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Princess Sofia and Barack Obama: Why I Must Choose Accordingly

October 26, 2012 by la Webjefa Leave a Comment

By Nicole Guidotti-Hernandez
For The Feminist Wire (10/23/12)Disney's new Latina Princess Sofia

Is it a coincidence that Disney launched the promotional campaign for its first Hispanic Princess Sofia weeks before the 2012 Presidential election? Maybe. But I can’t help but ponder the larger implications of thinking through “Hispanic” activists being “pissed” about the new Disney princess not debuting in a feature film without linking it to Obama’s fluctuating position on immigration.

In a time of crisis, where numerous Latino children and their families are targets for deportation and criminalized for their brown skin, Princess Sofia is a distraction. Historically speaking, Sofia might be Disney’s first princess, but there are other famous and royals and Sofias who carry Hispanic herencia, including Sofía, current Reina de España and Sofía Vergara, Columbian comedienne, reina of ABC’s Modern Family, and how could we forget the reina of Tejano music, Selena as a part of this amalgam. Thus, we might read Disney’s Princess Sofia as a intertextual citation of these three reinas, and a means of creating a Diva figure for Latina/o youth to emulate and identify with.

As scholar Deborah Paredez has noted about youth who perform the Latina Diva’s legacy through song and affect, “donning the outfit of a diva…harnesses the power of Selena’s embodiment of becoming to convey her own non-traditional, non-white budding sexuality.”3 But here’s the hitch with Princess Sofia’s Diva pose: instead of proposing brown skin as a positive, and potentially boundary-breaking figure that disrupts normativity, her whiteness and accidental Princessness (she’s adopted and saved by a royal family) recapitulate to the original and somewhat false signification of whiteness associated with la reinaSofía and España and not necessarily the other versions of being a queen posed by Vergara and Selena.

Original article continues at The Feminist Wire

 

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  • Home
  • About
    • History of MALCS
      • Historical Timelines
      • MALCS Historical Archives
    • MALCS Site
      • MALCS Before 2017
      • MUJERES TALK Archives
    • Support MALCS
  • Membership
    • My MALCS Account Login
    • Member Only Forums
    • MALCS Bylaws 2014
  • MALCS Leadership
    • Position Descriptions and Terms
      • Past MALCS Chairs
    • Elections
    • Nominations Process
  • Institute
  • CLS Journal
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    • MALCS blog
    • Chapters
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