translation from Spanish to English that there is also an element of that invented language. My own act of translation carries this mysterious trace of her language, but also a trace of Spanish as it is filtered through my subjectivity, causing my English translation to result in a sort of contaminated English—bordered, ghostly.
discordant, this allows her to configure her intricate bordered position without eliminating the contradictions and tensions present in colonial history and Colombia’s sociopolitical context. When La Fulminante speaks in her language, her face moves closer to and away from the camera, but always speaking directly to it. The subtitles, written in second person, reinforce that confrontational attitude. As a result, every viewer plays the role of the man consuming a pornographic video. In my own experience, although I can recognize that I do not identify with this category of the spectator, playing this role forces me to confront my own position of viewership. The sensation that unfolds is one of a split-position: on the one hand, the second-person perspective of the subtitles forces me to assume the position that La Fulminante is critiquing—the position of the man enjoying the image for sexual pleasure; on the other hand, the experience removes me from my own inherent position and acknowledges that there is a gap in the role of the viewer—as if I am seeing La Fulminante interact with someone who is not there. As a result, the position of the viewer is destabilized and split. Hence, the position of the viewer is also subject to the tension of always inhabiting the two roles: the one of consumption, and the one of being consumed.
La Fulminante employs a condescending tone that feels like a mix of pity and a scolding in order to establish the confrontational nature of the video subtitles. For example, the
subtitles address the viewer with words like “little man” and after, “The fault is not yours. But it is your responsibility to recover”. The tone of the subtitles and the overall critique they make, connecting the construction of masculinity with the involvement with deadly violence, is a reversal of the “viewing” dynamics in pornography. The subtitles are phrased as a
reading of the viewer as they analyze the construction of masculinity to point to its contradictions. In this interaction, the consumption of the body is no longer a one-way relationship because, simultaneously, La Fulminante assesses the masculine subjectivity involved in the engagement between viewer and performer. As a result, there is a form of “watching back” that exists not only in the viewer’s gaze but also in an elaborate analysis of how masculinity is constructed. This viewing back does not eliminate the experience of consumption of the body in the screen, but it makes it twofold—that is, situating the viewer in the constant cycle of watching the sexual performance of a racialized women and being analyzed by the person in the other side of the screen.
The analysis of masculinity, for instance, is executed when the subtitles read: “They implant in some kids a conception of the potent male, powerful, indolent, strong, willing to
do anything for money.” However, further on, the subtitles unmask masculinity with a critique that uses these descriptions: “dreams of power,” “weak will,” “blindly obedient,” “submissive to the power that arms give,” “conformist.” The ideas under which masculinity is constructed are diverted. The masculinity of these violent men seems to conceal the same position that is often used to characterize women—that of weakness and submissiveness. In other words, the subtitles expose the construction of masculinity as a sort of manipulation to use men in the violent activities hidden within the neoliberal system that Sayak Valencia, in her theory of Gore Capitalism, has argued is sustained in the “desires of consumption, self-affirmation, and empowerment” (53). That is, it is the desire to consume what makes these men willing to use and be used by other men in the mechanization of bodies and death. Manly self-affirmation through violence sustains the global criminal economic system that keeps power in the market of first-world countries.
That complicity of these man in the system that ultimately uses them to kill each other, is directly named in the subtitles: “You follow the oppressors and shoot the bullets, willing to obey the order of it does not matter who, your damn blind obedience turns you into an accomplice of our oppressor.” Moreover, further on, they read: “The erection of capitalism pumps hot blood feeding from the rivers of death and many swallow it submissive to the power of arms.” These phrases connect the sexual satisfaction of the consumption of female bodies with the denunciation of taking part in the violent regime of Gore Capitalism. The sexual metaphors connect the feelings of empowerment through arousal with the ones from the uses of arms. This connection can be further considered with the reflections of Maria Lugones on what she calls the Colonial/Modern Gender System, which I referred to in the introduction of the thesis. In her depiction of western constructions of gender in colonial times, Lugones argues that some colonized men acted as collaborators to the gender
imposition: “The white colonizer constructed a powerful inside force as colonized men were co-opted into patriarchal roles” (200). Lugones makes this argument to support her position of thinking of gender as one of the forms of colonial domination. Although Lugones is talking in historical terms, this collaboration seems significant in its relationship with power in Latin American contexts. Furthermore, she claims that looking at these historical moments might serve to understand some contemporary gender dynamics in which racialized men do not behave as allies to racialized women who decry gender violence. In this sense, these reflections help to demonstrate that any form of gender violence is complicit in the colonial system.
