Afro-Cuban Cyberfeminism: Love/Sexual Revolution in Sandra Álvarez Ramírez’s Blogging

Judith Sierra-Rivera

doi:10.25222/larr.323

Abstract

This essay focuses on the dynamics of (dis)embodiment between national love and the body of the black woman in Cuba. This very discussion lies at the center of Sandra Álvarez Ramírez’s blog Negra cubana tenía que ser, where the black woman’s body becomes an ideal in itself. Álvarez Ramírez’s intellectual interventions impress this body with love and assemble a community whose members share the black feminist goal of a sexual (polyamory) revolution. I propose that Negra cubana’s revolutionary matrix resides in the blog’s networking: a cyberfeminist agenda to connect Cuban black women’s voices with other voices around the world. Contrary to the utopian promise of the Cuban Revolution, Negra cubana’s black feminist promise is that of enactment in the present—in both physical and virtual realms.

Highlights

Este ensayo se centra en las dinámicas dematerialización que ocurren entre el amor nacional y el cuerpo de la mujer negra en Cuba
In the case of Cuba, as Guillermina de Ferrari (2014, 3) has proposed, the narratives of the Cuban Revolution illustrated those devoted men through a series of rhetorical devices portraying male friendship, a fraternity that was supposed to be “masculine and equal, rather than patriarchal.”
Very much like other national and identitarian discourses, the Cuban Revolution has depended on a “promise of happiness,” as Sara Ahmed (2010, 2) has denominated the set of associations that promise to guarantee a path of success and, of future happiness

Summary

Introduction

Este ensayo se centra en las dinámicas de (des)materialización que ocurren entre el amor nacional y el cuerpo de la mujer negra en Cuba. This discussion lies at the center of Sandra Álvarez Ramírez’s blog Negra cubana tenía que ser (here referred to as Negracubana) and propels her writing into an articulation of the black woman’s body as an ideal in itself, employing narratives that include a documentation of black women’s political actions in both the past and the present.

Results

Conclusion