Representación del cuerpo, el género y la «raza» en Vida y muerte de la mulata. Una historia que se repite

Abstract

In this essay, I will focus on and deliberate about the idea of «la mulata» derived from the hegemonic narratives in Cuban art, science, and literature of the second half of the XIXth century. Here I am interested in the images, or lack thereof, fashioning the mulatto body and what was their intention behind such signifiers. I use the interpretative keys to intersectional feminism and an interdisciplinary methodology applied to the study of this sexualizing and racializing representations of bodies. I suggest that the mulatto woman is a discursive construct of otherness (re)signifying the objectification of the black body. This cultural artifice allows for the continuation of the harm inflicted on Cuban afro-descendant women by the colonialist imagery on race, class, and gender.