By: DaBreonna Doss
I ran across Jane the Virgin one day in hopes of finding a new series on Netflix. It is about this Latina girl who grows up on strict religious views. She lives with her grandmother and mother, whom was in the country illegally, and she falls in love with a white cop that one night crashed her party. Later, she goes into the doctor for a checkup but instead received an artificial insemination in place of a wife who could not get pregnant. The storyline exaggerates from there, however, there are a few themes that I specifically want to point out. These themes include Jane’s love story, her childhood background, and circumstances her Latina body is placed in.
The chapter Mobilizing the Latina Myth by author Priscilla Peña Ovalle in the book In Dance and the Hollywood Latina: Race, Sex, and Stardom exposes the myth of the Latina body and the ways in which Hollywood media and popular culture further these themes. Ovalle begins her analysis by exploring the reasons dance “effectively delivered the complex racial and sexual meanings that compose the myth of the Hollywood Latina” (Ovalle, 2011). She gives examples of Latina stars that started their careers as dancers. One of them being famous actor and star Jennifer Lopez. They exposed themselves as dancers until they gained the mobility to take their career in their own direction. Ovalle goes on to describe Latina bodies to be “oscillating between the normalcy of whiteness and the exoticism of blackness, Latinas function as in-between bodies to mediate and maintain the racial status quo”. She explains that as middle-men, Latinas have the ability to maneuver themselves to the more desired racialized representation (Ovalle, 2011). Her analysis furthers through identifying the sameness Latinas have with media through their accessible physical appearance,yet difference through a natural ability of dance. The final piece I’d like to point out is her analysis on the role a Latina woman’s significant other plays. She firmly states “If he is white, she is potentially an insufficient or temporary partner in the film’s narrative. If the Latina is cast opposite a Latino character… , the narrative or other cinematic codes suggest that she can find a better lover” (Ovalle, 2011).
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| Jane and the two lovers she is forced to choose from: the lover cop or her baby's father |
Netflix series Jane the Virgin is an astounding example of the many themes Ovalle talks about within her writing. The fact that Jane was able to maneuver from her blackness and into her whiteness when being caught throwing a party is deliberate. When going through flashbacks of Jane’s childhood they begin with her in dance school and show how dance would have came in handy. The wife (white) who was supposed to originally be inseminated expresses her extreme jealousy over Jane’s physical image and bubbly personality. This example highlights the idea of sameness versus difference for Latina women in media.
Lastly, Jane’s love story between the cop and her baby’s father. Jane begins with the cop, leaves him to be with the father, then comes back. Within the time of Jane being with the baby’s dad she found out about his father’s inheritance and how rich he was, his drug lord mother, and his now ex-wife doing things to her out of revenge. The chronologically placed scenes are essential to Ovalle explanation of a Latina significant other.
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| (Left to Right) Jane, Ex-wife, Baby's father, and son |
United States history has placed marginalized bodies in categories that fit its perception. As long as we ignore it, we will continue to reaffirm and reproduce those categories through the media and popular culture we consume. Ovalle analysis and Netflix series Jane the Virgin follow each other almost simultaneously. All I’m saying is… do we need more evidence?
Keywords: Latina, Ovalle, race, representation, sex
References
Ovalle, P. (2011). Mobilizing the Latina Myth. In Dance and the Hollywood Latina: Race, Sex, and
Stardom (pp. 1-23). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Word Count: 605
DaBreonna
ReplyDeleteApart from some persistent trouble with formatting and issues with punctuation, your post makes an important and welcome contribution to our class discussion.
Not only have you located an interesting piece of scholarship related to the representation of Latina bodies in US popular culture, you've productively applied this analysis into an original discussion of a cultural object that has yet to be examined in this fashion.
In other words, you've made "the leap" from restating what other scholars have said about such representations to successfully applying this work to inform your very own concise, yet incisive, discussion of Jane.
Combined with wider discussion of Latina/Latino representation in US media and popular culture, you've got the makings of a fine bit of original scholarship applicable in any number of courses: women's studies, Latina studies, and, of course, media studies.
Two suggestions moving forward: First, work on tidying up your writing from grammatical and punctuation errors. Second, work through this short essay and consider developing it into a sustained critical-cultural analysis of Jane in subsequent course work.
27 pts.