Dissident bodies. Motherhood as a political apparatus: the case of Cuba and the Latin American context

Abstract

A 1980 black and white photograph portrays a naked woman, whose identity is unknown, holding a large knife pointing at her pregnant belly.  

The photograph, No matar, ni ver matar animales III (1985), is a self-portrait by Cuban artist Marta María Pérez Bravo (Havana, 1959). It belongs to the series Para concebir (1985-1986) in which the artist captures the period of pregnancy and post-partum in a sequence of black and white shots with strongly anti-romantic and exorcising connotations. The title refers to the superstition linked to the Afro-Cuban religions of Santería and Palo Monte according to which a woman will give birth to a child with a violent temperament if she kills or witnesses the killing of an animal during the nine months of gestation.   

By examining the work of Pérez Bravo, together with that of Johanna Hammann (Lima,1954-2017), Barbara Carrasco (El Paso, 1967), Monica Mayer (Mexico City, 1954) and Josely Carvalho (São Paulo, 1942), this article aims to investigate the emergence of a dystopian representation of the maternal body in Latin American art since the late 1970s.   

This iconography subverts the traditional collective imagery of motherhood as caring and loving, contrasting it with an often brutal and violent representation, symptomatic of local traditions, religious values, racial issues and the socio-political situations of certain realities in Latin America. This body of images suggests a maternal ‘artivism’ that denotes an understanding and representation of the female body as a political and militant apparatus and social product.