Situating Spectatorship: Latina and Chicana Responses to Representations in American Popular Culture (2015)

Undergraduates: Hillary Stroud, Carla Salas, Carolina Carrasco, Natalia Gonzalez Chavez, Manuela Nivia, Rachel Gelfand

Faculty Advisor: Michelle Robinson
Department: American Studies

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This project, developed as part of an honors thesis for the American Studies department, collects oral history interviews and firsthand testimonies that consider the politicized representations of Latina women in popular media. While existing academic texts on the subject tend to situate stereotypes of Latina women in cultural and historical contexts and set forth primarily structuralist critiques of media trends, this paper attempts instead to privilege the role of viewers in interpreting meaning through the lenses of cultural identity. The interview data contained herein function as individual case studies in theories of spectatorship and cultural identity contextualized by an existing body of Latina/o studies literature.
I began by studying the work of Stuart Hall in cultural studies and Chon Noriega, Charles Ram¿¿rez Berg, Mary Beltr¿¿n, and Myra Mendible, among others, in the field of Latina/o representation studies. I then conducted interviews with four Latina students from UNC-Chapel Hill. Combining the data, I identified certain aspects of representation that spectators prioritize while viewing, such as body type and sexuality, as well as certain factors that influence spectators¿¿¿ relationships to these aspects, such as educational background and location within power structures. I also theorize how the women I interviewed conceptualize themselves as media spectators. Finally, I generalize my findings in terms of cultural standards for evaluating contemporary media.