Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Of Beasts and Beauty: Gender, Race, and Identity in Colombia

2016; Duke University Press; Volume: 96; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-3678045

1527-1900

Marcia Ochoa,

Advertising and Communication Studies

This history of Colombian beauty and beauty pageants extends its analysis beyond the contemporary televised form of the pageant to consider the historical basis of its morphology. Michael Edward Stanfield argues that Colombian beauty serves an ameliorating purpose alongside a masculine, bestial violence. Feminine beauty develops in a Colombia racked with violence from its inception, always yearning to see itself otherwise. Stanfield draws primarily from nineteenth-century travelers' accounts and newspaper and magazine coverage, particularly publications aimed at a feminine audience. Stanfield provides a helpful resource for researchers looking to familiarize themselves with this aspect of Colombian print culture of the last 150 years.Stanfield proposes a structural basis for the morphology of beauty culture in Colombia, which he argues waxes and wanes with the intensification of conflict: as “the beast” rears its ugly head, Colombians seek refuge in beauty as an aesthetic and moral project. Feminine beauty, he argues, exists in tension between tradition, defined as machista and patriarchal, and modernity, which signifies “individualism, merit, and expanding freedoms” for women (p. 81). Tradition extols feminine beauty as morally superior to masculine forms of power, while modernity figures the exhibition of beauty as a taking off of the yoke of masculine constraint over feminine mobility and sexuality. These two binaries, beauty/beast and tradition/modernity, mark Stanfield's analysis throughout and unfortunately limit its scope, flattening the representation of beauty, race, and nation in a country whose beauty culture is bristling with creativity, aspiration, and contradiction. The author demonstrates very little engagement with contemporary Colombian scholars considering similar questions.Stanfield's account follows a fairly conventional periodization: the early national period (chapter 2), the turn of the twentieth century (chapter 3), the flapper era (chapter 4), the rise of the Liberal government (chapter 5), the era of intense violence and genocide known as La Violencia (chapter 6), the rise of counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s (chapters 7 and 8), and, finally, the narco era (chapter 9). This periodization is not based in shifts in beauty in Colombia; it instead filters beauty from the vantage of “the beast” in order to argue that the two are linked. Here, Stanfield misses an important opportunity to reconsider this masculinist periodization centered on the global North in light of the kind of evidence that only Colombian beauty culture can provide. The result is, at times, a painfully forced and anecdotal review of individual articles presented chronologically to reinforce the main argument.This brings me to a methodological point regarding Stanfield's use of print sources to develop the argument. Although the way that Stanfield constructs his claims hints at content analysis, his presentation of evidence is incidental, not thematic. He treats each article that he encounters as an individual piece of evidence, rather than thematizing and looking for patterns in representation (see pp. 142–43 for an example). It's this approach that gives the analysis its anecdotal tone. From my perspective as an ethnographer of media, the methodology lacks a systematic analysis of discourse, an account of the cultural and symbolic logics in which the primary sources signify and circulate.One example of this occurs in chapter 5, in which the author presents the emergence of the “Miss Colombia” pageant beginning in 1932. Though it might seem to be splitting hairs, it's important to note that at this time the pageant was called “Señorita” and not “Miss” Colombia; this differs from the practice in Venezuela, which adopted the English title around this time. By repeatedly referring to the pageant as Miss Colombia, Stanfield misses an important element of the creation of a national queen in the emergence of international cultural and commercial circuits. Later chapters refer to the pageant by the correct name, but the representation in this chapter is confusing.Of Beasts and Beauty promises to enlighten on the topic of race and Colombian national identity. This is an important area of research, as racialized disparities are prevalent in Colombian society, as they are in other societies based on the expropriation of land from indigenous populations and the enslavement of Afro-descendant people to benefit Euro-descendant colonists and European nations throughout the Americas. However, I was surprised to find little discussion of race. Stanfield primarily names race when discussing black or darker-skinned candidates, missing the opportunity to consider the pageant's role in the production of whiteness in the national imaginary. Though he does discuss the tendency in much of the history of beauty queens toward elevating the nobility of Spanish descent, a consideration of how Colombian beauty is rendered as white does not appear. Stanfield promisingly mentions the Reinado de la Caña del Azúcar in Cali, Cauca Valley, as a mechanism for masking the black labor of the sugar industry (p. 136), but he doesn't develop the point further.In sum, while Of Beasts and Beauty provides some valuable resources for studying feminine popular culture in Colombia, it falls short in terms of analytical development and complexity.