Erotics, Erotica, and Transnational Desire: Cuban Women and the Desiring Gaze

This paper takes a transnational and historical approach to examine the erotic depiction of Cuban women for U.S. and Cuban audiences. Focusing on both text and audiovisual erotica produced in Cuba, this paper critically... [ view full abstract ]

This paper takes a transnational and historical approach to examine the erotic depiction of Cuban women for U.S. and Cuban audiences. Focusing on both text and audiovisual erotica produced in Cuba, this paper critically engages with questions of transnational desire and how eroticized depictions of female populations impact and reflect geopolitical relationships between nation-states and how this, in turn, relates to the racialization of U.S. Latinas. Specifically, I analyze the production of sexually explicit texts and films produced in Havana from the 1930s to the 1950s (these materials are archived at the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, Indiana). In the early twentieth century, publishing firms such as Editorial Flerida, Cubian Press, and Phedrin Press published both pamphlets and books with sexual content in Havana. Most of these appear to be produced for English-speaking audiences inside and outside the island. In the late 1940s and 1950s, films with a sexual content were also produced in Cuba. Unlike the pamphlets and books that came before, some of these films included Spanish language titles, Cuban themes, and could have been intended for Cuban and U.S. audiences. I examine the sexualized representation of Cuban women prior to the 1959 Cuban Revolution and the relationship between these representations and the regulation of sex industries in the United States and Cuba. I compare this to the racialized/sexualized representation of Cuban immigrants to the U.S. after the revolution. In what ways did discourses of erotic Cuban women continue to circulate and to what extent were they supplanted by discourse of sexually and racially legitimate Cuban female subjects? This paper is part of a larger project tentatively entitled “Desiring Gaze: Race, Sexuality, and Cuba-U.S. Relations” that examines the diverse ways that race and sexuality played into U.S.-Cuba relations and our national imaginaries.