the Female Body GOVERNING

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isabel molina guzmán & angharad n. valdivia
network aired a Jennifer Lopez vs. Dolly Parton match with J-Lo’s butt
battling against Dolly’s breasts. Lopez’s buttocks function within a system
of differentiation, a system predicated on and traversed by racialized
and gendered difference. At the same time, this difference is classifi ed
as fascinating yet “abnormal” and “irregular.”
As such, the objectifi cation of Lopez’s body exists in relation to a
longer history of technologies of the body that have scrutinized, judged,
and disciplined the bodies of racialized Others. Beginning with the
medical discourse surrounding the Hottentot Venus, the bodies of
women of color—specifi cally their genitals and buttocks—are excessively
sexualized, exoticized, and pathologized (Gilman, 1985). Like
other U.S. constructions of the exotic, this cultural construction of the
Latina focuses primarily on the lower body (Beltrán, 2002; Desmond,
1997; Guzmán & Valdivia, 2004), a corporeal site with great cultural
overdeterminations: Within the Eurocentric mind/body dualism, culture
is associated with the higher functions of the mind/brain, and it is
separated and differentiated from the physiology and movement of
the lower body, including hips, legs, sexual reproductive organs, and
orifi ces of excrement and waste. Such a taxonomy and associations of
upper and lower bodily strata contribute to discourses of dominant and
nondominant peoples respectively, and actively reconstitute systems of
differentiation and separation: high/low, mind/body, culture/nature,
Anglo/Latina, human/animal, civilized/primitive, control/chaos. Thus,
Lopez and her lower body remain commodifi ed, exoticized, and sexualized
as part of the ambivalent desire for the Other, and, as such, she
reproduces classifi cations and typologies that fragment Latinas into
exotic and sexual and “Others.” Simultaneously she is located beyond
whiteness but short of blackness ultimately reinscribing the unacceptability
of the Black corporeal particularity.
Examples of such sexualizations include Lopez’s roles in the fi lm
noirs Blood and Wine (1996) and Oliver Stone’s U-Turn (1997). In both of
these fi lms, Lopez’s body and sexuality is represented in animalistic and
primitive terms that are irresistibly dangerous to the Anglo American
males in their lives. Lopez’s body is cinematically sliced into objectifi ed
parts and sexually consumed by the male protagonists and the cinematic
spectator. For example, in U-Turn, Lopez’s character Grace McKenna,
a half-Anglo/half-Navajo woman, is explicitly fetishized through visual
montages of her eyes, lips, and breasts linking her highly sexualized
body to the hot, dry Arizona desert/nature. Indeed, the narrative falsely
climaxes in the fi nal sex scene, when Grace, with the fresh blood of
her own body and that of murdered father/husband, has sex with her
accomplice in front of the dead body and is visually made to resemble her