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Globalization and Voyeurism: Sexed Identities
Claudia Salamanca (Universidad Javeriana de Colombia)
In August 2004, information about the existence of 12 porno disks, 53 videos with 53 different Colombian women and girls from the towns of Melgar and Girardot, was released to the media, and consequently, the Colombian public. Six U.S. military contractors of the Plan Colombia, stationed on the military base, “Tolemaida,” Colombia, created and produced these videos. I interviewed several people around the towns, owners of rental video stores, priests, journalists, girls that claim that they were not one of them, and parents who gathered around the TV, checking if their daughters were on the videos. I look in these narratives for the facts, rumors, expectations, cultural coordinates and social field in which those videos were developed. The borders, using the image of the physical body as a volume which can be penetrated and crossed, are displayed and explored by the porno representation, however there is also a clear exploration of a body geopolitically and economically constituted whose expression is developed in the formation of mutual subjectivities in these visual documents. These porno videos contain important content of what is understood to be Colombian for these American military contractors. But, there is also a clear expectation and reciprocal relation in the constitution of what is being American in these men by these women. Sexuality turns into the mean to explore the borders of geopolitical schemas crossed by discourses of diplomatic and military cooperation on a personal scale. I primarily undertake a visual analysis of these videos, a series called “The Devil’s Adventures in Columbia XXX,” in order to cross reference them to that which I have called the contested female imaginary in the Colombian war conflict (Salamanca 2003, 2004). Different institutional forms in Colombia, including groups not officially recognized but already constituted as a body with parts and functions in the social field, have confronted the globalization process by the deployment of the female imaginary. There is an exacerbation of what is feminine for different groups in Colombia. From human rights organizations to the guerrillas, there is a strong effort for constituting what should be Colombian essentializing it in the female body, whether it is of the victim, the mother, or the free guerrilla fighter. Even though this proliferation of subject positions carries the disjunction of precisely what they attempt to constitute as a unique signifier, they concentrate what is Colombian as a meaningful symbol to the world in the female body. The guerrillas have conspicuously displayed the image of “la mujer fariana” (the woman guerrilla), the Colombian Army presents its own iron woman, the image of the Colombian minister of Defense Martha Lucia Ramirez, with her mirror images of women soldiers and social workers and the media and the private economic industry have offered the feminine as the perfect labor force in the context of the signature of the TLC (Free Zone Agreement in the Andean region with USA). This labor force includes employees of off shore industries to models, anchors and cultural products in which the Colombian women are represented. These videos are important in the analysis of the contested female imaginary because they are subject to a mutual gaze. They express a mutual projection and a mutual constitution not only of the Colombian identity but its relationship with what is understood as the United States. The field of exploration of this mutual process of identification takes sex and the narratives of contact, body, pain and pleasure as their means of sneaking across borders. I state, using voyeurism as a metaphor, parallels between globalization and sexuality. Voyeurism is carried here not by a passive activity; it is developed through the mutual fantasies that take place during the act. The distance, that is part of the voyeur, is manifested in these videos by the use of language. The voyeur here exposes herself/himself by the desire of being and having that Colombian-ness (in exposure and possession) and at the same time he/she fantasizes about that American-ness. Globalization and voyeurism allows me to speak about a process of mutual identification in which geopolitical processes crossed by diplomatic, and military cooperation are inscribed in the body.
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