Feminist Media Studies

ISSN: 1468-0777 (Print) 1471-5902 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfms20

Beyond filling in the gap: the state and status of

Latina/o Feminist Media Studies
Mara Elena Cepeda
To cite this article: Mara Elena Cepeda (2016) Beyond filling in the gap: the state and
status of Latina/o Feminist Media Studies, Feminist Media Studies, 16:2, 344-360, DOI:
10.1080/14680777.2015.1052005
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2015.1052005

Published online: 31 Jul 2015.

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Date: 07 September 2016, At: 05:34

FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES, 2016

VOL. 16, NO. 2, 344360
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2015.1052005

Beyond filling in the gap: the state and status of Latina/o

Feminist Media Studies
Mara Elena Cepeda
Latina/o Studies, Williams College, Williamstown, MA, USA

ABSTRACT

Against the socio-economic and cultural backdrop of the ongoing

Latina/o media boom, this critical literature review delineates
the location and status of contemporary Latina/o Feminist Media
Studies. Departing from a critique of current mainstream Feminist
Media Studies research and citational practices, it traces the influence
of rapidly expanding transnational Latina/o media markets, the
gendering of Latinidad, and transnational feminisms on recent
Latina/o Feminist Media Studies scholarship. As it not only breaks
with exclusively domestic analyses of intersectionality and accurately
reflects twenty-first century medias transnational orientation, this
essay argues that the theoretical paradigms and thematic concerns
of Latina/o Feminist Media Studies must ultimately be reframed as
central, not marginal, to Feminist Media Studies research.

ARTICLE HISTORY

Received 6 April 2014

Revised 4 May 2015
Accepted 4 May 2015
KEYWORDS

Latina/o media; Feminist

Media; Media Studies;
transnationalism

On the opening page of A Latina in the Land of Hollywood and Other Essays (2000), Angharad
N. Valdivia offers a self-reflexive critique, posed via a pair of pointed questions, of the research
practices of Feminist Media Studies: Why do my spectatorship positions continue to be
ignored or spoken for without research? Where can I make an intervention that is both
rooted in the everyday and informed by feminist, ethnic, and global theories? (3). Valdivia
encourages us to consider the tangled web of scholarly privilege rooted in categories of
difference such as ethno-racial identity, gender, sexual orientation, class, language, and
national origins. She references a brand of power that highlights (but more often than not
obscures) the intimate links between the personal, the political, the theoretical, and quotidian research praxes. Above all, Valdivia identifies an exercise of authority/authorial practice
that permeates our intellectual existence as Feminist Media Studies specialists; after all, the
issue of just who speaks for (which) women and on what terms undergirds any feminist media
critique (Margaret Gallagher 2003, 25; emphasis mine). Such interrogations into scholarly
praxis point to what Stuart Hall refers to as the positions of enunciation, or the practices
of representation [that] always implicate the positions from which we speak or write (2003,
233234). These position(s) of enunciation determine not only that which we publish as
academics but also (and of equal import) just how we undertake the often invisible, solitary

CONTACT Mara Elena Cepeda

2015 Taylor & Francis

mcepeda@williams.edu

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labor of conducting our own research and crafting it for public consumption. The practices of
research and politics of citation within Feminist Media Studies are thus activities that essentially expose the fields underlying power dynamics with respect to knowledge production
and the dissemination of research. Who constitutes the primary subjects of Feminist Media
Studies at large? How are we to pursue the everyday business of producing this scholarship
in a fashion that meaningfully integrates the fields that remain marginal to it? In sum, the
complex relationship between the interrelated fields of Latina/o Feminist Media Studies1 and
Feminist Media Studies highlights the significance of what it means to produce knowledge
from the margin of the margins and the impacts that this positionality portends for the
former field, its specialists, and the institutional and scholarly networks in which all Feminist
Media Studies experts participate.
Perhaps it is time, fifteen years later, to attach an addendum to Valdivias original insights,
mindful of the fact that [r]esearch is an expression of our location in a world connected by
lines of power and cultural asymmetry (Radha S. Hegde 1998, 285). We therefore must also
ask ourselves: within Feminist Media Studies, just who speaks about and for Latina/o-related
research, or what are its positions of enunciation? What are the unique concerns of Latina/o
Feminist Media Studies within its efforts to claim institutional and intellectual space? How is
Latina/o Feminist Media Studies scholarship framed within Feminist Media Studies research
as a whole, at a juncture during which the risk of misrecognition (Lisa McLaughlin 1995,
144145) faces both fields?
This essay offers a representative, if not exhaustive, overview of the historical trajectory,
theoretical currents, and predominant methodological approaches associated with contemporary Latina/o Feminist Media Studies that recognizes the intertwined nature of Feminist
Media Studies, Latina/o Feminist Media Studies, Latina/o Queer Studies, and transnational
feminist thought. The critical literature review that follows addresses the Latina/o Feminist
Media Studies literature that has emerged since the turn of the twenty-first century, a time
period that has widely been characterized as a Latina/o popular media boom. Considering
the politics of citation and research practices as they pertain to the relationship between
Latina/o Feminist Media Studies and Feminist Media Studies, I comment on the questions of
authority, authorship, identity, and voice that have so profoundly shaped the state and status
of Latina/o Feminist Media Studies to date. Ultimately, I argue that a meaningful engagement
with the politics and scholarly production of Latina/o Feminist Media Studies, and most
specifically the fields emphatically transnational character, renders it a vital area of study
for Feminist Media Studies as a whole within contemporary glocalized media environments.
Moreover, the transnational scope of Latina/o Feminist Media Studies offers the possibility
to extend beyond the domestic, Western-oriented intersectionality in which much current
feminist research is grounded (Vrushali Patil 2013, 853854).
This essay provides a public accounting of the existing achievements and future promise of Latina/o Feminist Media Studies. As one of the primary theoretical lenses employed
within Latina/o Feminist Media Studies (and within post-feminist media culture in general)
the female/Latina body constitutes an analytical cornerstone, treated as both a liberatory
resource and a troublesome entity in need of constant surveillance and self-discipline
(Rosalind Gill 2007, 137). Given that the body, totally imprinted by history serves as the
slate upon which happenings are inscribed, the analysis of popular media texts featuring
Latinas moreover provides an ideal platform for examining the transnational (Michel Foucault
1977, 148; Angharad N. Valdivia 2012, 75). A consideration of just how the Latina body is

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theorized and the manner in which the material body troubles the constitution not only
of bodies of knowledge, but of institutional bodies as well therefore figures prominently
within this overview of the current location and status of Latina/o Feminist Media Studies.

Feminist research praxis and the politics of citation

Within institutional academic circles, Latina/o Feminist Media Studies has always contended
with a politics of research, publication, and citation that echo the never-neutral hierarchies
of knowledge production that mold the US academic landscape. One frequently overlooked,
yet critical arena in which institutional relationships of power manifest themselves is via
the research and citational practices employed by many Feminist Media Studies scholars
regarding Latina/o Feminist Media Studies, including among those who advocate for an
intersectional approach. It is here where the personal, the political, the theoretical, and quotidian praxis unite in a fashion that underscores the entrenched epistemological hierarchies
that so strongly inform individual research practices and indeed the very manner in which
the broader field of Feminist Media Studies is collectively imagined.
Valdivia recounts how in recent years she has been approached to review numerous
versions of the I just discovered that Jennifer Lopez is a Latina media phenomenon essay.
This continues to occur a full eighteen years since the publication of the first major article on
Lopez by Negrn-Muntaner in the nations premier Chicana/o Studies journal, in addition to
myriad other publications in the period since (see Magdalena Barrera 2001; Mary C. Beltrn
2002, 2009; Isabel Molina-Guzmn 2010; Priscilla Pea Ovalle 2011; Angharad N. Valdivia
2007, 2010, to list but a few). These repeated discovery narratives reflect an unwillingness
on the part of some mainstream Feminist Media Studies scholars to conduct serious, thorough literature reviews within Latina/o Feminist Media Studies, and ultimately underscores
the manner in which the intellectual labor of white scholars and whiteness itself are often
differentially valued within Feminist Media Studies (Angharad N. Valdivia 2008, 1314).
In the Feminist Media Studies literature reviews published since 2000 that do incorporate
some consideration of Latinas/os, the tendency is straightforward: a cursory mention of
Latinas and their relationship to media texts and/or Third Wave feminism is inserted, accompanied by the now seemingly obligatory references to a limited canon of Third Wave feminist
of color texts. While certainly ground breaking and of historic importance, with scant exception these works, which are primarily confined to the genre of personal narrative (Cherre
Moraga and Gloria Anzaldas edited volume This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical
Women of Color [1984] and Gloria Anzaldas hybrid monograph Borderlands/La Frontera:
The New Mestiza [1987] predominate), could not be classified as Media Studies scholarship.
The emphasis on said texts underscores the manner in which the intertwined discourses of
gender, ethno-racial identity, and nations are so frequently expressed via discourses about
sexuality. Yet the virtually exclusive focus on the work of Moraga and Anzalda ultimately
constitutes a rather troubling pattern, given that during the roughly thirty years since the
publication of said texts, an innovative and diverse array of Latina/o Feminist Media Studies
scholarship has been produced, yet none of it (barring the occasional mention of Valdivias
work) (see Linda Aldoory and Elizabeth L. Toth 2000; Bonnie J. Dow and Celeste M. Condit
2005; Gallager 2003) is cited (see Cindy L. Griffin and Karma R. Chvez 2012; Kaitlynn Mendes
and Cynthia Carter 2008; S. Craig Watkins and Rana A. Emerson 2000). Such a consistent
failure to rigorously engage the whole of Latina/o Feminist Media Studies foundational and
emerging research renders the discourse produced within that field rare (Foucault, cited in

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Lynn Spigel 2004, 1216), or quite literally beyond the parameters of that which is currently
articulated and disseminated among scholars of Feminist Media Studies, both now as well as
for the future (Spigel 2004, 1216). As Ada Hurtado outlines in her discussion of the processes
through which gendered whiteness is naturalized, this perpetuates a dynamic in which
I [the white subject] will not acknowledge your presence; my ability not to see you is my power. If I
do not see you, you do not exist. If you only exist at my will, you are nothing without my attention.
I am, therefore, the one that controls who is real and who is not. (1997, 137; emphasis in original)

Indeed, it is at such junctures that the unspoken (or in this case, the uncited) serves to (re)
activate mechanisms of white privilege and their attendant impacts on the lives of scholars
of color (Aimee M. Carrillo Rowe 2000, 67), many of whom are junior faculty members. In
concrete terms, for Latina/o Feminist Media Studies specialists, this discursive erasure may
in turn influence whether or not these individuals are granted tenure, receive promotion, or
are even offered an academic position in the first place (Valdivia 2008, 15).
Critical individual career ramifications aside, several self-evident rationales for mainstream
Feminist Studies scholars to familiarize themselves with Latina/o Feminist Media Studies
exist. After all, the questions that Latina/o Feminist Media Studies grapples with do not solely
reflect or implicate a Latina/o-only media landscape. Rather, Latina/o demographics, the
dynamics of media globalization, and the multiple ways in which Latinidad disrupts hemispheric constructs of gender, ethno-racial identity, sexuality, language, and nation render a
studious examination of current Latina/o Feminist Media Studies scholarship imperative to
all contemporary Feminist Media Studies specialists. To engage in research as usual at this
juncture as such risks perpetuating a system in which the production of feminist knowledge,
in addition to its very dissemination, is starkly hierarchized.

The historical trajectory of Latina/o Feminist Media Studies

Faced by the distinct challenges of a world now dominated by media, Feminist Media Studies
emerged in the early 1970s as a result of Second Wave feminism and the increased visibility
of feminism as a whole (Mendes and Carter 2008, 17031704).
The marked Latina/o population growth that began during the same period made its
presence felt in US higher education and markets by the late 1980s, coalescing in the very
first Media Studies courses that expressly incorporated a limited consideration of Latinas/
os. The available materials were restricted in number and largely concerned with issues of
race and ethnicity. Nevertheless, the landmark women of color literary works of authors such
as the aforementioned Moraga and Anzalda were at times incorporated into the nascent
Latina/o Media Studies bibliography (Angharad N. Valdivia 2004a, 107) in an effort to promote the more intersectional perspective that forms the bedrock of Latina/o Feminist Media
Studies. These early Latina/o feminist scholarly endeavors generally wielded little impact
on the mainstream Feminist Media Studies canon, however (Angharad N. Valdivia 1995, 9).
Since their emergence in the late 1980s, both Latina/o Media Studies and Latina/o
Feminist Media Studies can be divided into various overlapping cohorts of scholars, not
all of whose work falls under the category of feminist. As Valdivia traces (2008, 12), the
inaugural cohort of Latina/o Media Studies scholars is composed of self-taught individuals
who did not initially receive the interdisciplinary training that predominates within current
Latina/o Media Studies. Many of these individuals, including feminist Film Studies scholar
Rosa Linda Fregoso (1993, 1995, 1999, 2003, 2014), have contributed to a foundational corpus
of research that stretches back for decades.

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The second cohort of Latina/o Media Studies scholars, among them Angharad Valdivia,
benefitted from graduate-level access to various disciplines as well as enhanced formal training in the origins of fields such as film and popular culture. Lacking any formal guidance or
mentorship from graduate advisors who were most often unfamiliar with Ethnic or Latina/o
Studies, many of this second group managed to assemble their work from across the disciplines. Valdivia, for example, is the editor or author of several foundational Latina/o Media
Studies and Latina/o Feminist Media Studies texts (see Angharad N. Valdivia 1995, 2000,
2003, 2004a, among others), including Latina/os and the Media (2010), the inaugural and
sole textbook dedicated to a comprehensive overview of the field. However, this cohort also
struggled with the concomitant institutional pressure to adhere to more monodisciplinary
research models, particularly during the pre-tenure period, a situation that at times inhibited their ability to cross disciplinary borders (Valdivia 2008, 1213). While small in number,
specialists from these earlier cohorts have exhibited a marked commitment to supporting
junior scholars, many of them women of color, in turn helping to foster a rapidly expanding
corpus of cutting-edge, critically engaged research.
In contrast, more junior Latina/o Media Studies scholars have experienced the privilege
of specialized, rigorously interdisciplinary training in Latina/o Feminist Media Studies. While
enjoying access to much high-quality published research within the fields of Latina/o Media
and Communications Studies as part of their intellectual formation, this third generation
has certainly not limited itself to those fields; rather, to paraphrase Valdivia, if Media Studies
is interdisciplinary, then Latina/o Media Studies (and more specifically, Latina/o Feminist
Media Studies) proves more emphatically so (Valdivia 2008, 10, 13). More recent cohorts of
Latina/o Feminist Media Studies scholars have and continue to produce an impressive array
of research, as highlighted throughout this essay.

The transnational Latina/o media boom

According to the US Census, as of 2012 the Latina/o population numbered fifty-three million
plus, a six-fold increase since 1970 that accounts for more than half of the nations growth during that same time period (Anna Brown 2014). By the 1990s, the changes in the social order
spurred on by these dramatic demographic shifts prompted a turn towards more intensive,
Latina/o-centered niche marketing within the US mediascape (John Fiske 1997, 62). In short,
the capitalist logic of Latinas/os can spend, therefore Latinas/os exist accompanying the
increase in Latino/a numbers and buying power rendered the Latina/o market more legible
to mainstream media outlets and therefore ripe for increased media attention across all
formats. As a result, the US culture industries endeavored to independently impact as well
as conform to existing Latina/o consumer behavior (Mara Elena Cepeda 2014, 303). Shifting
ethno-racial demographics thus fueled burgeoning corporate interest in Latina/o and Latin
American media markets, fostering the development of Spanish-language and Latina/
o-centered media.2 Transnational Spanish-language (and, I would add, Latina/o-centered)
media thus undeniably contributes to the dynamic relationship between immigration flows,
global media, and the US communications infrastructure (Mari Castaeda 2008, 5152).
The Latin media boom of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is best
understood as a marketing phenomenon predicated upon the commodification of Latinidad,
Latina/o audiences, and Latina feminisms, as it has attempted to capitalize on the monetary
resources of Latina consumers and engage in the management of social identities (Jillian M.
Bez 2007, 111; Mara Elena Cepeda 2010; Elana Levine 2001, 41). Indeed, as Molina-Guzmn

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observes, while the post-9/11 period has been characterized by a general downturn in US
advertising sales, advertising expenditures for Latina/o-centered media have expanded,
with particular attention leveled at the eighteenthirty-four-year-old Latina demographic
(2010, 1). The innocuous, carefully scripted depictions of difference offered in much mainstream, Latina-centered media of this period has therefore not merely aimed to reproduce
Latina realities; it has also sought to (re)formulate those realities in palatable, highly commodifiable terms (Levine 2001, 41).
It would be a serious error, however, to view the Latina/o media market or its consumers
solely via a domestic lens. Reflecting the dynamically transnational character of the diverse
Latina/o communities as well as prohibitively high US production costs, most Latina/o media
products are intended for global circulation (Castaeda 2008; Isabel Molina-Guzmn 2007;
Juan Pin 2014; Omar Rincn and Mara Paula Martnez 2014; Valdivia 2012); Latinas in
particular thus function as both the target and the resource for global popular culture
(Angharad N. Valdivia 2011, 54). To offer but two key examples: much of the programming
offered on mainstream Latina/o-centered media outlets, such as top-rated Spanish-language
television channel Univisin, is in fact produced in Latin America for rebroadcast in the US.
In addition, the Latina/o advertising industry, so central to the ways in which Latinas/os
and non-Latinas/os alike imagine what it means to be Latina/o, has historically rested in
the hands of Latin American-born elites who have relied on strikingly traditional tropes of
Latina/o ethno-racial identity, gender, linguistic, class, and familial structures in their productions (Arlene Dvila 2001). While in recent years we have witnessed a shift towards more
media content that recognizes the bicultural and bilingual character of most Latina/o media
consumption habits, substantial conflict between the local (niche) and global Latina/o media
markets persists (Levine 2001, 36). Within this transnational confluence, as the presumptive
keepers of the domestic space, Latinas in particular have garnered increased attention within
marketing strategies that consistently cast them as good gendered, raced, and classed
consumers, undercutting any notion of a gender-neutral economy (Micky Lee 2006, 200).
For mainstream marketers, Latinidad or Latina/o-ness offers the potential for appealing
to the broadest portion of Latina/o consumers possible, while simultaneously facilitating
the promotion of more expansive ethno-racial categories in the service of increased profits
and liberal multiculturalism. However, as a form of diversity born of market strategies (Fiske
1997, 58), much of mainstream Latina/o media and its gendered articulations of Latinidad
are contained to some degree by these same market forces. Latinidad therefore proffers the
contradictory allure of marketability in tandem with the potential for consumer unease, given
the unincorporable elements of Latina/o bodies whose difference has proven impossible to
diminish (Fiske 1997, 58; Molina-Guzmn 2010, 14). This unruly difference is in turn managed
via strategies that valorize specific phenotypical traits and cultural expressions over others,
privileging the scripts of hybridity that favor normative constructions of Latina identity
(Valdivia 2011, 53, 55). As such, an historic emphasis on the narrowly construed Latin Look
feminine phenotype (Dvila 2001; Clara E. Rodriguez 1997) (light olive skin, long dark hair,
and dark eyes) in Latina/o media has molded the careers of many Latina actresses, including Zo Saldaa and Cameron Diaz. To date, the Afro-Latina Saldaa has played largely
African-American roles, whereas the blonde, blue-eyed Diaz has exclusively been cast in
Anglo parts. The experience of both actresses thus explicitly illustrates the rigid raced and
gendered visual discourse of the Latin Look and the manner it reflects as well as impacts
popular conceptualizations of Latina/o identity.

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The gendering of Latinidad and transnational feminisms

The confluence of historical, cultural, and socio-economic conditions that comprise the
recent Latina/o media market boom has profoundly influenced the thematic emphases
within contemporary Latina/o Feminist Media Studies scholarship. Another primary concept
shaping the field is Latinidad. Briefly stated, Latinidad constitutes a dynamic belief in a
shared Latina/o identity rooted in cultural, historic, affective, and political affinities (be they
real or imagined) within and across US borders. Latinidad is often critiqued for its tendency to
flatten the unique cultural and historic features of individual Latina/o communities. However,
it is simultaneously valued as an integral component in the success of more formal Latina/o
political mobilization efforts as well as everyday on the ground, pan-ethnic endeavors.
Ironically, its mounting commodification has meant increased exposure and employment
opportunities for Latina/o industry professionals, just as it has translated into more homogenized media representations of Latinas/os (Isabel Molina-Guzmn and Angharad N. Valdivia
2004, 218), particularly with respect to images of Latina/o gender dynamics and sexuality. As
a grassroots phenomenon that continuously reacts in concert with as well as against market
pressures (Mara Elena Cepeda 2003), Latinidadand more specifically, the gendering of
Latinidadhas thus emerged as a key related site of inquiry for Latina/o Feminist Media
Studies scholars.
Latina/o Feminist Media Studies scholars have consistently emphasized the need to examine Latinidad vis--vis Latina and women of color subjectivities (Frances R. Aparicio 2003;
Jillian M. Bez 2007, 2008; Bernadette Marie Calafell 2001, 2010, 2012, 2014; Bernadette
Marie Calafell and Shane T. Moreman 2008; Cepeda 2003, 2010; Isabel Molina-Guzmn 2005,
2010; Molina-Guzmn and Valdivia 2004; Deborah Paredez 2009; Pea Ovalle 2011; Viviana
Rojas 2004; Angharad N. Valdivia 2004b, 2011; Lucila Vargas 2000). Significantly, Latinidad
challenges existing popular and academic notions of culture, place, and borders, just as it
reshapes the US national imaginary with respect to ethno-racial identity, gender, and sexuality. Perhaps most strikingly, Latinidad disrupts the black/white racial dichotomy that has
historically defined life in the United States. Valdivia asserts that Latinidad also functions
as a gendered construct within the global imaginary, in which a market-driven sexualized
Latina presence is reproduced and inserted into the circuits of transnational popular culture
through technological convergence that layers cultural forms, genres, and markets (2011,
65). This gendering does not solely materialize within dominant media representations of
Latinas/os, however. It is also present in Latina/o self-representations, which may range from
subversive self-tropicalization3 to the misogynistic responses to the feminization of Latino
labor that Dolores Ins Casillas traces in her research on some of Spanish-language radios
most prominent on-air personalities (2008, 2014).
Transnationalism, and particularly transnational feminism, constitutes another primordial
intellectual current within Latina/o Feminist Media Studies, in keeping with the assumption
that media constitutes a central site upon and through which global inequities are being
staged today (Raka Shome 2006, 257). Indeed, the explicitly transnational bent of Latina/o
Media Studies in particular, marked by the cross-border production, circulation, and reception of Latina/o media, both reflects and informs the always/already transnational nature of
Latina/o Studies as a whole. Significantly, in recent years the transnational scope of Latina/o
Feminist Media Studies and its recognition of the links between gender and the global have
become even more overtly articulated (see Jillian M. Bez 2006, 2007, 2008; Beltrn 2009;
Mara Elena Cepeda 2003, 2008, 2010; Michelle Habell-Palln 1999, 2005; Molina-Guzmn

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2005, 2010; Frances Negrn-Muntaner 2004; Valdivia 1995, 2000, 2004b, 2007, 2011, 2012;
Deborah R. Vargas 2012; Lucila Vargas 2006, 2008, 2009).
Since the 1990s, transnational feminist approaches have gained currency due in part to
the success of transnational feminist activist networks (Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan
1994; Ranjoo Seodu Herr 2014, 9). Jillian Bez delineates the intersectional character and
importance of transnational feminisms, or the manner in which categories of difference such
as ethno-racial identity, class, sexuality, and nation are superimposed upon each other in a
manner that not only articulates identity, but also informs the various types of oppression
that individuals experience. A transnational feminist perspective underscores the continuous
flow of people, products, and cultural norms across borders, stressing careful and historically
situated analyses of Third World womens oppression and resistance while acknowledging
the need to attend to an array of global feminist perspectives (Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Herr
2014, 2, 11). These cross-border flows occur in concert with the unequal policing of individuals across those very sites of demarcation (Bez 2006, 67). In short, transnational feminism
emphasizes how asymmetrical power relations across space obligate us to re-conceptualize
gender (Shome 2006, 256), and categories of difference as a whole. Moreover, it exists at
ease with the contradictory, recognizing the oppositional potential at times available to the
less powerful, in addition to the fluid, frequently incongruous character of identity itself.
Within Latina/o Feminist Media Studies, transnational feminism thus serves as a remarkably
apt lens for examining the often painful, uneasy hybridity that many Latinas confront on
a daily basis (Bez 2006, 67).
Simultaneously, transnational feminist frameworks challenge and deconstruct all borders
in order to achieve a more self-reflexive, anti-essentialist stance (Sandra K. Soto 2005, 115).
In this vein, transnational feminist thought adheres to the notion that
a lack of attention to the cultural and economic inequities of globalization in any interrogations
of gender itself is imbricated in, and reinforcing of, global inequalities, for an ability to ignore the
global can only come about when one occupies globally privileged subject positions. (Shome
2006, 255)

Transnational feminist thought itself has at times become the target of criticism for its
tendency to privilege knowledge produced in and centered on the US or Europe, or a
homogenizing move on the part of First World scholars (Ochy Curiel 2009; Grewal and
Kaplan 1994, 2; Patil 2013, 852853). In the case of Latina/o Feminist Media Studies, such
moves introduce the risk of collapsing the vital distinctions between Latin American and
US-based Third World feminisms (see Sonia E. Alvarez, Elisabeth Jay Friedman, Ericka
Beckman, Maylei Blackwell, Norma Stolz Chinchilla, Nathalie Leon, Marysa Navarro et al.
2003; Angela Ixkic Bastian Duarte 2012; Curiel 2009; Yuderkys Espinosa Mioso 2009; Mara
Luisa Femenas 2009; Marlise Matos and Clarisse Paradis 2013; Denise A. Segura and Elisa
Facio 2007).
As a theoretical framework, transnational feminism ultimately poses urgent questions
regarding the very epistemological foundations of Feminist Studies (Soto 2005, 114).
Specifically, transnational feminism encourages us to re-frame the apparent novelty of
the so-called worlding of Latina/o Feminist Media Studies as a move that ultimately disregards the fields foundations as an inherently transnational intellectual and political project
with long-standing productive links to Womens, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, American
Studies, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Communications Studies, Ethnic Studies, and
Media Studies alike. The failure to recognize Latina/o Feminist Studies as such runs the risk

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of erasing, as so frequently happens in the globalized labor market, the intellectual efforts
and contributions of women and/or of communities of color in general (Cepeda 2010). The
uneven relationships of power unveiled in such moves also materialize in the very Latina/o
media texts forming the area of inquiry that has received the most attention from Latina/o
Feminist Media Studies scholars thus far, the terrain of the representational.

Questions of representation: theorizing the Latina body

As Valdivia asserts, the representational touchstones so intimately associated with contemporary media depictions of Latina identity are best understood as reflective of the historical
moment, or a time in which Latinas subjectivities and bodies sign in for the growing Latina/o
population and the anxieties that these demographic shifts prompt within dominant culture
(2004b). Targets of both gendering and racialization, Latina media texts are perceived as
possessing intrinsically less value and power than their masculine counterparts, promoting
a double-edged construction of femininity and otherness (Molina-Guzmn and Valdivia
2004, 206). Yet the bodies attached to these Latina images are not entirely devoid of agency.
To the contrary, the very hybridity that renders the Latina body so suspect within dominant
culture is also that which imbues it with the fluidity necessary to disrupt traditional notions
of ethno-racial and national identity, sexuality, and class (Barrera 2001, 409; Molina-Guzmn
and Valdivia 2004, 214). Indeed, some Latina media stars (Rita Hayworth, Rita Moreno, and
Jennifer Lopez being relevant contemporary examples) have harnessed their own liminal
ethno-racial locations in a concerted effort to maximize their career potential at a given
historical moment, a relatively privileged brand of movement that Pea Ovalle (2011, 78)
refers to as racial mobility.
With Latina Feminist Media Studies, star texts, or the public discourse associated with
Latina celebrities beyond the parameters of their actual performances, thus form a wellestablished area of post-feminist scholarly interest, particularly in relationship to the Latina/o
body (Aparicio 2003; Bez 2006, 2008; Barrera 2001; Beltrn 2002, 2009; Cepeda 2003, 2008,
2010; Habell-Palln 1999, 2005; Katynka Z. Martnez 2008; Myra Mendible 2007; MolinaGuzmn 2010; Molina-Guzmn and Valdivia 2004; Frances Negrn-Muntaner 1997, 2004;
Paredez 2009; Pea Ovalle 2011; Valdivia 2000, 2007, 2010; Vargas 2012). The star texts associated with Latina or non-white stars have proven of considerable import in the process of
demarcating public identities and power, given that, as Beltrn observes, social and racial
hierarchies are both reflected in and reinforced by a nations system of stardom (2002,
72). As the theoretical prism through which much of the scholarship on Latina/o media
representation to date has been realized, the Latina body has clearly emerged as a locus
of what Bez (2006) describes as competing tensions, or, as Molina-Guzmn and Valdivia
assert, a site in which a sense of desire linked to Otherness is contradictorily intertwined
with non-normative phenotypical features and sexuality (2004, 213). The Latina body is thus
framed as an undisciplined vessel far from containment, as evidenced in Negrn-Muntaners
classic commentary on Jennifers butt:
A big culo does not only upset hegemonic (white) notions of beauty and good taste, it is a sign for
the dark, incomprehensible excess of Latino and other African diaspora cultures. Excess of food
(unrestrained), excess of shitting (dirty), and excess of sex (heathen) are its three vital signs. Like
hegemonic white perceptions of Latinos, big butts are impractical and dangerous. (1997, 189)

Hypervisible and frequently reduced to a singular body part that signs in for their racialized
sexuality (Barrera 2001, 408) (i.e., Jennifer Lopezs rear end, Shakiras hips, and Sofa Vergaras

FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES

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breasts), Latina media bodies are thus hailed as examples of the domestic and global markets increased tolerance for difference, yet simultaneously discursively policed for failing
to conform to established hegemonic norms.
The many scholarly case studies dedicated to theorizing the complex relationship between
the growing transnational Latina/o markets and the increased yet still frequently problematic
media visibility of Latinas clearly illustrate the manner in which political investment of the
body is bound up, in accordance with complex reciprocal relations, with its economic use
(Michel Foucault 1995, 2526). Cast as the body of choice within global media markets, the
female body of color is the object of emphatically embodied media coverage, particularly in
contrast to media representations of white women, including white or light-skinned Latinas
(Molina-Guzmn 2010, 20; Valdivia 2007, 139). Indeed, as Valdivia demonstrates, it is via the
calculated usage of sexualized Latina femininity embedded within the specific expressions
of gender and sexuality present within consumer culture that the transnational Latina/o
community/market earns recognition on the global stage (2011, 53). It is as both a cultural
as well as an economic commodity, then, that the Latina body has been framed within
Latina/o Feminist Media Studies. The multiple ways in which Latina/o audiences interpret
and ultimately employ these media texts in daily life, moreover, have emerged as the fields
single most other productive area of inquiry since the turn of the twentieth century.

Latina/o Feminist Audience Studies: building on frustration theory

One of the most common ways of doing genderindeed, of doing difference in general
occurs via media consumption (Gill 2007, 25). Nevertheless, within recent years mainstream
Feminist Media Studies has been characterized by its sharp critique of Audience Studies and
indeed of ethnographic projects in general. This work has contributed to the development
of women of color Audience Studies precisely at a moment in which Feminist Media Studies
research on textual representation predominates. It is noteworthy, therefore, that various
Latina/o Feminist Media Studies scholars have pursued empirical scholarship dedicated
to audience dynamics, overtly rejecting the tendency to assume that white metropolitan
consumers stand in for audiences everywhere (Radhika E. Parameswaran 2003, 311, 314).
Within this context, Valdivias essay Women of Color in the Audience: Reception Analysis
Meets Frustration Theory (2000) has impacted the recent upsurge in Latina Feminist Audience
Studies research, as characterized by the work of Jillian M. Bez (2008, forthcoming), Casillas
(2014), Cepeda (2008), Mara Elena Cepeda and Alejandra Rosales (forthcoming), MolinaGuzmn (2010), Yeidy M. Rivero (2003), Rojas (2004), Felicity Amaya Schaeffer (2012), and
Vargas (2008, 2009), among others. Valdivias sharp commentary regarding the near-absolute
dearth of women of color Feminist Audience Studies research at the turn of the century constitutes a necessary call for change. Her critique underscores the rigid ethno-racial binaries
dominating reception scholarship, as well as its overemphasis on pleasure, a stance that she
contends risks erasing the very real labor attached to the irate or frustrated readings often
produced by women of color informants (2000, 149163, 167169). Despite the additional
logistical labors, the ethical issues, and methodological considerations involved in undertaking research centering on Latina/women of color audiences (Valdivia 2000, 163169),
the marked increase in the number of recent publications devoted to Latina/o Feminist
Audience Studies demonstrates a genuine intellectual and political engagement with the
problematics that Valdivia cites. More importantly, the transnational orientation of much
Latina/o Feminist Audience Studies problematizes the very category of audience posited

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as an either/or (global/local; global/domestic) proposition. Instead, it reframes the audiences as an unpredictable nexus of the local and global (Shome 2006, 264265; emphasis
in original), much in the same way that the Latina/o music industry conducts its marketing
efforts, targeting Latin American and Latina/o consumers as inextricably linked entities.
Much of this research is resolutely self-reflexive in nature, with some of its proponents
skillfully responding to the call for deeper ethnographic engagement, thereby avoiding the
tendency to limit Audience Studies to questions of media content or informant interpretation at the expense of considering the broader social context. Such an approach reduces
informants to mere circuit[s] of information, lacking any status beyond their role as conduits
for information regarding media content (Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian
Larkin 2002, 19). Notably, the methods employed by many in this growing group of scholars
meaningfully integrate the strengths of textual analysis with ethnographic engagement,
ultimately providing a more nuanced understanding of both the informants social context
as well as the media formats themselves. Such an approach offers a critical interdisciplinary
perspective on the singular role that increasingly visible Latina consumers play in the transnational media context.

The paradoxes of increased visibility

The most recent Latina/o media boom and the status of Latinas/os as the United States
largest ethno-racial minority have irrevocably altered the ways in which US media markets
are constructed, media formats are employed, and issues such as gender, ethno-racial identity, and nation are understood in the transnational context. However, to date most Feminist
Media Studies specialists have as a rule failed to meaningfully engage the work of Latina
Feminist Media Studies established and/or emerging scholars (Valdivia 2008, 1314), most
often treating the category of Latina instead as a liminal add-on category designed to fill
in the (newest) gap alongside African-American women in peripheral discussions pertaining to women of color feminisms and the media. To persist in the practice of mechanically
expanding the category of US woman of color and/or attempting to adopt a transnational
analytical perspective via the superficial insertion of Latinas ultimately perpetuates the discursive construction of whiteness as the long-standing, unspoken force that molds feminist
theory and praxis in unreflexive, exclusionary fashion (Carrillo Rowe 2000, 77).
Suspicion is a potent force driving feminist theory and praxis (Valdivia 1995, 13). The suspicions and critiques outlined in the preceding pages are therefore leveled in the hope of fostering dialogue and substantive intellectual interchange across various cohorts of Feminist
Media Studies scholars, as Mary C. Beltrn encourages (2011, 21). In sum, the institutional
and scholarly gaps dividing those specializing in Ethnic Feminist Media Studies and those
scholars dedicated to mainstream Feminist Media Studies are still far too considerableand
the scholars in these fields collectively pay the price for it, albeit to differential degrees. The
current status quo calls for more mindful practices of research and citation, ever aware of the
insidious fashion in which privilege is embedded within, as well as perpetuated by, everyday
scholarly choices. The line distinguishing what it means to be inconsiderate of scholarship
versus merely not considering it (McLaughlin 1995, 155) simply bears too much weight.
Latina/o Feminist Media Studies scholars therefore confront a considerable paradox, in
that the subjects that we study, our research, and we as scholars are rendered simultaneously
invisible and hypervisible (Amira Jarmakani 2011, 227). We are relegated to invisibility within
the wider terrain of Feminist Media Studies because with scant exception our collective

FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES

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body of research largely goes unexamined (and therefore uncited) by mainstream Feminist
Media Studies scholars. Yet Latina/o Feminist Media Studies specialists are also hypervisible due to the various markers of difference that we as scholars quite literally bring to the
feminist academic table and our institutions of employment. Much like the subjects that
we study, we inhabit a media-saturated society in which the commodification of Latinidad,
while lending greater visibility and in some cases voice to Latina/o media subjects, has also
resulted in the homogenization of all people, places, and things Latina/o (Molina-Guzmn
and Valdivia 2004, 218).
The challenges that hybrid Latina/o media texts level at the rigid ethno-racial binaries
and univocal understandings of national identity permeating US media cultureparticularly within visual mediaultimately impact the totality of feminist scholarly activity (Pea
Ovalle 2011; Valdivia 1995, 13; 2004a, 109). If teaching offers us a unique opportunity to
undiscipline the classroom (Spigel 2004, 12171218), and more emphatically the ways
in which our students and we ourselves conceptualize (and aspire to complicate) the
intersection of gender, ethno-racial identity, class, sexuality, and national origins, then
Latina/o Feminist Media Studies offer the ideal platform from which to engage in such
critiques across borders. Indeed, the contemporary re-mapping of Spanish-language and
Latina/o-centered media is prompting economic shifts, shaping how we conceptualize the
nation (Castaeda 2008, 64), and in the process troubling any attempts at neat distinctions
between local and global media production, circulation, and reception. As matters stand,
however, a deeply relational, transnational approach to women of color and mediain fact, a
truly twenty-first century, global understanding of the complex dynamics binding categories
of difference and media, periodwill simply not be realized until Latina/o Feminist Media
Studies is meaningfully embraced within the broader Feminist Media Studies conversation.

Notes
1.Among the varied nomenclature employed within the broader field of Latina/o Studies, I
utilize the phrase Latina/o Feminist Media Studies for two primary reasons. First, it is the
most gender-inclusive, transparent language currently employed by specialists. Second, the
inclusion of the masculine Latino attached to Feminist Media Studies reflects the small but
expanding scholarly work dedicated to issues of Latino masculinities and media (see Casillas
2008, 2014; Cepeda and Rosales, forthcoming; Habell-Palln 1999, 2005; Carmen Lugo-Lugo
2012). Another important distinction is to be drawn between Latina/o Media Studies research
that focuses on gender as a key variable and that which highlights gender within a feminist
framework. Following Mendes and Carter (2008, 1701), I maintain that these two forms of
research differ in that the latter is intersectional in its approach to categories of difference
and explicitly oriented toward the realization of gender justice. For the purposes of this essay,
I am interested in the second strand of scholarship.
2.Transnational Spanish-language media is targeted at Spanish speakers, whereas transnational
Latina/o-centered media may be produced in Spanish, English, or a combination of the two
languages.
3.As posited by Frances R. Aparicio and Susana Chvez-Silverman, for Latinas/os, selftropicalization is an oppositional strategy that entails standing the dominant cultures
stereotypes and images on their heads from the margins, resemanticizing them from
hegemonic tools into discursive weapons of resistance (1997, 12).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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M.E. CEPEDA

Notes on contributor

Mara Elena Cepeda is Associate Professor of Latina/o Studies at Williams College, where she focuses
on Ethnic and Feminist Studies approaches to transnational Latina/o media and popular culture.
Cepeda is the author of Musical ImagiNation: US-Colombian Identity and the Latin Music Boom (New
York University Press), and co-editor with Dolores Ins Casillas of The Routledge Companion to Latina/o
Media (Routledge, forthcoming). E-mail: mcepeda@williams.edu

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