The empire blogs back: Gendered and sexualized cultural “others” in superdiversified digital trajectories

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of the ongoing processes of constructing and deconstructing sexualized and exoticized othering in Brazilian-Portuguese mediatized cultural (mis)encounters and (mis)constructions of the female body against the background of changing geopolitical and socio-economic superdiversifying relations in the postcolonial Lusophone world. Methodologically it tries to respond to a call, by several authors, for more empirically grounded research as a means of addressing the complexities involved in contemporary national–transnational dialogs and identity construction processes. The analysis, while resting on a larger cultural and postcolonial studies׳ frame of reference, brings this kind of translocal conversation home with an in-depth analysis of digital encounters detected in text trajectories on blogs and social media. The data, approached through the lenses of competing orders of indexicality, indicate that “cultural identity” (as enacted through the exchanges of a handful of Portuguese and Brazilian nationals) is a minefield that has to be understood as interlacing discrepant indexical values: it simultaneously articulates historic rivalries and their rejection. From this point of view, the voices of several of the focused interlocutors seemed to cry out for new meaning-making processes while still orienting to Colonial totalizing dichotomies and hierarchies. This kind of dovetailing adds more nuanced contours to the notion of superdiversity being explored in this special volume, reconstructing it in terms of a permanent and necessary diversity-sameness dialectics – a kind of friction that has been exacerbated in digital contexts. Put otherwise, “colonial empires” are still around as orienting references but, in superdiverse times, not only do they write back but also blog back in multi-territorial discursive trajectories.