Suchergebnisse

This essay reviews the following works:Making Up the Difference: Women, Beauty, and Direct Selling in Ecuador. By Erynn Masi de Casanova. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. Pp. xix + 239. $55.00 cloth: ISBN: 9780292723863.Dolores del Río: Beauty in Light and Shade. By Linda B. Hall. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. Pp. xvi + 358. $60 cloth. ISBN: 9780804784078.Queen for a Day: Transformistas, Beauty Queens, and the Performance of Femininity in Venezuela. By Marcia Ochoa. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Pp. xi + 277. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 9780822356264.Of Beasts and Beauty: Gender, Race, and Identity in Colombia. By Michael Edward Stanfield. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013. Pp. x + 280. $60.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780292745582.Beauty and the Beast. By Michael Taussig. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Pp. x + 172. $18.00 paper. ISBN: 9780226789866.

This essay analyzes two contemporary Hollywood films—Fools Rush In (1997) and McFarland, USA (2015)—to highlight the mainstream imaginary of the relationship between Mexicanness and whiteness. We argue that these fi lms reveal how the existence and persistence of an emotionally impoverished whiteness becomes visible beside, against, and through Mexican affective fullness. We develop the term "white lack" to represent how whiteness, in all its modernity and focus on individual autonomy, is exposed as incomplete and even insufficient once it knows and "feels" the warmth and abundance of Mexicanness. We show that the political logics of white lack reveal a yearning not just for human connection but also for a different social order and relationship to place. Yet even as these fi lms gesture toward moments of interracial harmony and anticapitalist possibilities, they both retain the centrality of the white hegemonic gaze; indeed, Mexican affective fullness must be contained and reabsorbed into the body of whiteness by the end of each film.