Core Post #5 - JLO

In Beltran’s “The Hollywood Latina Body as Site of Social Struggle,” Beltran explores white anxieties manifested in representations of the non-white body. In closing, Beltran argues that Jennifer Lopez isn’t just another “victim” to society’s deeply embedded Eurocentric beauty favoring, and consequently another ethnic, sexualized body. Rather, Beltran calls Jennifer Lopez “empowered and empowering,” via “asserting qualities such as intelligence, assertiveness, and power” while simultaneously boasting her not-white, not-tall, not-model-thin body as beautiful (82).

I really resonate with the idea of setting forth an alternative standard of beautiful, that is equally as beautiful as the white standard. However, as this article was written in 2002, I would argue that while many of Beltran’s ideas of white primacy make a lot of sense, and are reminiscent in today’s star representation, I largely oppose her structuring of the white, curveless body as the most stable and most powerful. And this is a good thing. Meaning, I argue that the thin, tall supermodel body is no longer the most highly desired, and that there exist a range of equally desirable bodies for the general public to strive for, and this is a very good thing. What’s more, modern media loves the butts of white celebrities – Blake Lively, Emily Ratajowski, Scarlet Johannson, Demi Lovato, Jennifer Lawrence, Miley Cyrus and much much more.

While it might be easy to attribute the swelling prominence of curved bodies in Hollywood to the rise of ethnic bodies like J-Lo, I would argue that this is a rather big claim, evidenced by big booty – white – predecessors like Bette Davis and Marilyn Monroe. However, Beltran’s claim that a white body is most desirable definitely has substance, especially on the grounds of the racial hierarchies of Latina and African American women in history. Here, Beltran writes that the black and Latina body were represented as the “sexualized Other,” “hypersexual,” “more in touch with their bodies,” and therefore inferior, all because of their exaggerated rear ends (81). Further, this exaggerated feature “presents” the woman who possesses the feature to the male gaze, and Beltran transfers this idea to the representation of J-Lo’s rear end in media, posing that she is also, “presenting.”

The idea that J-Lo “presents” herself to the white and male gaze on the terms of her big butt is super interesting, yet contradicted by the agency that she wields that is supposedly derived from her big butt. To explore this, “epistemology of the butt.” Here, the author connects the “big rear end” to ideas that ultimately re-enslave women to their bodies. At its core, the big rear end serves no purpose – it “upsets white notions of beauty and good taste” by exhibiting three signs of excess: excess of food, shitting, and sex (189). To me, this all makes very good sense, but how does J-Lo enter and flip the marginalized status of the “big rear end” to work in her favor? Negrón-Munaner writes that J-Lo is able to by taking control of her body, reclaiming the “big rear end.” She does this through playing the right roles that don’t draw attention to her ethnicity, while simultaneously offering her body to the Latina community as an “identification site” for beauty. All of this is incredibly fascinating, and I am curious on the way the “non-normative” body has transgressed over time to 2017.