In January 2000, two Chilean architects received a grant from the government’s funding organization for culture, Fondart, to construct a glass house in the center of Santiago. The project was named “Nautilus” and the house was designed so that viewers could watch the everyday activities of the inhabitant, the young and attractive actress, Daniela Tobar, as she did her household chores, showered, bathed and went about her daily business. Intended to make people reflect on private space, the house attracted huge crowds to witness intimate life that was ordinarily hidden from view. Welcomed by those for whom it symbolized the new transparency, the public display of nudity aroused some darker sentiments.
The installation of the glass house on a public thoroughfare coincided with the opening of La Moneda Palace, which had been closed to the public for 30 years. “Both,” wrote Alberto Luengo in El Mostrador “are exhibitionist projects that are intended to make what is ordinarily hidden, transparent and to focus the attention of passersby, ‘the people,’ on phenomena that have hitherto been neglected, deprived of meaning and hence have been exaggerated (in people’s minds).” He compared the reclamation of the Moneda as public space to the public display of the naked body whose exposure had always been taboo in Chile.[1] But although a public opinion poll concluded that 54% of the viewers regarded the installation as a cultural event and not as exhibitionism, what drew the mostly male crowd to the glass house was not the chance to reflect on privacy nor on the body politic, but voyeurism and worse. Excited spectators crowded around the house causing traffic problems, especially at times when Daniela was likely to take a shower, sometimes insulting her, sometimes inciting her to strip. A woman who resembled the actress was stripped naked by excited men before being rescued by the police. Psychiatrists and sexologists were invited to debate voyeurism. Daniela became so distraught by the scandal that she had to have a bodyguard and she later withdrew from the project, to be replaced by a male actor.
Meanwhile the press was having a field day. “Santiago is burning,” “Naked. Naked,” “Tumult Downtown” shrieked the headlines. The conservative daily El Mercurio snidely calculated the amount of money that had been spent in order to put on display “the bland curves” of the “lola”—9,400 “pitolines” (bucks)—and gloated: “You can see everything inside, how she showers, how she sits on the toilet to pee,” making much of the fact that Daniela did not wear a bra. Many articles in this and other papers made liberal use of racy Chilean slang as if to underscore that this particular art did not merit serious treatment.
The incident not only put unreconstructed male sexuality on the front page, but raised the problem of the public funding of problematic art in a way that was comparable to the scandal over the Brooklyn Museum’s “Sensation” exhibition in 1999. But most significant of all it showed up the murky side of the “transparency” that is now the current buzzword in political discourse.
Transparency is the good housekeeping seal of approval for new democracies, a word used by Honduran generals, Southern Cone politicians and U.S. diplomats and businessmen alike to mark the difference between the clear present and the dark corruption and secrecy of the past. It became the image of a new beginning when the organizers of Chile’s pavilion at the Seville World’s Fair in l992 towed an iceberg from the Antarctic and put it on display as the national symbol—one that was white, pure, cool and, of course, transparent. The culture critic, Nelly Richard, commented that this natural marvel was intended to obliterate any reference to the historical Chile, to the insurrection and disorder of the past, erasing ideological references in order to transmit a cool white message that distanced it from dark tropical America.[2]
But the glass house incident showed how tricky transparency can be, for while it made the obvious point that everything in modern society is now treated as spectacle, it also demonstrated how easily in a consumer society transparency can be confused with commodification, in this case the commodification of the female body that seemed to invite immediate gratification. The rogue males who gathered round the house were certainly not contemplating a new and more open stage of Chilean history, but engaged in a voyeurism that the house seemed to encourage.
If there is a lesson to be drawn from the glass house, it is that the common notion that enlightened attitudes to sexuality come with modernization is a shaky one. This is a point made by Lia Zanotta Machado, who studied men imprisoned for rape in a federal prison in Brazil. She pointed out that their violence is not the survival of something archaic, some primitive throwback that is about to disappear with modernization, but a reinscription of the code of masculinity “within the generalized values of an individualist society,” in which social success is no longer connected to work. According to Zanotta Machado, the belief in the social construction of gender can blind us to the obstinate persistence of male domination and to the deep-rooted nature of sexual difference, which is still operative in postmodern societies. Further, where religious restraints have been relaxed and laws are not enforced, when societal values are hedonistic and narcissistic, there is an explosive articulation of masculine desire now turned towards uninhibited acquisition by any means.[3]
The chronicles and testimonials of young criminals and sicarios in Venezuela and Colombia illustrate this articulation of hedonism with violence.[4] Whereas honor used to be staked on female virtue, status has now migrated to clothing, motorcycles and guns. According to these accounts, adolescent boys kill for brand names, for Nike shoes as if immediate gratification can only be satisfied by violence. By describing themselves as “desechable”—disposable as is any consumer product—the boys acknowledge that death too is part of a cycle of consumption. Like the rapists studied by Zanotta Machado, they regard crime as an assertion of virility. The conjunction of crime, consumerism and “hombría” exposes the contradictions between the permissiveness of the market (and eventually the anarchy it encourages) and the demand for control, discipline and punishment.
During the 1980s and 1990s, there were unprecedented openings for the public discussion of sexuality made possible by the political mobilization of women, gays and transvestites. Hitherto suppressed voices now had “permission to speak” not only in public demonstrations, but on popular television shows such as Cristina. Fiction and poetry explored women’s sexuality, gay and lesbian love, and the tragedy of AIDS. Debate feminista, published in Mexico, Feminaria, published in Buenos Aires, the Revista de crítica cultural and Nomadías, published in Chile, and Cadernos Pagú, published in São Paulo, were just some of the journals founded over the last two decades that have explored these issues. What distinguishes many of these journals is their commitment both to political action and to the broadening of feminist debate beyond national and disciplinary boundaries. The global reach and sophisticated analyses of Latin American feminism were impressively on display at the Beijing conference and the Huairou forum of nongovermental organizations in l995 at the close of which the Peruvian feminist, Virginia Vargas, spoke confidently of the capacity of this regional feminism to create “new utopias.”[5]
In the midst of this optimism there were also sober warnings of new kinds of difficulties that faced women and other minorities, given the uneven and problematic consequences of modernization in which the openness and transparency promised by neoliberal governments are simultaneously inhibited not only by violence and fear, but also by conservative pressure groups and particularly the Catholic Church. In many countries, and nowhere more than Chile, there is a disjunction between what can be said (almost everything) and what can be done—between transparency and prohibition. That is why cultural projects such as the glass house that reveal and provoke public debate around these issues are significant.
One of the projects of feminism as well as of gay and transvestite movements has been the destabilization of hegemonic gender categories especially in the wake of the military governments. Because of their visible defiance of the conventional attributes of gender, lesbians and transvestites are often represented as cultural vanguards, whose rejection of society’s categorization of male and female is transgressive not only of the state but of the traditional left because of their redefinition of masculinity. In l986, the Chilean writer and performance artist, Pedro Lemebel read a manifesto at a conference of the left in Santiago, “Hablo por mi diferencia” (“I speak from my difference”), in which he spoke of the roundup and the execution of transvestites by the military government in a year “that the Human Rights Comission doesn’t remember.” At the same time, he also targeted left militants, asserting: “I leave the gun to you and your cold blood and it is not out of fear… My manliness did not come from the party / Because they mocked and rejected me. / I learned it in the hard battle of those years.” And he concluded, “I am more subversive than you are.”[6]
In l995, the artist Juan Dávila launched a different kind of attack on the heroic male narrative: He circulated postcards depicting a transvestite and mestizo Bolívar on horseback, his shirt open to reveal female breasts. The Venezuelan government issued a heated protest, and although the project had received government funding, it was quickly denounced in official circles in Chile as being in bad taste or worse. Commenting on the protests, the critic Nelly Richard, described them as desperate attempts to reassert traditional values at a time when all values had become commutable in the market place.[7]
In an action in Buenos Aires that would have been unthinkable under the military government, the transvestite Lohana tore up her identity card outside a government office after being told to dress as a man in order for her photograph to be acceptable to the authorities. In an interview, she explained: “We are the living proof that one can be something different from man or woman; one can be a transvestite, for example. So we who construct the transvestite, we are those who are born with certain genitals and they give us a sex, a gender and socialize us and we then say it doesn’t suit me. What I want is to construct my identity, autoconstruct my identity in a different gender.”[8] Like the glass house, Dávila’s transvestite Bolívar and Lohana’s actions were cultural interventions that openly transgressed conventional representations.
But while Lohana’s self-fashioning was couched in terms that, however subversive of the state bureaucracy, were perfectly compatible with individualistic neoliberal values, both the glass house and the transvestite Bolívar raised more awkward questions. Both were publicly funded art works that nevertheless challenged hegemonic discourse—both were deeply controversial. The Bolívar made transparent what had been hidden—the mestizo and the female—by the heroic masculine narrative. The glass house that was intended to show the disappearance of privacy in the modern world had the unintended but interesting effect of stripping not only the actress but the public as well.
The body, clothed or unclothed, is a site of cultural conflict that is nothing so simple as “good tradition” and “bad modernity” or vice versa. While on the one hand, identity is no longer imprisoned in a narrow definition of sexual difference, images of the body are increasingly standardized according to global specifications. The Colombian soap opera, Betty La Fea (Ugly Betty), could not be more explicit in this regard, as Betty’s starchy petty bourgeois (and Catholic) family values are assaulted by the fashion industry for which she works. Will ugly Betty be made over to become a glamorous global sexpot or will she stubbornly hang on to her native modesty and her aversion to putting her body on display? The end is not yet in sight, but the popularity of the soap opera and its offshoots—”ugliness” contests—suggest that it touches a sensitive nerve of class and racial definitions of beauty and ugliness. The body, long unackowledged in political thought, is now a major site of contention.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jean Franco is Professor Emerita of Spanish Literature at Columbia Universtiy. Her most recent books are Critical Passions (Duke University Press, 2000), and Cultural Revolutions: Latin American Culture During the Cold War (forthcoming from Harvard University Press, 2001).
NOTES
1. Alberto Luengo, “Casa cerrada,” El Mostrador (Santiago), March 22, 2000. http://www.elmostrador.cl/
2. Nelly Richard, “El modelaje gráfico de una identidad publicitaria,” Residuos y metáforas: Ensayos de crítica cultural sobre el Chile de la Transición (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, l998), pp.163-177.
3. Lia Zanotta Machado “Masculinidade, Sexualidad e Estupro. As constucoes da virilidade,” Cadernos Pagú (São Paulo: Unicamp, l998), pp. 232-273.
4. Sicario is the name given to a paid assassin. See José Roberto Duque and Boris Muñoz, La ley de la calle: Testimonios de jóvenes protagonistas de la violencia en Caracas (Caracas: Fundarte, 1995); Alonzo Salazar, Born to Die in Medellín (New York: Monthly Review Press, n.d.).
5. Virginia Vargas, “Declaración de América Latina y el Caribe,” Debate feminista (Mexico: Año 6, Vol. 12, October l995) pp. 75-78.
6. Pedro Lemebel, “Hablo por mi diferencia,” Loco afán. Crónicas del sidario (Santiago: Ediciones Lom, l994), pp. 83-90.
7. Nelly Richard, “Turbiedad, anacronismo y degeneraciones,” in Residuos y metáforas, pp.179-198.
8. Unpublished interview with Irina Mendieta.
