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Myra Mendible (ed.)
University of Texas Press, Austin, TX , USA, 2007 , paperback , 323pp ., $24.95 ,
ISBN: 978-0292714939
From Bananas to Buttocks builds on the work of cinema, media, performance, and popular culture scholars (some of whom have contributed essays to this tome) to further the "fertile" mining of representations of the Latina body. As the title of the book suggests, the essays presented are situated within a genealogy of scholarship demarcated by the twin goal posts of tropicalization, for which Carmen Miranda's star text provides the most popular case study, and bodily excess, centered on the study of the hyper-sexualized Jennifer Lopez. Extending Judith Butler's notion of performativity to posit Latinidad as "building on the assumption that ethnic groups are constituted through various classificatory, discursive acts and corporeal exchanges" (3) along with the feminist assertion that "woman" is a social construction, the stated goal of this collection of essays is one of recovering agency, "of affirming the potential for Latina/o self-fashioning and solidarity" (4). As a collection, these essays show how the spectacular presence of Latina bodies simultaneously challenges dominant aesthetics while problematically reifying race, gender, and class hierarchies.
The introduction by Mendible aptly outlines the role of the gendered body in nation building, situating allegorized Latinas and Latin American women as convenient representational tropes in oppositional constructions of "America" and "Americans." Given the high visibility of star personas from classical and contemporary cinema, owing to the astounding circulation of US media, dedicating the first two-thirds of...