the Female Body GOVERNING

Disciplining the Ethnic Body 223
desired by the bodies of racialized Others. Consequently, a relationship
between a White male body and a female body of color, such as Latinas,
is always consensual because under this particular political economy of
sexuality a woman of color would desire a White man. However, a White
woman cannot desire the racialized Other, so these relationships are
nearly always portrayed as sexually violent and nonconsensual. Within
this discursive formation, Latino men do not generally interact sexually
with Anglo women unless it is to threaten or enact forced sexual violence
or rape, as in the Pancho Villa fi lms. This common representational
practice affi rms the social order by disciplining Latina bodies as a
symbolic site through which culture is biologically and symbolically
negotiated, contested, opposed, and eventually homogenized through
global commodifi cation (Beltrán, 2002; Guzmán, 2005).
Moreover and signifi cantly in relation to Frida Kahlo—narratives of
authenticity and Latinidad more often than not hark back to the mother
continent, to Latin America. As such, U.S. Latina and Latinos are never
quite authentic, anywhere, because the boundaries of the body are
policed by multiple cultures. Thus Frida Kahlo functions as a powerful
signifi er of identity because she is often articulated within the narrative of
“The Motherland.” Within the narrative of the motherland, Eurocentric
discourses of authenticity, which erase indigenous, African, and other
non-White populations, hark back to Spain, a place often constructed as
the site of whiteness despite its history of African Moorish occupation.
Not coincidentally, Penélope Cruz is identifi ed in surveys of U.S. Latina
and Latinos as more Latina, more authentic, and more beautiful than
either Hayek or Lopez. Somewhat oppositionally, compared to Lopez
whose body is articulated as raw natural energy, Cruz is linked to civility
and sophistication (Valdivia, 2007). These narratives of authenticity
and origin privilege a mythical nostalgic racially pure Spain that, in a
discursively productive manner, proves to be untenable and like other
discourses of purity produces hierarchies of essentialist fragmentation.
Governing Racial-Otherness in Popular Culture
Despite their ability to destabilize racial categories, Latina bodies are
traversed, mobilized, and eventually normalized by the interconnected
discourse of fear and desire. At the level of fear and disciplinarity, the
imagined hypersexuality and hyperfertility of Latina (not Latino) bodies
function as a threat to racially grounded defi nitions of national identity.
At the level of desire and surveillance, Latina bodies are purveyed and
sought as the sexually profi cient exotic other. Furthermore, Acosta and
Kreshel (2002) stress the contradictory nature of this racialized and