Nationalisms & Sexualities

Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, Patricia Yaeger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138340909
• eBook ISBN: 9780429802768
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally published in 1992, Nationalisms and Sexualities addresses questions of how notions of identity are shaped by discussions of nationalism and sexuality. The book looks at a variety of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, on a wide range of geographical regions and historical moments. The volume departs from social scientific paradigms that treat nation and sexuality as discrete and autonomous entities. Its contributors respond instead to emerging issues that redefine the horizons of what is globally considered today as "the political": how the formation of sexual, gendered, racial, and/or class identities have contributed to the formation of sexual, gendered, racial, and/or class identities, and vice versa; how technologies of representation play a role in the constitution of national and sexual identities; how colonialism and postcolonialism have altered consolidations of national and sexual identities.

Part I
(De) Colonizing Gender

Chapter 1

Don (Juanito) Duck and the Imperial-Patriarchal Unconscious: Disney Studios, the Good Neighbor Policy, and the Packaging of Latin America

Julianne Burton

Title Song

“We’re Three Caballeros”

(Sung to the tune of “Que Lindo es Jalisco”¹)

We’re three caballeros

Three gay caballeros

They say we are birds of a feather

We’re happy amigos

No matter where he goes,

Where one two and three goes,

We’re always together.

We’re three happy chappies

with snappy serapes

You’ll find us beneath our sombreros

We’re brave and we’ll say so

We’re bright as a peso.

“Who say so?” “We say so!”

The three caballeros.

Through fair or stormy weather

We stand close together

Like books on a shelf

Guitars here beside us

To play as we go

We sing and we samba

We shout, “Ay, caramba!”

“What means ‘Ay, caramba!’?”

Oh yes, I don’t know.

Like brother to brother,

We’re all for each other

Like three caballeros

Together we’ll stay.

Through fair or stormy weather

We stand close together

Like books on a shelf

and friends though we may be

When some Latin baby

Says yes, no or maybe,

Each man is for himself!

In the summer of 1987, with the runaway success of Luis Valdez’s La Bamba, Hollywood suddenly opened its eyes (and its pocketbook) to the Hispanic. Robert Redford’s The Milagro Beanfield War, Jane Fonda’s Old Gringo and the Edward James Olmos vehicle Stand and Deliver were all part of what looks, in retrospect, like only a brief spark of interest, though it was hyped at the time as a veritable fireball. Numerous articles predicting the imminent Latinization of Hollywood appeared in the press.² In May 1988, Geraldo Rivera produced “Heyday for Hispanics in Hollywood.” That August, Newsweek dedicated an entire issue to America’s Latino population, emphasizing the arts and putting Olmos on the cover.

That transitory and transparently opportunistic fascination was not the first time that Hollywood has “looked Latin.” The logistic and propagandists exigencies of World War II prompted a similar “about face.” This was the era of Dolores del Rio, Lupe Velez, Cesar Romero, Desi Arnaz, and the self-caricaturing but nonetheless emblematic Carmen Miranda, when Latin rhythms and entertainers were all the rage and hosts of Hollywood stars went “Flying Down to Rio” or “Down Argentine Way” or spent “A Weekend in Havana”—to name just a few titles from the period. Made-in-Hollywood-USA and exported en masse to Latin American screens, many of these projective constructs of a northern imaginary struck Latin Americans as distorted and demeaning. There is a long history of protests registered by country after country (Brazil over Rio’s Road to Hell [1931], Cuba over Cuban Love Song [1931], Mexico over Girl of the Rio [1932] and Viva Villa! [1934]) in response to the condescending images of Latin-ness elaborated in Hollywood.”³

This essay undertakes to examine one instance of the intricate process of appropriation and projection through which one Hollywood dream factory constructed its Other(s)—an exceptional instance that, despite the best intentions and a wealth of creative talent and effort, seems to prove the rule of cross-cultural borrowing as self-aggrandizing appropriation, of Good-Neighborliness as foil for empire-building-as-usual.

Cartoons are an unlikely vehicle for propaganda. Disney is an unlikely locus of lasciviousness. Yet in addition to predictable fun, frolic and fireworks, The Three Caballeros (1945) indulges its audience in scenes of cross-dressing and cross-species coupling, of blatant sexual punning and predation, in tales of conquest in which the patriarchal unconscious and the imperial unconscious insidiously overlap. What, we ask ourselves as we begin to glimpse these invested meanings coalescing beneath the film’s chaotic surface exuberance, do kids make of this? What did the Latin Americans make of it? What did the Disney staff make of it even while they were making it? Why is this film so different from the prototypical Disney product? These questions, which initially lead us from the film to the history of the project which engendered it, will eventually bring us back to the film and a series of propositions about its textual operations and ideological effects.

FAR FROM INNOCENCE

Precisely because of their assumed innocence and innocuousness, their inherent ability—even obligation—to defy all conventions of realistic representation, animated cartoons offer up a fascinating zone within which to examine how a dominant culture constructs its subordinates. As a nonphotographic application of a photographie medium, they are freed from the basic cinematic expectation that they convey an “impression of reality.” (The phrase belongs to the influential French critic Andre Bazin, who theorized that images from the real world press themselves upon the celluloid like a fingerprint.) The function and essence of cartoons is in fact the reverse: the impression of irreality, of intangible and imaginary worlds in chaotic, disruptive, subversive collision. Animated cartoons reinforce this otherworldliness when their “subjects” are not humanoid but “animaloid,” and in this category, Disney stands über alles.

The myth of the unassailable ideological innocence of Disney’s anthropomorphic zoology was shattered in 1971 with the publication of Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart’s pathbreaking How to Read Donald Duck.⁴ This intellectually ingenious and politically explosive little paperback cut to the measure of a comic book applied sophisticated interpretive methodologies derived from advanced literary and communications theory to examples of “low” or “popular” culture—in this case, Disney comic strips. Writing in Chile in the first year of Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity coalition, Dorfman (a Chilean) and Mattelart (a Belgian) exposed the imperialist subtext lurking behind the façade of innocuous and “childish” entertainment, revealin1g all its underlying racist and chauvinist biases. One of their most intriguing arguments highlights the asexuality of sex/gender relations in this Disneyan universe of cousins and uncles, from which any acknowledgement of direct biological reproduction—not just maternity but paternity as well—has mysteriously vanished. Intriguingly, the authors argue that rather than undermining unchallenged patriarchal authority, this omission reinforces it.⁵

The Three Caballeros and the set of films of which it is the culmination are another product of the “collective unconscious” of that culture-industry-cumempire known as Walt Disney Productions. The Three Caballeros was released in 1945, when Disney’s reputation was at its zenith. (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the studio’s first animated feature, had been released in 1937, to be followed by Fantasia in 1940, Dumbo in 1941, and Bambi in 1942.) For some, The Three Caballeros’s principle interest lies in its technical accomplishment. It offers the first sustained mixing of live action and animation within the same frame in a color feature. The technology which Disney developed (multiplane cameras and three-color Technicolor processes) provided the basis for the 1988 tour de force Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and its sequels. But for others, the film’s principal interest lies in an intriguing anomaly: The Three Caballeros does not exhibit the characteristic censorship mechanisms identified by Dorfman and Mattelart in the Disney comics and so familiar to anyone reared on a diet of Disney entertainments. Instead of Disney’s trademark—“sexless sexiness” in James Agee’s apt phrase⁶—The Three Caballeros parades rampant (masculine) desire and the explosive results of its repeated frustration. How are we to understand this temporary suspension of a virtually emblematic inhibition?

The Three Caballeros also lays claim to considerable significance because it, and the related set of documentary travelogues, animated cartoons and live-action/animation combinations which led up to it, are the product of a concerted effort to expiate the past sins of North American cultural chauvinism, to replace hollow and hackneyed stereotypes with representations of Latin Americans ostensibly rendered on their own terms. How did this self-correcting enterprise come about?

These two apparently unrelated questions are the point of departure for what follows.

THE SCOOP ON “EL GROUPO”

As World War II loomed in Europe and Asia, the United States government registered concern about the allegiances of the Latin American nations. According to the image-historian Allen Woll:

[From 1939] with the growing threat of war with Germany, the United States appeared eager to ease any remaining tensions with South American governments in order to maintain hemispheric unity as a bulwark against foreign invasion…. Roosevelt explained the basis for his vigorous reassertion of the Good Neighbor Policy: “I began to visualize a wholly new attitude toward other American Republics based on an honest and sincere desire, first, to remove from their minds all fear of American aggression—territorial or financial—and, second, to take them into a kind of hemispheric partnership in which no Republic would take undue advantage.”⁷

Nelson Rockefeller, director of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, and his assistant John Hay Whitney, head of the Motion Picture Section, extended their functions beyond regulation and into production. According to Woll, Rockefeller and Whitney “were instrumental in the hiring of Walt Disney ‘as the first Hollywood producer of motion pictures specifically intended to carry a message of democracy and friendship below the Rio Grande’” (55). Whitney claimed that Disney “would show the truth about the American Way” in a series of “direct propaganda films couched in the simplicity of the animation medium” (55). Disney’s South American project was thus built upon a self-conscious disposition formulated at high levels of national government to represent Latin being, culture and experience with authenticity and respect for intra-regional as well as inter-regional variations.

Between 1941 and 1943,⁸ Walt Disney, his wife, and a score of staff members made three trips south of the border in search of the “raw material” for this Good Neighbor initiative. The material they collected was eventually rendered into nearly two dozen films, both shorts and features, both educational and escapist, both—in the prevailing terminology—“direct and indirect propaganda.”⁹ Entertainment shorts like El Gaucho Goofy and Pluto and the Armadillo and educational films like The Grain That Built a Hemisphere and Cleanliness Brings Health are, from the present perspective, merely byproducts of a venture whose central importance revolves around a trilogy of films which convey a totalizing account of this cross-cultural journey: South of the Border with Disney (1941), Saludos Amigos (1943) and, in particular, The Three Caballeros (1945). As a composite, these films move progressively away from the literal to the figurative and from the experiential to the imaginary.

South of the Border With Disney is a thoroughly conventional travelogue, a “documentary diary” of the Disney group’s original Latin American tour which Disney himself narrates. For lack of a more qualified cameraman, Disney also shot the images of “El Groupo” (as they syncretically dubbed themselves), their hosts, and their forays. South of the Border exhibits only occasional scraps of animation as it depicts the “birth” of various cartoon figures who will not be fully “embodied” until the two subsequent films. Joe Carioca, the fast-talking, cigar-smoking, umbrella-toting parrot from Rio makes his first appearance here as a series of uninked, backgroundless two-color pencil sketches, briefly and provisionally animated to perform an incipient samba.

Saludos Amigos retraces the same basic itinerary, but this time several animated characters assume a more central role. This anthology film, tied together with documentary footage of the Disney junket, is composed of four discrete shorts: Donald Duck’s adventures and misadventures at Bolivia’s Lake Titicaca in the company of animated llamas and real-life cholas (Bolivian peasant women in full skirts and derby hats); Pedro the little Chilean mail plane’s intrepid voyage over the Andes; Goofy as egregious gaucho in the Argentine; and, finally and most rewardingly, “Aquarela do Brasil” (“Watercolor of Brazil”) in which Joe Carioca introduces Donald Duck to samba, cachaça (cane liquor) and Rio nightclubs. This last seven and a half minute portion is animated to the strains of Ari Barroso’s mellifluous “Brazil” and a second, more percussive samba by Zequinha de Abreu, and features an animated watercolor brush delineating the action in lush tropical colors and textures. “Aquarela do Brasil” is proto-music video at its finest.¹⁰

Finally, in The Three Caballeros, as described in detail below, live action becomes fully subordinate to animation. The balance of the first film has been reversed: here personality assumes precedence over geography and literal depictions of place give way to more mythic geographies animated by imagination and desire. Each of these three films thus (re)inscribes the process of appropriation of the “genuinely” Latin American in more elaborate and intricate ways. In each successive effort, the process of cross-cultural appropriation and refiguration is more effectively displaced and transmuted.

Judging from the evidence offered in South of the Border with Disney, the dominant assumption beneath El Groupo’s good-neighborly enterprise was that culture is its material base and that these physical artifacts are transportable and translatable—subject not only to various means of pre- and post-mechanical reproduction but also subjectable to the artistic imaginations of the visiting Disneyites whose self-appointed mandate to refigure them in transculturating gestures is to be received by the locals as tribute rather than as expropriation. Countless ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Half Title
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Note on cover art
• Introduction
• Part I (De)Colonizing Gender
• Part II Tailoring the Nation
• Part III The Other Country
• Part IV Spectacular Bodies
• Part V “To Govern Is to Populate”
• Part VI Women, Resistance and the State
• Contributors