Semiophors and Sexual Systems

What is it about?

This paper examines physical and linguistic sites through which women and words about women circulate along Latin America’s Interoceanic Road, running from the Brazilian to the Peruvian coast. I argue that the discourse on women circulates with specific linguistic-packaging, made and remade at different sites. In analyzing how these sites form a “cartography of communicability” (Briggs), I follow Marilena Chauí, who employs the term “semiophor” to refer to people and things that once pulled out of daily circulation, take on new meanings beyond their material existence. I seek to complicate the socially viable/acceptable identities offered/imposed upon these women—victim or voluntary agent. I assert that to avoid resinscriptions of difference that “muzzle the subaltern” (Spivak), one must practice ethnographic vigilance.

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Why is it important?

In this article, I examine what questions and problems come attached to the region that we study, the language(s) that is (are) spoken and how to show the plurality of both without losing precision and truth in representation. What analytical and linguistic genealogies of thought and life-worlds does the researcher inherit? The Spanish and Portuguese colonial efforts produced and left fictions that went beyond the liberty afforded by magical realism and manifested in productive as well as destructive consequences. How one speaks and writes about race, nature, and history becomes a conversation that also involves disease, violence, and poverty.

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