the Female Body GOVERNING

Disciplining the Ethnic Body 207
they are connected, to less powerful positions than their masculinized
counterparts. As a result, the body that becomes both racialized and
feminized is the product of a double-edged construction of “otherness.”
For example, if Latino bodies can be said to be generally devalued and
feminized, then Latina bodies are doubly displaced in that they fall
beyond the margins of both Latino culture generally, and the mainstream
of femininity and beauty. Additionally, the culturally powerful discourses
of border crossing contamination and excessive sexual reproduction
singles out Latina bodies as symbolically impure and dangerous bodies
requiring state-sanctioned inspections and medical interventions. This
is the contemporary context for the study of gender and Latinidad in
the United States and in the many places across the globe where U.S.produced
cultural products circulate.
This chapter draws on feminist media theories and Latina and Latino
Studies to explore recent writing surrounding the representational
politics of hybridized bodies and transnational identities. Through
an exploration of the politics of Latinidad the chapter investigates
the dual processes of producing and policing the Latina body and
alternative forms of corporeal beauty. Furthermore, we investigate how
these public and spectacularized bodies are traversed and disciplined
by homogenizing European narratives of origin and binary racialized
prescriptions of the body, such as those that surround Latina
migration, immigration, and health. At the same time, the chapter
explores how the hybridized body (i.e., the Latina body) characterized
through discourses of multiplicity connects to broader transformative
notions of transnational bodies and identities to put these European and
racialized narratives into question and to push beyond them. Drawing
on Shohat’s and Stam’s (1994) notion of “ethnicities in relation,” this
chapter explores the relational construction of gender, nation, race, and
class. At the same time, the chapter engages the Foucauldian (1979)
concept of “normalization” as an instrument of power and discipline to
theorize the contemporary tensions between hybridity/multiplicity and
homogenization/fragmentation to address the useful formation of new
and productively globalized corporeal practices toward the manufacture
of alternative embodiments and identities.
Contextualizing Latinidad in U.S. Public Culture
Recent historical shifts, including global economic transformations,
geographical migrations and diasporas, and newly forming global
identities have brought previously minoritized cultures to the foreground.
In particular, demographic and cultural changes in racial and