Stumped Identities: Body Image, Bodies Politic, and the Mujer Maya as Prosthetic

Abstract

This article explores way Guatemalan nation, ladinos (nonindigenous people), burgeoning Mayan cultural rights movement, and gringa feminism deploy Mayan woman, or la mujer Maya as I call this discursive construct, as a prosthetic.' I suggest that these identifications (nation, ethnicity, and gender) are like wounded bodies and rely on supports like imagined Mayan woman in order to exist. The prosthetic makes up for something missing, it covers over an opening, and as Allucquere Rosanne Stone (1995) suggests, it overcomes a lack of presence. I argue that for Guatemalan nationstate mujer Maya overcomes missing Mayan representation in recent peace process and, like a peg leg, supports nation's limping political economy. For Mayan cultural rights movement, which must prove itself appropriate to modernity while retaining tradition that legitimates it, she fills in this impossible divide. The mujer Maya also serves to support first world anthropology trying to be in solidarity with building peace and strengthening Mayan rights while being feminist. National, ethnic (Maya and nonindigenous), and gender identities are stumped, in sense of being incomplete, wounded, and rudimentary, as well as being baffled and unsure. To stump also means to make political speeches or support a cause (Webster's New World Dictionary of American Language, 2nd ed., s.v. stump) and I argue that similarly, these identities are always political, result of process and work. They are cyborg bodies politic (Gray and Mentor 1995) that rely on figure of Woman to support identity formation. I wager that by exploring their use of mujer Maya as prosthetic we can learn more about them. Thus, I do not claim to speak for actually existing Mayan women. I am primarily interested in mujer Maya as a construct, a boundary marker, a prosthetic, and ways, in turn, this helps us explore the webs of information and power/knowledge [that] incarcerate but also sustain and move her (Gray and Mentor 1995:435).