Beyond Ethnocentrism: Gender, Power and the Third-World Intelligentsia

In a brief review of the development of the Latin American intelligentsia over the past half century, Franco notes that they have been constituted by a metropolitan and masculine discourse that they have adapted to in order to catch the 'metropolitan attention'. Not only has their intellectual production relied on representations of women as symbolic virgins, mothers or whores, but the entire process of intellectual production has been characterized by traits typically associated with masculinity, such as public space, mobility, activity, and immortality. Thus research has been occupied with the public and with (modern) production, rather than the private and reproduction, and this has served to subordinate not only women but also the indigenous groups. Moreover, the act of research and intellectual production becomes characteristic of 'the masculine' through being framed as a quest for immortality and a confrontation between the pursuer and the pursued (i.e. the writer and the reader).

When Latin American intellectual research has been revolutionary in character, this too is viewed as eminently masculine, since the revolutionary is associated with the ideal-type militant who suppresses feelings of weakness, and who is in many ways the diametric opposite of the feminine. The revolutionary and counter-hegemonic discourses of the intelligentsia are built on conservative and hegemonic gender relations. In sum, the constitution of the Latin American intelligentsia, in interaction with the metropolitan attention, has served to embed the production of knowledge in the sphere of domination and masculinity.