the Female Body GOVERNING

9
Disciplining the Ethnic Body
Latinidad, Hybridized Bodies
and Transnational Identities
ISABEL MOLINA GUZMÁN & ANGHARAD N. VALDIVIA
University of Illinois
In recent years, as the number of Latina and Latinos living in the
United States have increased, Latinidad—the cultural state and process
of being, becoming, or appearing Latina or Latino—has become not
only a widely culturally intelligible identity but also a culturally desirable
ethnicity, style, and corporeal practice. Recently and historically, the
construction and transformation of Latinidad has been produced and
mobilized primarily, though not exclusively, through mass mediated
discourse and other modes of public culture. This chapter examines the
popular culture narratives and symbolic strategies surrounding the signifi
cation of Latina bodies against the background of contemporary and
public discourses about Latinas to interrogate the tensions of policing
and producing racialized and gendered bodies. In particular, we focus
on Latina women with widely circulated media representations and
analyze these popular narratives by engaging with Foucault’s concept
of normalization as an instrument of power and discipline to theorize
through the tension between racial and ethnic hybridity/multiplicity and
racial and ethnic homogenization/fragmentation. Given the way mass
communication is both informative and informed by the contemporary
U.S. discursive formation about race, ethnicity, gender, and identity, we
conclude by contextualizing our analysis within the terrain of public
talk about Latina health and bodies.
Decades of research on ethnic, racial, and feminist studies demonstrate
that active mediation and production of racialized and ethnicized
bodies are traversed by gendered power relations. In other words,
the sign of “woman” often functions as a stand-in for objects and
concepts ranging from nation to beauty to sexuality, and in contexts
that often relegate feminized images, bodies, and the objects to which
206