Artigo Acesso aberto Revisado por pares

Unmasking Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Nicaraguan Festival ‐ by Borland, Katherine

2009; Wiley; Volume: 28; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1470-9856.2009.00320_10.x

ISSN

1470-9856

Autores

Julie Cupples,

Tópico(s)

Media, Gender, and Advertising

Resumo

Borland, Katherine ( 2006 ) Unmasking Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Nicaraguan Festival , University of Arizona Press ( Tucson, AZ ), xi + 223 pp. £22.84 hbk . This book draws on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the department of Masaya, the official capital of Nicaraguan folklore. It explores three specific folkloric practices. The first is the carnivalesque torovenado masquerades, the second is the transvestite Marimba Negras dances and the third the annual wagon pilgrimage from Masaya to Popuyapua in Rivas. The book covers a great deal of terrain in its eight chapters. Folklore is, as Katherine Borland understands it, ordinary people's cultural production. It is a cultural production that is forged through its intersection with a variety of subject positions and through the performance of a range of gender, sexual, class, national and political identities. Masayans clearly see themselves as the official guardians of national traditions. These traditions are, however, also used to contest and resist nationalist imaginaries. Indeed, one of the key strengths of the book is the way the author captures the fluidity and malleability of these cultural practices and their adaptation to the current political moment. For example, she describes how during the 2001 electoral campaign, the torovenado masqueraders took on the presidential candidates, creating caricatures of Arnoldo Alemán's corruption and of Daniel Ortega's obsession with becoming president despite allegations of sexual assault against him. The masqueraders also draw on global political events or borrow from folkloric practices in other parts of the world when it suits their political or artistic purposes. These cultural practices are not therefore to be understood as local exotic curiosities, as they intersect with broader political themes and processes at a number of scales. In this respect, this book provides a refreshing challenge to the views often espoused by cultural nationalists who see borrowing, hybridity and fluidity as a threat to national authenticity and thus charge the popular classes with the confining role of preserving rather than (re)inventing traditions. Drawing on theories of performance and performativity, Borland is able to get to grips with the ways in which traditions in both organised and spontaneous ways are reworked rather than preserved. The author's take on popular cultural enactments in Masaya is both empirically rich and theoretically nuanced. While she recognises the considerable potential for oppositional politics that resides in these practices, she never takes this potential for granted and outlines how the practices can also be the site of conservative impulses as well as progressive ones. The dance of Las Negras, an all male dance that involves transvestism and the performance by men of feminine elegance, seems on the surface to rework dominant notions of gender and sexuality and is being partially reinscribed as a gay performance. She also points out, however, that this dance also works to exclude the participation of women and reproduce men's dominant position in public performance and consequently, on one level, reinforces rather than challenges conservative social agendas. The pilgrimage to Popuyapua on the other hand, despite its overt religiosity, is a site in which women can express religious devotion and assert a degree of freedom and independence. Other cultural enactments discussed also clearly function as important markers of class difference and become subject to elitism and cultural conservatism. Borland discusses at length the festival of the Ahuizotes, a night-time masquerade of spooks, which emerged in the indigenous-identified community of Monimbó as an alternative festival to the torovenados. While this festival avoided politically complex issues such as politics, religion and sexuality, it came under criticism from Managua-based intellectuals who viewed it as a foreign-influenced festival and an invasion of Halloween. By questioning the authenticity of the Ahuizotes, nationalist intellectuals maintain their class distinction and attempt to contain the hybridised cultural expression of the popular classes. These tensions emerge from the diverse cultural functions of the festivals themselves, which are simultaneously sites of indigenous and popular resistance and sites for the assertion of national identity. It is in the assertion of national identity that both class and the racial dynamics of mestizaje and indigeneity come into play. One example of this is the way in which classed notions of mestizaje are drawn upon to frame the professionalisation of indigenous dances in terms of ‘improving’ on an indigenous past. Festivals, despite their oppositional potential, are therefore also used for the reassertion of social hierarchy. The empirical material used in this book is presented in an engaged and sensitive way. It is anchored in a range of apt theoretical frameworks and Borland makes good use for example of Butler's theory of performativity, Scott's concept of ‘weapons of the weak’ and García Canclini's understandings of cultural production within the constraints and possibilities of capitalism to frame and extend this empirical material. This book illuminates an important area of Nicaraguan cultural politics on which very little had been published to date. Julie Cupples a

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