Bodies
The body is a central topic for feminism, especially if we think of Ni Una Menos as a movement to respect the lives and bodies of women. In this way, the body takes a central role in Rebeca Lane’s song/video. Particularly, in the relationship of lyrics and the images of the video, the body becomes a way of creating meanings by itself, as it is systematically used as a semiotic resource.
Language is interaction, and, in the interaction, our bodies are a basic element, especially when we want to think of the relation between language and space. We can also think of this in other terms: human interaction happens in the relationship between bodies that produce meanings via talking, writing, signing, gesturing, or other activities. Even digitally, I need to use parts of my body to be able to create this text. In the case of the video, we interact with the bodies of the people represented.
An important element is we usually socialize with dressed bodies, with their different adornments. Thus, when we talk about the body we think of the physical body and the garments and decorations. Additionally, as we are analyzing a video, we adopt visual semiotics to understand the relationship of those represented bodies with ours as the audience.
For a detailed explanation of how we relate to body and clothing and how we analyze them, you can visit the section on Interaction order a.k.a body as a mode.
In the lyrics we find Rebeca Lane’s voice saying “no tengo privilegio que proteja este cuerpo” (“I do not have privilege protecting this body”), where “este” (“this”) would be indexical of her own physical body. However, in the video we don’t find her body; instead, we find represented participants lip-syncing the lyrics, which creates indexicality between Lane’s voice (and her body indexed via her voice) and multiple bodies.
Expanding on this, we could say that the same happens with the first singular person: in the verbal mode, first-person pronouns and verbal morphemes index the participant whom we hear speaking or in this case singing, Rebeca Lane. However, when we add the images we see a group of women who, one by one, perform the song by lip-syncing the lyrics making the viewer relate the first singular pronoun (“yo”) to each of their bodies. In this way, the first singular person gets re-signified to become indexical of two bodies, in each of its appearances, at the same time (the singer and the lip-syncer), indexing multiple bodies across the song, even when the voice of the singer continues to be the same. This is how a pronoun expected to cover a single individual becomes also part of a collective identity, gaining a different value.
As stated in the theoretical framework, clothing is a key part of our understanding of the body. In the video, dress becomes a mode to produce collective identification and sameness through materials, colors, and accessories. In the video, we see that all the lip-syncers and children wear jeans on their lower-body, white garments on their upper-body (Figure 1), and similar makeup. Although one might think this responds to planning in preparations for the video, it seems to be a practice related to the construction of the feminist identity beyond the recording: we see that similar decisions are made by some groups within the ni una menos mass demonstrations. In the documented demonstrations that became part of the music video we also find groups of participants who made similar decisions in terms of their clothes, for example, wearing only black garments (Figure 2 upper image) or wearing the same t-shirts and skirts as participants, in the back, in Figure 2 (bottom). In this last image we also see, in the front, a woman who we identify as an indigenous person from the Andes region because of her traditional clothes. In the image one might wonder if the participants in the back are wearing a typical type of skirts from the Andes too on the lower-body, which might be the same garment as the indigenous woman. However, we can see that they relate to the indigenous woman also from their hair style, which is the same. It is important to notice that the traditional indigenous clothes make reference to women who self-identify as cholitas and there are women who dedicate to do different activities keeping their traditional skirts as a symbol of resistance, such as Cholitas Escaladoras, a group of Aymara women climbing mountains.
A central element in the documented mass demonstrmanifestations is the green handkerchief, which became an icon of Latin American feminism to demonstrate ideological affiliation with the feminist cause in general and with reproductive rights in particular. The Latin American movement is also known as “la marea verde” because of this element.
Another multimodal element that constructs a collective identity in the video is makeup. All participants who were recorded for the video, including the children, have a sort of tribal makeup (Figure 3 upper image). We find this kind of makeup in the documented mass demonstrations (Figure 3, bottom) where it appears to mark the participants as part of a tribe or community. And, while we could not affirm this kind of makeup indexes another existent group, we could related it to a symbol of associated with warriors going into battle.
The idea of warriors relates to the lyrics which make reference to emergency preparation, self-defense, bravery, and struggle (“esto es una emergencia y estamos preparadas”, “agresiva porque es la forma en que me defiendo”, “valiente en nombre mío y en el de todas mis bisabuelas”, “en pie de lucha porque vivas nos queremos, no queremos a ni una menos”, “esto es autodefensa”, “estamos en resistencia”, “ya no somos indefensas”). It also relates to the chants from the documented mass demonstrations that we hear at the end of the video “si tocan a una respondemos todas.”
Other researchers mention how the body is a central element for Rebeca Lane. For example, Kristen A. Kolenz writes about it in the paper about Lane’s Central American Mestiza Consciousness. In this paper, the author includes the song Tzk’at.
The song starts with the voice of Lorena Cabnal, a community feminist leader from Guatemala, explaining the concept of terrritory-body-land according to her indigenous cosmogony. We can relate the video to the ideas of community feminism as we find the information on femicide in Latin America written on the body of one of the represented participants.
In line with the body, the topic of makeup for the feminist movement has been previously studied in the case of Uruguay. Particularly, Victoria Furtado & Valeria Grabino explained, in 2018, how women utilized makeup in Uruguay to create community and collective identity in the feminist demonstrations.
Silvia Rivera Alfaro has created the research and the website. The text and drawings are under the license of Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0.
The video is copyright of Rebeca Lane. The Creative Commons license does not apply to the video and images from the video. They are used on this website with the artist’s permission.