Introduction
The objective of this article is to analyze the production of the subject Woman by reviewing some practices, discourses, and technologies promoted by the state, the church, and elites. It is important to emphasize that in most research about women or femininity, female subjectivity appears tightly linked to sexual difference. However, in this work I want to show that the notion of Woman is co-determined by race and class. The experience characteristic of such representation was possible only for a small group of white and bourgeois women. Others—Indian, black, and mestiza “women”Footnote 3 —could hardly account for a social experience comparable to the Western narrative about woman. Nevertheless, processes of homogenization allow these others to be classified and disciplined according to the gender norm, yet without altering the prejudices and inequalities produced by the prevailing racist and classist system, which implies the production of other female subjectivities, of other “women.”
The colonial/modern gender system, imposed in the American colonies in the fifteenth century, was based on the idea of the humanity of white people and on the nonhumanity of black and indigenous people, considered working animals. Gender is an expression of the human, therefore, the condition of man and woman was recognizable only among white people. That is, only these people lived social experiences based on a sex/gender division that differentiated tasks, qualities, roles, times, and spaces of action. This division associated only white men with reason and strength, and white women with emotion and frailty. These representations constituted at the same time the separation between the public sphere and private sphere, as well as the sexual division of labor, where men ruled in business and women at home.
The colonial/modern gender system produces and imposes on the colonized peoples, at the same time and without dissociation, an epistemic regime of hierarchical, dichotomous differentiation that initially and fundamentally distinguishes between the human and the nonhuman, and from which race–gender classification categories would emerge. These categories would be co-constitutive of the modern colonial episteme and cannot be thought outside of this episteme or separately from each other. This is so because, contrary to what classical feminism has maintained, the gender category corresponds only to humans, that is, beings of reason of white European descent. For the colonial gaze, the populations found in colonized lands did not reproduce an order of reason; they were rather part of a natural order, a previous stage in the evolution of species. (Espinosa Reference Espinosa Miñoso2016; my translation)
For enslaved black and indigenous people, difference based on sexual organs (sexual dimorphism), that is, males and females, introduced by colonizers, did not operate in the same way as among white-criollo society in matters such as social relationships, emotions, or the sexual division of labor. The meanings inscribed on the anatomy of nonwhite bodies were conceived, basically, from the dynamics of unlimited economic exploitation and maximum benefit for the colonizer. The colonial system of exploitation did not produce black men or “women” or indigenous men or “women.”
In the case of indigenous peoples, the process of colonization undermined previous forms of social organization and relations between the people who made up these communities. Evangelization and the creation of institutions such as the encomienda Footnote 4 sought to teach Indians how to be good Christians, to behave according to the ideals of woman and man that the sex/gender organization of the West indicated. However, reviewing some sections of the Burgos laws of 1512, whose aim was to improve the treatment of Indians, it can be seen that the provisions directed at Indian “women” focused on regulating economic exploitation, which included pointing out the tasks they had to carry out, without being mediated by any idea associated with femininity. Even questions of the moral order, such as indoctrination, appeared inseparable from economic activities.
Single Indian women, who had to remain under the authority of their parents, were obliged to work with them, or with third parties, through an employment contract with their parents. Those who, for whatever reasons, did not have parents, had to be constrained to live together, be indoctrinated, and forced to work on farms in exchange for a wage. (Pizarro Reference Pizarro Zelaya2013, 45; my translation)
For every five months of work they should be granted forty days of rest, to be used to intensify their catechesis; women, except those who were more than four months pregnant, should also be taken to the mines. (de Icaza Reference de Icaza Dufour1987, 25; my translation)
During the processes of capture and enslavement, African people were seen and treated as game animals, cargo/merchandise on a ship, and beasts of labor on the plantation, in the mine, or on the hacienda. The experience of the slave trade, in which they were merchandise, was not marked by the idea of the gendered black body but by the body as a unit of measurement. As Hortense Spillers notes:
We might say that the slave ship, its crew, and its human-as-cargo stand for a wild and unclaimed richness of possibility that is not interrupted, not “counted”/“accounted,” or differentiated, until its movement gains the land thousands of miles away from the point of departure. Under these conditions, one is neither female, nor male, as both subjects are taken into “account” as quantities. The female in “Middle Passage,” as the apparently smaller physical mass, occupies “less room” in a directly translatable money economy. But she is, nevertheless, quantifiable by the same rules of accounting as her male counterpart. (Spillers Reference Spillers1987, 72)
The organization of work on the plantation, the hacienda, or in the mine does not lead us to suppose that gender was a primordial element structuring relations between masters and slaves.Footnote 5 As Angela Davis notes:
The slave system defined Black people as chattel. Since women, no less than men, were viewed as profitable labor-units, they might as well have been genderless as far as the slaveholders were concerned. In the words of one scholar, “the slave woman was first a full-time worker for her owner, and only incidentally a wife, mother and homemaker.” (Davis Reference Davis1983, 9)
For Argentine philosopher María Lugones, talking about black or Indian women is nonsensical because:
If in the modern, Eurocentered, capitalist, colonial gender system, on the one hand the category “woman” signifies something ideologically, it points to a fragile person, sexually contained, relegated to the domestic, without reason and without a public role, and on the other, the racial—and therefore racist—classification “black” or “Indian” ideologically points to primitive beings in every sense, not really human, capable of great violence, sexually uncontrolled, with enormous capacity and resistance for physical work, What does “Indian woman,” “black woman” mean? There are no Indian or black women. The phrase “Indian woman” is a contradiction. (Lugones Reference Lugones2012, 133; my translation)
According to Lugones, for the colonial/modern gender system, the only women who existed were white and bourgeois because they were the only people whose social experience was structured by the normative ideal of female gender proposed by the West. However, despite the obvious contradiction, there was talk of black “women” or indigenous “women.” Lugones explains this as the product of an operation of meaning that would lead to the production of similes or versions of women. This operation of meaning would have two moments, in the first, the colonizers used the word “woman” to refer to Indians and black females based on shared bodily attributes, without deploying engendering technologies. In the second, similes or versions of women are produced, which are exposed to gender technologiesFootnote 6 interwoven with subordinate race and class positions. It is this interweaving that is going to give rise to sex/gender experiences through which these similes of women are subject to the prejudices connected with being a woman, but none of the privileges.
Women racialized as inferior were turned from animals into various modified versions of “women” as it fit the processes of global, Eurocentered capitalism . . . there was no extension of the status of white women to colonized women even when they were turned into similes of bourgeois white women. Colonized females got the inferior status of gendering as women, without any of the privileges accompanying that status for white bourgeois women. (Lugones Reference Lugones2007, 203)
With the founding of the new Latin American nations in the nineteenth century, and their abolition of slavery and steadfast appropriation of the humanistic values of the French Revolution, including the proclamation of equality for all men, one might have thought that the dichotomy between humans and nonhumans would have seen its end. However, the colonial forms of the hierarchical organization of social life persisted, and with them racism. White-criollos, the new ruling class, kept for themselves all the economic and political privileges of the colonizers, while the situation of Indian peoples and black communities continued to be precarious, although covered with certain contradictory legal paraphernalia that declared them citizens and barbarians at the same time. For example, in Colombia, the Constitution of 1821 granted citizenship to Indians, and Law 89 of 1890, in force through 2017, called them barbarians. In the case of enslaved black people, the Constitution of 1821 established that their freedom would be granted gradually. However, actual recognition of their freedom did not occur until 1851, due to the many obstacles that were put in the way. The only people with full rights—the citizens, the humans—continued to be the white-criollos, property owners and educated, who complied with the norms of duty of the new nation, because these norms were modeled upon their own image and likeness. Anyone other than white-criollos remained incomplete/partial human subjects and citizens, for whom the state prescribed a variety of descriptions and definitions, presenting them as the most deficient versions of a model embodied in superior form.
Zandra Pedraza explains this landscape in Colombia and Latin America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a modern biopolitical regime:
With this I emphasize that the knowledge, agents, institutions, and populations involved in the exercise of biopower were, by the second half of the nineteenth century, totally interwoven in the reproduction of relationships, social representations, and practices conditioned by the colonial past, and the forms of coloniality intrinsic to the evolution of Latin American nations in the nineteenth century. . . . The will to solidify republics in Latin America led the process of nation-state building over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, seeking to maintain differences and privileges established during colonial times, within a broad paradigm of Spanish-speaking, Catholic, and civilized unity. (Pedraza Reference Pedraza2011b, 104; my translation)
This situation gave rise to a great variety of discursive and nondiscursive practices of differentiation in the midst of the process of shaping a nation-state through discourses of homogenization aimed at creating a national identity. These differentiating and homogenizing devicesFootnote 7 produced and constituted the subjects of the nation.
In the nineteenth century the nation was basically a discursive construction and a textual strategy. The national textual strategy generates not only feelings of belonging and identification within a community of equals, but also the production and staging of a symbolic order. Through the latter, it constitutes the national populace, its life forms, and it classifies national subjects according to order, shape, and difference. The discourses on the nation give rise to subordinate subjects and, mainly, an elite class capable of producing and reproducing the national discourses and ideals that constitute it as a dominant group. (Arias Reference Arias2007, 16; my translation)
In this way, the subject “woman” produced by the emerging Colombian nation-state was co-constituted by homogenizing and differentiating discourses and practices that had their roots in the racist and colonial classist structure. Cornerstone of the nation-state, constitutional texts clearly show this tension between differentiation and homogenization. These texts reflect the values and rights shared by the inhabitants of the territory, which makes all of them formally equal. Equality would be achieved by homogenizing. But, at the same time, homogenization implies elements of hierarchical differentiation between equals, based on property, income, gender, or age. The Colombian National Constitution of 1886 created the conditions for maintaining the differences of colonial origin between whites/criollos/civilized/humans, and black, Indian, and mestizo/savage/nonhumans.Footnote 8
The differentiating practices and discoursesFootnote 9 sought to establish distinctive references for the formation of a new elite and a new hierarchical structure, making use of the racist and classist ideas imposed by the colonizers. Manuals of civility and good manners, of notorious bourgeois inspiration, provide an example of these differentiating discourses, which targeted the local elites and contained norms of behavior in social spaces.
Together with these differentiating devices were those of a homogenizing character that, through massive circulation, aimed at civilizing and Westernizing barbarian/Indian/black/mestiza women.Footnote 10 These devices sought to transform sensibility and episteme, in such a way that experience and self-perception adapted to Western norms, ideals, and values, including those of the Catholic Church and hygienist medicine. Homogenizing strategies worked through binding categories that, by simplifying and reducing social experience, managed to hide differences and thus allowed for the false universalization of the Western human experience.Footnote 11 For this, various technologies were deployed that permitted barbarian, Indian, black, and nonwhite mestizas to be named women, and to see themselves in these terms, summoned as they were to interpret their social experience after the idea/ideal of woman, despite the fact that due to social, economic, and racial conditions, the realization of these others as women was more than difficult.Footnote 12
Homogenization becomes even more complex when Homi Bhabha's account of mimicry is considered. According to Bhabha, throughout the process of assimilation and appropriation of the culture of the colonizer, the only thing the colonized subject achieves is to provide evidence of their own difference, in spite of themselves.
Colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite. Which is to say, that the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference. (Bhabha Reference Bhabha1994, 86)
This process of homogenization was facilitated by the desire for whiteness of a racist society that embarked on a process of miscegenation with which it sought to erase its black or Indian origins, pass as white, Westernize. This process allowed some mestizos to ascend socially, legitimize their wealth, and access power.
Then European culture was made seductive: it gave access to power. After all, beyond repression, the main instrument of all power is its seduction. Cultural Europeanisation was transformed into an aspiration. It was a way of participating and later to reach the same material benefits and the same power as the Europeans. (Quijano Reference Quijano2007, 169)
However, not only discursive and nondiscursive practices of the church and medicine fulfilled homogenizing functions. Feminist discourse would do so as well, with its efforts to constitute a singular subject of political action, encompassing all women who endured the same patriarchal oppression.Footnote 13 It is important to note that the first feminist wave arrived in the country during the first century of republican life, barely forty years after the promulgation of the Constitution of 1886. It was promoted by elite women and achieved legal recognition and dialogue with the state, so its influence on the national discourses that constituted female subjectivity is undeniable.Footnote 14
The New Republic and Its New Subjects
During the nation-state building process, constitutions and urbanity manuals played an important role in creating discursive practices with a strong capacity to produce and discipline national subjectivities.
Constitutions, grammars, and manuals, as discursive genres, constituted through their laws and norms a police field of surveillance and orthopedics that captured and immobilized the citizen. Here the “power of writing” not only models but also becomes the foundation and container of the very object that it prescribes. (González Stephan Reference González Stephan1999, 14; my translation)
Through these discursive practices it is possible to observe the functioning of the differentiation and homogenization devices present in the state and in social life.
The legal framework defined by the Constitution of 1821 maintained colonial differences despite the aspirations for equality that were manifested by both beginning a process to abolish slavery and the formal recognition of the citizenship of Indian people. However, the abolition of slavery would only arrive by 1851, while Indian citizenship would turn into a reason to end Indian communal property, instead of providing a symbolic and material change of status within social hierarchies. The vindication of the colonial past continued with the National Constitution of 1886 that remained in force through 1991. The Concordat of 1887, and Law 89 of 1890, “that determines the ways to govern over barbarians being reduced to civilized life,” continues to this day.Footnote 15
These laws and constitutions revealed a tension in national discourse between unification/homogenization and differentiation:
The nation's projects and discourses not only intend to produce a political and cultural unity, but also to build hierarchical techniques and strategies of differentiation between population groups interpellated by these technologies. National construction moves in a tension between unification and differentiation. In this sense, we understand regimes of Colombianity as fields of definition and identity struggles that rearticulate and configure different forms of collective identities, under an intertwining framework of the racial, regional, cultural, or ethnic. (Castro-Gómez Reference Castro-Gómez2009, 13; my translation)
Until the beginning of the twentieth century, there weren't many changes in the constitution and in the laws that regulated Indian and black populations. Nor did persistent racist ideas from the colonial period change much, revived through controversies on racial degeneration that took hold after “La Guerra de los Mil Días” (1899–1902) and that would remain very much in force in the debate on the viability of the nation and its development. This discussion focused on the inferiority of races that occupied national territory whose mixture resulted in unintelligent beings unable to overcome national backwardness. Therefore, the only possible solution was to bring in white foreigners to mix them little by little with the local population.
The ideas of Laureano Gómez, who would become president of the republic, exemplify the persistence of the racist legacy of colonial times:
For Laureano Gómez, in Colombia, the “nirvana” of development is almost impossible. It's not only a badly geographically situated country, but also badly constituted: since it has had the misfortune of merging three races in its territory, races incapable of going beyond their own fundamental limitations: Spaniards and black and Indian peoples. (Castro-Gómez Reference Castro-Gómez2009, 170; my translation)
Producing Difference
As in the rest of Latin American territory, in Nueva Granada (Colombia), the new republics were inspired by liberal and bourgeois values, ideas, and the institutions of the French Revolution. Bourgeois notions of the familyFootnote 16 would play a fundamental role for white-criollos, the new ruling elite. These notions would fuel the process of social distinction for a group that, despite having the economic capital to impose itself as an elite, in many cases did not have the symbolic capital of whiteness, which would have to be accumulated through education, manners, and morality. Within the bourgeois family, the subjectivities of men and women who would embody the ideal, the ought-to-be of the nation—white, enlightened, virtuous—would be formed:
The bourgeoisie, especially in Latin America, in its compulsive desire for promotion and status, had to acquire refined manners and a way of speaking as the forms of its whitening and Westernization. Here, and particularly in multiethnic societies such as Cuba, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, a good part of these new middle sectors were not totally white. Therefore, maximizing cleanliness or meticulous care of the movements of the body or educating the diction was not a matter of strict corporal or linguistic hygiene, but a problem of social distinction. Good manners not only whitened the skin, but now represented a marketable value (and not a virtue), because both appearance (cleanliness, health, clothing) and knowing how to speak were the symbolic capital that could place each individual (man or woman depending on the case) in the highest social hierarchy. (González Stephan Reference González Stephan1999, 86; my translation)
This whiteness would enable a hierarchical differentiation from the great mass of Indian, black, mulatto, zambo, and poor people that made up the nascent nation. The formation of these whitened masculine and feminine subjectivities was based on manuals of urbanity, booklets, and protocols, since, in the early days of these national states, institutions such as the school or the factory, important in shaping subjectivity, were not fully established.Footnote 17 That is why during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a large number of manuals, booklets, and laws that sought to educate/whiten men, boys, girls, and, of course, women of the new elites would be produced following the model of the bourgeois woman.Footnote 18 Bourgeois white women learned tips on how to dress, how to run the household, how to treat the maids, how to walk, and how to put on makeup. In this way, a representation of women and womanhood, constructed from undeniable racial and class elements, was put into circulation. The woman par excellence led an existence entirely within the four walls of a house, where she cultivated her body and spirit in a calm way. This description corresponds only with the experience of a bourgeois woman, and had little to do with the existence of black or Indian “women,” and even poor mestiza “women,” whose economic situation prevented them from staying at home, making the street and public space the places where their lives developed.
Meanwhile, the life of a young, high-class Bogota woman might go like this:
Girls from privileged groups were beginning to shine in society, carefully subjected to male authority, whether or not it was a time of war. In 1867, a young woman from Bogotá spent her time attending dances and opera, reading novels of Fernán Caballero, receiving visits from her suitors and friends, and religious practices. While choosing her future husband, she consulted with her family and her confessor about her romantic doubts. (Velásquez Reference Velásquez1995, 314; my translation)
Lives of mestiza peasant, Indian, and black “women” were developed in the agricultural, livestock, and mining environments: “a third of working women (27.4%) were farmers, ranchers, fishers, and miners. Of about 40,000 miners registered for the entire national territory in 1870, 46% (about 18,000) were women, most of them mazamorreras”Footnote 19 (Velásquez Reference Velásquez1995, 318; my translation). In the cities, black, Indian, and mulatto women were servants who washed, cooked, and looked after the children and houses of their employers. These situations of poverty led many to engage in sexual relations with their employers to improve their economic conditions and others to engage in prostitution: “Between tolerance and persecution, many women from lower strata practiced prostitution. Almost at the same level, due to the squalor of the environment where they operated, chicheras Footnote 20 continued their traditional, independent, and lucrative business throughout the century” (Velásquez Reference Velásquez1995, 318; my translation).
Differentiating Devices and Homogenizing Devices
The state and elites promoted differentiating practices and discourses, producing a national female subject who was not determined solely by sexual difference, but was the product of an intersection of sex, class, and race. For this reason, Woman is the same as white and bourgeois. Although the national constitution does not make direct reference to the role or place of women, it is possible to infer it based on the preeminent place given to the male/white/property-owning citizen. It delimits the assignation of women and men by describing Indians as savages and by extending the enslavement of black people, not recognizing them as human.
In this context, booklets of civility and good manners served to construct the whiteness of new elites, and specifically to produce the white woman of the nation. It is important to point out that the moral behavior of Indian and black “women” was never a matter of greater regulation.
The behavior of women of another social class and of another race was less discussed, although some writers did raise the idea of the education of working-class women, as did Acosta de Samper in her newspaper La Mujer, where she recommended that Colombia open technical, arts, and crafts schools for them. (Hincapié Reference Hincapié2013, 12; my translation)
So, for nonwhite “women,” disciplining sex/gender was inseparable from disciplining race and class.
Homogenizing devices were decisive for the processes of subjectivation of the inhabitants of the Colombian territory and in the shaping of national identity, as evidenced by the important role played by Catholicism in consolidating the nation. The Catholic Church was considered by the state and elites as a unifying institution that would enable the integration of a territory characterized by a heterogeneity produced by deep class and racial difference.
Catholicism's unifying project made sense for the nation, in the midst of maintenance of social, cultural, and racial differences. Catholic evangelism was based on the postulate of the singular origin of all human groups. Differences were moderately accepted if people subscribed to the principles of Catholic life, to the same moral order. (Arias Reference Arias2007, 16; my translation)
From early colonization, the Catholic Church's “civilizing” intention was built on this homogenizing and unifying discourse, which included the classification of people, the determination of their degree of humanity, and the conversion of barbarians and savages to human beings, to children of God, and the poor into obedient masses. Which is to say, the job of the evangelist was the Westernization of these “others.” In Colombia, until the late twentieth century, the Catholic Church maintained the goal of the missions, a strategy by which the state gave power to religious orders, mainly Spanish, to civilize Indians and eliminate their savage customs until they became a useful and productive labor force and citizens of the nation (Arias Reference Arias2007).
The civilizing mission of the church included nonwhite “women,” to whom it directed a discourse loaded with a dual vision. It did so, on the one hand, with sermons and images about a holy and pure virgin, humble, poor, and mother of all humanity. And on the other, with the figure of an evil and sinful Eve, the cause of the expulsion from paradise, the doom of the world, and of men. The Catholic Church thereby interpreted issues such as motherhood, care of sons and daughters, obedience to the husband, and spiritual and physical weakness from the experience of white women, but presented it as a reality shared with Indian, black, and mestiza “women.”
During the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, hygienist medicine occupied a preeminent place in the consolidation of the national project. The state sought to find in the application of their new scientific precepts a solution for a nation incapable of “progress.” These precepts sought to control and regulate bodies and spaces, including houses and cities. The medical-hygienist discourse contributed to the regulation of women's bodies, especially in relation to issues such as maternity, sexual reproduction, care for newborns, and sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis. This discourse reified women's bodies and the tasks that social life foisted on them because of their femininity. Physiology and gynecology fulfilled the task of studying and knowing their structure and biological functioning, and childcare acquired scientific status. This interest in woman was because she was considered “mother of Colombians, that is to say, that it was her responsibility to reshape the children of the homeland, thereby assisting in the creation of a new nation” (Facundo Reference Facundo, Viveros, Rivera and Rodríguez2006, 81; my translation).
To achieve this, it was necessary to change the behavior of women, especially those of popular sectors, who were considered responsible for all the ills of the nation: poverty, filth, and racial degeneration. This meant that impoverished black, Indian, and mestiza “women” had to learn the rules of conduct and hygiene habits of upper-class ladies in order to transform their families and their children into the citizens that the nation desired. The call was for some—the poor and racialized—to emulate the behavior of white elite women (Facundo Reference Facundo, Viveros, Rivera and Rodríguez2006), and for the latter to represent and embody the national ideal in such a way that they could serve as examples. The discourse of medicine/hygiene was extremely regulatory and had a great capacity to permeate different aspects of social life, hence the impact of the homogenization process undertaken.
We can reconstruct the idea of the feminine subject, desired and produced by the state and Colombian society of the nineteenth century, through an examination of differentiating and homogenizing devices of urbanity, constitutions, medicine/hygiene, and of the Catholic Church. However, none of these devices is specific to or directed exclusively to women; such specificity will come at the hand of feminism a century after the formation of the nation-state. With feminism, the conversion of Indian, black, and mestizas into “women” is consolidated by appealing to a homogenizing discourse that considers that all “women” without exception live the same social experience as white bourgeois women.
In Colombia, the so-called first feminist wave, which took place between the second and third decades of the twentieth century, boasted plurality by addressing women of different jobs and classes. Like the church, feminism claimed that womanhood implies the same social experience based on sexual difference. The determined support of elite women with access to political circles positioned feminism on the national agenda. They proposed a discourse of identity that erased race and class differences, creating the fiction of a shared oppression in which all women, including black, Indian and poor “women,” suffered captivity and contempt based on sex.
Feminist dialogue with the state at first consolidated a series of legal recognitions regarding the administration of assets and the right to vote, including later issues such as work, access to education, regulation of maternity, and equal pay. It is striking that, beyond advances or setbacks in each one of these demands, this dialogue inaugurates a new form of relationship between women and the state, making its political action more visible, as was intended. However, this visibility implied greater intervention and regulation in all aspects of the life of women, through specific laws and more explicit control.Footnote 21 Thus feminism accelerated the process of homogenization and submission of black, Indian, and mestiza “women” to the gender norm,Footnote 22 officially classified and controlled by gender technologies of the state.
Woman and “Woman”
The discursive and nondiscursive homogenizing and differentiating practices and devices of the church, medicine, urbanity, law, and feminism, in force since the nineteenth century to this day, produced white and bourgeois subject women. Their social experience is circumscribed to domestic life, care, economic dependence on the husband, and cultivation of beauty and delicacy. As I mentioned previously, this woman is white or whitened, in a privileged economic situation, whereby one could say she is the kind of subject who can only be produced in very small social groups. However, this will not be the only woman-subject produced by these discourses, since they also produced the other “woman.”
Differentiating and homogenizing devices, based on a racist and classist social pyramid of colonial origin, produced a “woman” placed at the bottom of the social hierarchy, subjected to a series of material and symbolic conditions that prevent the full embodiment of original femininity. We then return to the idea of mimicry proposed by Bhabha, a civilizing strategy that allows the colonized to appropriate certain cultural elements, but not all of them, not enough to stop being the other (Bhabha Reference Bhabha1994). Missing elements are inaccessible due to differentiating devices that reserve them for those who meet race and class requirements.
In this way, a mimetic “woman” emerges, an obscure version, the “reformed and recognizable other,” reformed by the Western civilizing process to be recognizable and controllable through her difference, which becomes evident every time she fails in her attempt to be like, to pass, to be almost the same as the original, thus fixing her partial/incomplete presence. Paraphrasing Bhabha, these mimetic women are almost women but not quite; they are able to repeat and imitate the original but never embody it. Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui offers an eloquent example of this mimesis with las cholas paceñas:
Initially conceived by Indian women as a strategy to change their status and access the dominant commercial and social world, la pollera, the Manila shawl and the Borsalino hat (adopted in the nineteenth century) became the emblem of a subordinated and excluded ethnicity that denies and ambiguously affirms differences in gesture and behavior. . . . Wishing at all costs to look at themselves in a Western mirror, cholas or birlochas configured a marginalized space of mestizaje, and ended up representing their features in an archaic and ridiculous way. (Rivera Cusicanqui Reference Rivera Cusicanqui2010, 216; my translation)Footnote 23
Final Reflection
The homogenizing and differentiating devices interweave social discourse, its elites, and a nation-state, maintaining a tension between the construction of a community of equals that shares language, race, culture, and traditions, and, at the same time, generating hierarchies and differences within this unity.
National projects discursively create an image of homogeneity that generates hierarchical patterns of incorporation. In other words, since the nineteenth century, the generation of feelings of equality and belonging was subject to the delimitation and construction of unity as an order that hierarchizes, contains, controls, and normalizes. (Castro-Gómez Reference Castro-Gómez2009, 21; my translation)
As Santiago Castro-Gómez states, unity will enable the differentiation and control of members of the national community. This control is characterized by imposing categories and assigning a place for members to occupy in the national pyramid. In the case of the Republic of Colombia, white-criollos established the parameters of the hierarchy, identifying themselves with the values and ideas of Western colonizers. These parameters classified Indian, black, and mestiza as women, implying an apparent homogenization with white women, and one might even say a recognition of their humanity. However, far from economic, racial, and cultural conditions that guarantee full embodiment of bourgeois white “women,” the only thing they achieved was the acquisition of obligations, prejudices, and control established by the gender norm.
Thus, nonwhitened Indian, black, and mestiza “women” were subjected to a situation of greater control of their bodies and sexuality by the state and society, losing the small spaces of unregulated freedom that they enjoyed when the gender norm did not appear on the horizon of their existence. What emerges is an unprecedented form of control through the interweaving of race, class, and gender. This shift will mean that the gender discourse that constituted the social experience of white bourgeois women began to play an important role in the processes of subjectivation of nonwhite “women” who began to feel interpellated. As Teresa de Lauretis points out, the Althusserian concept of interpellation refers to “the process whereby a social representation is accepted and absorbed by an individual as her (or his) own representation, and so becomes, for that individual, real, even though it is in fact imaginary” (de Lauretis Reference de Lauretis1987, 12). And Judith Butler calls it “the divine power to name,” capable of leaving its mark on subjects, using language not to describe the concrete reality of these so-called subjects, but to create them through “the citation of a convention that already exists. Interpellation is an act of speech whose ‘content’ is neither true nor false: it does not have description as its primary task. Its purpose is to indicate and establish a subject in subjection, to produce its social contours in space and time” (Butler Reference Butler1997, 33–34).
Basically, the production of subjects is an act of naming, whose dynamics and contents are pre-established according to the political mandates expressed in ideology. The gender norm, with its discourses and technologies, fully enters the lives of those others, occupying an important place in the process of disciplining and modeling their subjectivity. This process is not only about being subject to the state and social control, but also refers to self-perception in such a way that behavior, ways of thinking and feeling, are circumscribed to the norm of ought-to-be woman (white, Western, bourgeois). Nevertheless, this is not the consequence of a mere imposition, because the ideal is desired as an effect of the seduction that whiteness generates. Paraphrasing Frantz Fanon, nonwhitened black, Indian, and mestiza “women” want to appear, they want to take up the position of, and have what the woman has, the white woman (Fanon Reference Fanon2009).
The production of the subject “woman” continues; it is continuously updated. To the aforementioned discourses expressed in civility manuals, hygienist protocols, constitutions, catechisms, and feminist texts will be added cinema, television, and countless gossip magazines, for home and fashion, as well as laws and public policies.Footnote 24 These new gender technologies will provide new Western values and ideals about the ought-to-be woman necessary for modernization and industrialization processes.Footnote 25 These processes involve promoting changes in people's and of course women's codes of behavior.Footnote 26 In Colombia, despite transformations in social codes, the subject “woman” continues to be produced through two contradictory social processes: homogenization and differentiation/hierarchization. For this reason, it is necessary to keep talking about Woman and her obscure versions.
Celenis Rodríguez Moreno is an independent researcher. She is lawyer who holds a Master's degree in political science from Instituto de Altos Estudios Sociales of Universidad Nacional de San Martín (Buenos Aires, Argentina). Her topics of interest are decolonial feminism, decolonial and postcolonial thought, and decolonial analysis of the state and public policies. Her article “Public Policies on Gender Equality: Technologies of Modern Colonial Gender” will be published soon in Decolonial Feminism, ed. María Lugones, Yuderkys Espinosa, and Nelson Maldonado Torres. Rowman & Littlefield.
Alejandro Montelongo González is a decolonial educator and activist who graduated in sociology and has a Master's degree in social sciences and humanities from Universidad Autónoma de Aguascalientes. Gonzalez currently works as a temporary professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Universidad Autónoma de Aguascalientes.
Translator's Note: In the case of the literal quotes of sources in Spanish for which a previous translation into English was not identified, they were translated and indicated with the legend “my translation.” In the case of the literal quotes from sources in Spanish for which it was possible to identify an original version or previous translation to English, they were transcribed directly from said texts.
