Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

230 reframing latin america
it fortifi es the patriarchal and imperialist approach. 1 In the section of her
study called “Ten Perverse Propositions on Desire in Disney,” Burton asserts
that in an effort to present Latin America as a desirable place—through
beautifully packaged presents that Donald receives from his cousins, parrot
Joe Carioca and Panchito the rooster—the fi lmmakers succeed only in offering
hegemony in exchange for the gifts of limitless desire for a beautiful
land and beautiful ladies. Latin America is cast as female spectacle to serve
and entertain the male United States, which is cast as the inept, nonthreatening
Donald Duck.
Sexual props and images abound throughout. Joe Carioca’s umbrella and
cigar are transformed into two pistols, matching Panchito the Rooster’s own
pair. A dancing cowgirl is suddenly surrounded by phallic cacti and cracking
whips. Interspersed among disembodied, kissing lips, a fl accid elephant
trunk becomes erect and splashes water in Donald’s face, animated fl owers
swallow and dizzy him, and a telescope lengthens and stiffens in Donald’s
hands as he ogles bathing beauties on Acapulco beach.
Even if we assume, as Burton does, that the makers of the fi lm had no
intention of infusing an animated fi lm about Latin America with images of
passion considered essential to this “other” culture, the sexual innuendo
that underscores Donald’s relationship with Latin America reveals the
“‘collective unconscious’ of that culture-industry-cum-empire known as
Walt Disney Productions.” 2 Thus, regardless of the intentions of the fi lmmakers
to imagine a new and improved version of hemispheric relations,
the meaning created by the movie presents no challenge to former narratives.
Instead, the fi lm reinforces the status of the United States as hegemonic
center while maintaining Latin America at the margins, all within a
discursive community of neo-empire.
Julianne Burton, “Don (Juanito) Duck and the
Imperial Patriarchal Discourse” 3
Ten Perverse Propositions on Desire in Disney
First Proposition: Latin America as a Wartime Toontown In
Roger Rabbit, Toontown is a zone of marginality inhabited by the vulnerable
and the victimized, literally “an/other world”/“an/Other’s world” to
be entered only with wariness and dread and seldom escaped intact. For the
writers and animators of The Three Caballeros, Latin America is the 1940s
equivalent of “Toontown,” the seductive-repulsive zone of spectacular excess
and excessive spectacle. In the sections depicting Brazil and Mexico,
reason gives way to passion, order to disorder and incoherence, the logic