Professional Documents
Culture Documents
As Virtual Theatre: Performing Gender, Race, and Class in 21st-Century Colombia
As Virtual Theatre: Performing Gender, Race, and Class in 21st-Century Colombia
Isis Giraldo
To cite this article: Isis Giraldo (2020): SoHo as virtual theatre: performing gender, race, and class
in 21st-century Colombia, Cultural Studies, DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2020.1755710
ABSTRACT
In this article I explore the cultural significance of SoHo, a magazine produced by
and addressed to the Colombian elite yet consumed across a wider urban social
spectrum. I carry out an analysis of the magazine in connection with the broader
political, cultural, and social context of its production and circulation during the
period it was directed by journalist Daniel Samper Ospina (2001–2015). I argue
that under Samper Ospina, SoHo played a significant role in shaping gender
ideologies in 21st-century urban Colombia. Overtly addressed to a male
audience (its title means ‘Only for Men’) and following the model of Playboy
and Esquire, SoHo operated during the period studied as a ‘virtual theatre’
where the Colombian elite converged and where a sort of education in
postmodern sensibilities of both men and women took place. Such an
educational process took the form of a double-edged performance of gender,
social class, and race: firstly, in Austin’s sense, upon the women it portrayed;
secondly, in the theatrical sense, by the (mostly male) members of the
Colombian elite that actively participated in its production. As a virtual
theatre, SoHo carries out a specific type of ideological work that seeks to
ensure cultural hegemony and, through it, the perpetuation of a system of
domination that goes back to the colonial period and whose keys are ‘the
lettered city’ and the ‘whiteness device’ (All translations are mine).
KEYWORDS SoHo; urban Colombia; performance; ideology; gender; class; distinction; race; the whiteness
device; the lettered city
1. Introduction
Entering the Colombian scene in 1999, SoHo became in 2003 – and under the
direction of Daniel Samper Ospina (2001-2015) – the first publication in the
country to offer semi-nude photographs of what they claim are ‘the prettiest
women in Colombia’ accompanied by chronicles and columns by reputed
local and international writers, journalists, intellectuals, politicians, and per-
sonalities of a diverse kind.1
Overtly conceived as a lifestyle magazine (a commercial product with high-
culture pretensions), yet, borrowing and relying heavily on the ‘cultural
hybridity’ (García Canclini 1995) associated with Latin America at large, SoHo
positioned itself during the Samper Ospina years as one the most powerful
media in Colombia, the second most read magazine in the country in
Zuluaga and Martínez (2012), and established itself as a brand in other
countries of the region such as Argentina, Mexico, Panama, Ecuador, and
Peru (SoHo 2013). Because a large part of the Colombian cultural, economic,
and political elite were involved in its making during the period in question,
SoHo managed to attain great social weight which, in turn, granted it cultural
significance. Moreover, as part of a larger media company (Publicaciones
Semana), it managed to commodify its readership so that both its male and
female consumers were successfully converted into value (Iqani 2018,
p. 276).2 Hence, exploring SoHo, I argue, sheds light on a number of issues
that are crucial for understanding cultural hegemony and consent in the
context of Colombia because, as Chasteen puts it, ‘rule by the privileged
few [ … ] seldom succeeds for long without widespread consent’ (Chasteen
1996, p. xiii).
As a ‘process of mediation’ (Silverstone 1999, p. 13), SoHo was social, his-
torically specific, and political (1999, p. 4). Apart from aiming at being profita-
ble, it also aimed at, first, training its readers on urban global culture,
consumption, and lifestyle (Giraldo Work in progress), and second, at estab-
lishing itself as a powerful regulator of gender – the central explicit social
signifier around which the magazine organised its editorial line – and along
with it of social class and race. Despite its boisterous self-advertisement as
apolitical entertainment, the cultural work the magazine did during the
Samper Ospina era was wholly political (see also Giraldo 2020b; Forthcoming
a Work in progress). Moreover, and in line with what Jancovich suggests with
regard to Playboy, instead of ‘apolitical titillation’, SoHo’s ‘sexual materials
were not only integrated into its politics of lifestyle, but became the central
signifier of its politics’ (Jancovich 2006, p. 72).
In this article I claim that under Samper Ospina, SoHo became a scene
where a set of performances of diverse type and register took place: firstly,
of gender (and race and class) – upon and by the women who agreed to
be featured in its pages for free, despite the commercial character of the pub-
lication, and secondly, of class (and gender and race) – by those who partici-
pated in its production in one way or another. More than a tangible object
that is simply traded and consumed, I consider SoHo to be a spectacle that
spills over the material limits set by the medium to become a ‘virtual
theatre’: a theatrical scene (which is a medium itself) mediated through
another one (a magazine) and in which gender, class, and race are played
out (in the theatrical sense) and delimited (as in Austin’s speech acts theory).3
Such a spectacle, I argue, has the aim of carrying out a specific type of ideo-
logical work that seeks to ensure cultural hegemony and, through it, the per-
petuation of a system of domination that goes back to the colonial period and
CULTURAL STUDIES 3
whose keys are ‘the lettered city’ (Rama 1996) and the ‘whiteness device’
(Castro-Gómez 2010). While the first concept refers to ‘the urban nexus of let-
tered culture and state power’ (Rama 1996) which, I argue, operates in the 21st
century through civil society, the second one to a figurative artifact based on
the high-value of whiteness (established by colonialism) and that yet trans-
cends skin colour so to encompass a person’s type of wealth and social
ranking. Indeed, being intensely implicated with modernity-coloniality
(Giraldo 2016), SoHo constitutes a paradigmatic example of the enduring con-
tinuities between colonial New Granada and postcolonial Colombia and, as
such, a powerful tool for the enacting and reinforcement of the ‘coloniality’
of power (Mignolo 2000; Quijano 2000; Castro-Gómez 2014) and of gender
(Lugones 2007; Giraldo 2016).
I start by providing a theoretical discussion that includes justification for my
drawing from the British tradition of cultural studies rather than the Latin
American one, followed by an outlining of the general theoretical framework
from within which I approach my object of study: one that sits in-between
postcolonial studies (and its focus on representation) and decolonial critical
thought (which assumes modernity to be the hidden face of coloniality).
Then I present three case studies designed to exemplify the argument.
Hence, the article has a twofold goal. A theoretical one that seeks, first, to
make a case for the recentring of ideology, understood not as ‘false conscious-
ness’ but as a set of ideas about how the world works and should work, and
second, to introduce, re-work (by integrating gender), and deploy the con-
cepts of the ‘whiteness device’ (Castro-Gómez 2010) and ‘the lettered city’
(Rama 1996) developed by two Latin American thinkers situated in the
margins of the global circuit of knowledge production. These concepts, I
argue along, are fitting to explain the continuities between the colonial and
the contemporary post-colonial world. The second goal is empirical and
aims at showing how and why SoHo (under Daniel Samper Ospina) was
crucial in the shaping of ideologies of gender, race, and social class that
have perpetuated Colombia’s highly stratified social structure which, in turn,
have outlined the political sphere.4
Both García Canclini and Martín Barbero are interested in reading mass
culture as communication. Their approach puts the emphasis on the potenti-
ality of culture as a space for practices of symbolic production rather than as a
univocal space for the reproduction of ideology (Martín Barbero 2002, p. 213),
itself conceived in the Marxist sense of false consciousness. While García Can-
clini proposes ‘to reconceptualise consumption as a space where to think and
where the greatest part of economic, social, political, and psychological struc-
turation takes place in modern societies’ (2009, p. 16), Martín Barbero looks at
‘domination as a process of communication’ in contrast to ‘communication as
a process of domination’ (Martín Barbero 2002, p. 19).
Thus, rather than on production, both authors are interested in what
people do with the cultural artifacts they consume. Moreover, and as I
argue in detail elsewhere (Giraldo Forthcoming a), both seem sceptical of
approaches that recentre the question of power at play in consumption
and communication and of those that prioritise gender and/or race. Their per-
spective seems to present two features that Mehita Iqani identifies in some
approaches to consumption and the media: first, reticence to the idea that
the process of communication has been profoundly altered by the rise of con-
sumer culture and the logic of profit that permeates contemporary society,
and second, a sort of romanticising of the possibilities for the increasing of
cross-cultural understanding and democracy brought about by the expansion
of communication technology (2018, p. 277–278).
The focus on resistance – which entails an emphasis on what consumers do
with what they consume and is shared by both authors – is one that domi-
nates virtually all fields of research in/on Latin America and I recognise the
enormous value of such an approach. This focus is also prevalent in cultural
studies and media studies, as a glance over the table of contents of a
recent book titled Media Cultures in Latin America (Pertierra and Salazar
2020) will attest to. However, I consider that the study of cultural hegemony
(which implies to focus on production) is, as Charles Chasteen claimed back in
1996, vital for understanding the whole picture because it forces us to observe
the hegemonic power operating ‘at the level of people’s basic assumptions’
(Chasteen 1996, p. xiii). These assumptions are the ones behind the election
of political outsiders with overt misogynist, racist, homophobic, and/or
quasi-genocidal political views – such as Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro –
as heads of governments. Yet, we will not understand how these assumptions
manage to become naturalised and widespread within the social body by solely
focusing on the creative ways in which people craft identities through mass
consumption or on how ‘consumption has altered the ways and possibilities
of being a citizen’ (García Canclini 1995, p. 29).5
Hence, I situate ‘ideologies’, as Stuart Hall defined them – ‘frameworks of
thinking and calculation about the world’ (Hall 2016 (1983), p. 131) – at the
centre of my analysis. The goal of such an approach is to explore how
CULTURAL STUDIES 5
which Europe is located both in the origin and at the centre and where con-
cepts such as ‘civilization’ and its derivatives – civilised/uncivilised-savage,
‘civilizing process’ (Elias 1994) are key – is a central issue.
In the advanced capitalist West, and from approaches where modernity (as
defined above) is not only humankind’s inevitable goal but its most desirable
aim, ‘lifestyle media become crucial guides to living within, and with, moder-
nity’ (Bell and Hollows 2006, p. 4). Given that under modernity the individual
(rather than the community) is the one being enhanced, understanding the
self as a project that requires constant work, regulation, and improvement
(obtained mostly through consumption) is crucial. This, in turn, demands for
‘expert knowledge and guidance’ (see Slater 1997; Bell and Hollows 2006),
which the lifestyle magazine provides.
The debate on ‘modernity’, even from non-critical approaches to it, is far
from straightforward in the context of Latin America. The quest for modernity
has been key to the historical specificities of Colombia. Although conventional
accounts and Colombian intellectual and political elites have mostly assumed
a non-critical approach to ‘modernity’ – overwhelmingly read in positive terms
and taken to be a definite goal to attain (see for instance Bushnell 1993) – the
one I take here is aligned with critical perspectives. These understand it as
being intrinsically connected to ‘coloniality’, therefore its writing as ‘moder-
nity-coloniality’.8 Both are concomitant, the latter being the hidden face of
the former. From this approach, while modernity refers to a global phenom-
enon that originated on October 12, 1492, posited Europe at the centre of the
world – ‘the Point Zero’ in Castro-Gómez’s terminology – coloniality refers to
‘the invisible threads of power that emerge in colonial situations but extend
well beyond a strictly colonial setting and period’ (Giraldo 2016, p. 161). It
refers to ‘the symbolic, invisible and indelible traces of the colonial experience’
(Giraldo 2016, p. 161).
Derived from Aníbal Quijano’s notion of the ‘coloniality of power’ (2000) – a
tool to describe the macro-sociological relations established with the colonisa-
tion of Abya Yala –, the concept of coloniality is more useful if explored, as
Castro-Gómez suggests, as a set of local, specific, and situated practices rather
than as an abstract and totalising notion (Castro-Gómez 2014, p. 79). Further,
and while acknowledging that coloniality emerges in the past, it might be
more interesting to explore how it operates in the present so that we might
understand the extent to which the contemporary moment is profoundly
marked by the colonial legacy (Castro-Gómez 2014, p. 80). This legacy manifests
itself in ideologies of gender, sexuality, race, social class, and citizenship and
impinges upon the politics of representation – in which the role of modern-
day letrados is key – and of social organisation in contemporary Colombia.
In this article I partly aim at examining this by taking SoHo as an exemplary
case in point: as a lifestyle magazine SoHo does not simply bear the marks of
such a legacy but rather invigorates and perpetuates it. Indeed, whiteness
CULTURAL STUDIES 7
constituted the worthiest and most esteemed cultural capital for the learned
creole class in the New Granada (18th-century Colombia): first, it guaranteed
their access to the scientific and literary knowledge of the time; second, it
established the social distance between themselves and the ‘colonial other’
(Castro-Gómez 2010, p. 15).9 Hence, the dominance of creole elites over sub-
altern groups required the construction of an imaginary of whiteness that
legitimised (in the eyes of everyone) a social order around the ethnic differ-
ence (Castro-Gómez 2010, p. 73). This made of whiteness one of the corner-
stones of social organisation in 18th-century Colombia. Yet, as Castro-
Gómez (2010) convincingly argues, rather than as a discreet value in a skin-
colour palette, ‘whiteness’ was to be understood as a device that goes
beyond skin colour so as to encompass a person’s type of wealth and social
ranking (2010, p. 71). Moreover, whiteness was primarily ‘a lifestyle performed
publicly by members of the higher social strata and yearned for all other social
groups’ (Castro-Gómez 2010, p. 71).10
For my analysis of SoHo and borrowing from Castro-Gómez, I approach the
‘whiteness device’ (dispositivo de blancura) through ‘habitus’ and ‘cultural
capital’, both taken from Bourdieu (1979) and closely linked to lifestyle, dis-
tinction, and social stratification.11 Castro-Gómez is interested in the ways in
which European Enlightenment was translated and enunciated in the New
Granada and in the role of the whiteness device in this. In contrast, I am inter-
ested in exploring how ‘whiteness’ – as a device rather than skin colour and
thus encompassing ideas of race and social condition – is deployed by core
and marginal members of the lettered city in the pages of SoHo, first, as a
strategy to mark out their own distance from others and, second, as a way
to ensure the maintenance of the social order. Additionally, I am also inter-
ested in emphasising the inherent maleness of ‘the lettered city’, which,
however, operates beyond gender. Thus, in analogous manner to how a
mestizo can deploy the ‘whiteness device’ to individually benefit from the hier-
archy established along the skin-colour palette and, in turn, entrench the
power of whiteness, a woman can accommodate herself within the ‘lettered
city’ so as to benefit from it while, in turn, entrenching patriarchy.
Gender, though in connexion with social class, race, and sexuality, is SoHo’s
key political signifier. Thus, given that the magazine is a commercial product
whose main aim is the maximisation of economic profit (therefore dependent
on advertisement), its prima facie reading points to its work on the construc-
tion of a type of masculinity that mostly hinges upon (material and symbolic)
consumption and interpellates upwardly mobile individuals. Under this
premise, and following the line of women’s magazines, this would suggest
that SoHo mainly aims at tutoring men in practices of consumption while
encouraging them to approach and ‘see the marketplace as a vital tool for
self-transformation’ (Cieply 2010, p. 154)). Further, that while being overly con-
scious that the marketplace and consumption have both been usually under-
stood as ‘a gendered space defined by a female-consumer/male-producer
dichotomy’ (Cieply 2010, p. 154), SoHo follows the line of the men’s lifestyle
magazine in that it seeks to appeal to a new brand of male-consumer that
is open to new types of masculinity: the metrosexual, who adopts ‘self-care
and sartorial behaviors’ traditionally associated with femininity or homosexu-
ality in some cultures (Coad 2016, p. 1). The ‘new man’, characterised in some
accounts ‘as narcissistic and highly invested in his physical appearance’ (Gill
2003, p. 37). The ‘new lad’, who is ‘hedonistic, post-(if not anti) feminist, and
pre-eminently concerned with beer, football and shagging women’ (Gill
2003, p. 37).12
A finer reading, however, reveals a more complex picture. First, that
although explicitly addressed to men, SoHo is also implicitly addressed to
women because gender, which is relational (Connell 2005), is one of the
central signifiers around which the magazine builds its social and cultural nar-
rative (see Giraldo Forthcoming a Work in progress). Second, that there is
another type of masculinity at work in SoHo which is at odds with those
types that heavily rely on material consumption and which would constitute
the ‘hegemonic’ model (Connell 2005) in the Colombian context. This model is
embodied by a majority of male writers – most of them belonging to a close
circle of Colombian letrados – that frequently contribute to the magazine.
Moreover, this type of masculinity is also overtly and proudly embodied by
Daniel Samper Ospina (the magazine’s director during the period under
study), who is a very public and powerful figure in urban Colombia and
who – when accepting the job – undertook it as his own personal project.13
Considering gender as relational, rather than static, implies that the pattern
of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ (Connell 2005) I identify in SoHo and that, I argue,
is constantly performed by those men writing for it takes shape in relation to
subordinated models of masculinity, on the one hand, and to dominant and
subordinated models of femininity, on the other. A gender ideology in which
gender operates as a binary opposition around the male/female pairing,
which is itself an instance of coloniality at work (Giraldo 2016), is central to
SoHo both as a mass-media product and as a cultural project. Thus, in the
CULTURAL STUDIES 9
accompanying a text she wrote on the experiment she was asked to carry out
(to test six condoms), with both text and pictures clearly aimed at the explicit
sexual arousal of heterosexual male readers (Ruiz-Navarro 2009). During the
period in question, the magazine also featured a monthly column on sex
always written by a woman, usually behind a pseudonym, for a sustained
period of time: Conchita (Margarita Posada), LoLa, Alexa, June, etc.
Second, most of the women (regardless of what they do for a living) are
invited to feature in SoHo because they embody ‘spectacular femininity’
(McRobbie 2009). Apart from models, actresses and TV presenters – all of
whom need to be spectacularly feminine and beautiful to operate profession-
ally in those domains – SoHo prides itself in finding commoners that also
embody the type of beauty and femininity they trade in. Hence, plenty of
women of varied professions have been featured in SoHo: dentists, lawyers,
public servants, writers, psychologists, stock brokers, sports women, dancers,
politicians, etc. Edition 118, for instance, has a B side whose cover features a
female politician, María Fernanda Valencia, in underwear, high heels and a
blazer, promising to accept to be featured nude in SoHo’s edition 120 if she
gets elected to Bogotá’s House of Representatives. Daniel Samper Ospina,
after a short introduction where he implies they accepted her offer because
she definitely had the body capital, interviews her at length and allows her
to explain her programme (Samper Ospina 2010). It remains unclear whether
she paid the magazine for the interview since it clearly constitutes political
advertisement. According to Edition 120, she did not get enough votes
(though apparently was close) and despite SoHo’s pleading with her to
accept being featured nude anyway, she refused to do so (SoHo 2010).
Third, when it comes to women writers, they are praised for their intellec-
tual work – their capacity as subjects of thought – yet, whenever possible (i.e.
when they have the minimum body capital in SoHo scale), almost immediately
recast mainly as worthy of notice because of their embodying a femininity
that is approved of – their capacity as objects of sexual desire (SoHo 2008
2009; Ruiz-Navarro 2009). This can go even further: Edition 178, just before
Daniel Samper Ospina stepped down, features an article (which would be
worth a close-analysis) by a male writer ranking ‘the top five prettiest Colom-
bian female writers’: Margarita Posada, Carolina Cuervo, Margarita García
Robayo, Carolina Andújar, Marianne Ponsford (Palacio 2015).
Fourth, various of the ‘received’ intellectuals that contribute frequently to
the magazine find ways of addressing what they claim are their own physical
inadequacies, as opposed to their intellectual abilities, these latter being the
reason why they are what they are and do what they do. This is done in a
tone that betrays pride because in the end ‘intellectual labour’ in the Colom-
bian context is what constitutes the very essence of distinction – ‘the infinitely
varied art of setting distances’ (Bourdieu 1979, p. 70) – which in turn translates
into power along all social axes (culture is capital and hence functions as an
12 I. GIRALDO
Hence, dancing well, even in a what in his eyes would seem a wonderfully
ideal situation – which involves attracting the party’s prettiest woman and
having the power of making her fall for him – is worth the equivalent of ‘six
of his books’, which is quite a low price. And this despite the fact that, he
claims, in his teenage years when his peers saw him dancing they would
call him ‘the robot’ and that they were right because when it comes to
dancing ‘a robot is more graceful than myself [ … ] even a Swedish man […
in fact,] a German man, would appear as skilful as a costeño if dancing by
my side’ (Abad Faciolince 2007, p. 296).
The reference to the coastline culture (costeño) is not anodyne and allows
him to explicitly address his own incapacity for dancing in racial-geographical
terms a few lines later:
[ … ] unlike the good Caribbean and Colombian dancers, I was not born in the
coast or in tierra caliente but in a hilly region that is sad and violent and far more
interested in work, resentment, and circumspection. And although I have
CULTURAL STUDIES 13
Hence, he is plainly explaining his lack of dancing skills through his geo-
graphical origins (which goes hand in hand with racial ones) and the socio-
cultural implications this entails.17 He had previously made the reader know
that his ‘wives, girlfriends, and sisters’ – these latter sharing both genetics
and socio-cultural upbringing with him – have been and are good dancers
(2007, p. 296), which adds a gendered aspect to his already racialised theo-
rising on dancing. Hence, although giving the appearance of self-depreca-
tion, what Abad does is the opposite: he is associating himself with the
pole that has the upper-hand (‘mind’) in the Western binary opposition
‘mind/body’ upon which he is basing his whole digression on dancing,
while associating his social others (women, non-whites, non-intellectual
labourers) with the inferior pole (‘body’). This is amplified by further
claims. For instance, that the utter command of the body required in
dancing constitutes ‘a going back to a state of pure nature that precedes
the development of the frontal lobe and logical reasoning, because a
dancing body is a body that returns to a kind of happy thoughtlessness’
(2007, p. 296). Since the author’s own inability to dance is one of the
markers that distinguishes him from the good dancers, whom he identifies
mostly as costeños and from tierra caliente, he is associating his racial
others with the terms I am writing in italics and their lexical fields: nature
as opposed to ‘culture’ (the terrain of the intellectual par excellence), a
sense of receding to an early stage of evolution (before the development
of the pre-frontal lobe) and before the scientific revolution (the development
of logical reasoning). In short, he is associating the capability for dancing with
human underdevelopment, a link further emphasised by another statement
about ‘dancing [being] the licence the mind grants the body to happily
return to its animal phase’ (Abad Faciolince 2007, p. 296).18 Thus, his overt
avowal of being incapable to dance goes hand in hand with his connecting
the mastery of dancing – by costeños, people from tierra caliente and women
(such as his ‘wives, girlfriends, and sisters’) – with primitivism and intellectual
immaturity, on the one hand, and with his own performance as a man of
logic, reasoning, and theory, on the other.
The strategy of self-deprecation relied on by Abad Faciolince is one that
Benwell identifies in his analysis of the men’s lifestyle magazine loaded in
which masculinity oscillates between two types: heroic, ‘represented by mus-
cularity, physical labor, outdoor settings, heroic activities, sport and violence’
(2003, p. 157), and anti-heroic, which uses ironic-knowingness ‘as a shield
against the explicit marking of masculinity’ (2003, p. 162). This ‘continual oscil-
lation between aspiring hero and anti-hero’ has the effect of ensuring ‘that a
14 I. GIRALDO
position for the magazine male is never stable enough to be available for clear
definition’ (Benwell 2003, p. 162).
While this point is also valid for SoHo, my analysis shows that the ‘politics of
irony’ here – and in contrast with what Benwell says with regard to the textual
examples he analyses from loaded – pay ‘out a clear patriarchal dividend’
(Benwell 2003, p. 162). Indeed, the constant association of men with mind
and women with body, of which Abad’s text is but one example of far too
many, has effects in this regard. Firstly, it reinforces the already outsized
power of the letrado, mostly a male that can brandish the whiteness device,
which encapsulates both class and race: it perpetuates the lettered city. Sec-
ondly, prioritizing the intellect in the construction of hegemonic masculinity
reinforces the idea that getting old and/or bald and/or fat, does not threaten
a man’s worth. Thirdly, and as a mirror effect, prioritizing the body in the con-
struction of femininity, i.e. making of ‘spectacular femininity’ (McRobbie 2009)
a bodily feature (Gill 2007), entails the broad acceptance in the social imagin-
ary that getting old and/or fat, threatens a woman’s worth. These effects are
intertwined and contribute to the same goal: to reinforce and perpetuate
patriarchy, which is intersectional by default.
hierarchical context, across every possible social axe, at the same time that
they further legitimise and secure the perpetuation of the very system that
allows for their existence.
All the male subjects involved with García in one way or another for the
production of SoHo’s Edition 61 – Gamboa as creator of Quica (the novel’s
character), Cabrera as director of the film based on Gamboa’s novel, Gaviria
as the photographer, and Samper Ospina as director of the magazine –
perform gender, sexuality, and class upon García while showing the extent to
which the symbolic capital of whiteness which, in 21st century Colombia is
revealed through the same means that in 18th New Granada, i.e. through ‘the
ostentation of signs that need to be exhibited publicly’ (Castro-Gómez 2010,
p. 84). This is what (whitened mestizo) Gamboa’s performance of gender and dis-
tinction (which encompasses both cultural and economic capital), on and by
himself and upon García, is about: a public ostentation of signs that allows to
locate them both in the higher tiers of the very hierarchical Colombian
society, while locating her in a subordinated position with regard to him and
the other men consuming the pictorial and written representation of her body.
Focusing on Angulo’s dress, this opening sets the tone of the whole text
which Zuleta – who not only comes from Bogotá but is a member of the
Lleras family, one of the Colombian so called (creole) ‘presidential dynasties’ –
uses entirely to denigrate Angulo by pointing out the countless forms in
which the latter (but also the misses) fails to convince him that he is ‘gente de
bien’.22 In one single paragraph – which opens with a line that characterises
20 I. GIRALDO
recent fashionable item’). Stratified labour at the heart of unequal social struc-
tures, which translates into a basic aspect of social power (‘entrance to discos
will always be free because the lobo always knows somebody who works in
that kind of place’). Utter lack of gastronomic knowledge, which translates
into being taken for a great cook and into reducing the house’s food
budget (‘the lobo takes tuna cans for fresh salmon’ and ‘is incapable of dis-
tinguishing beef fillet from beef neck, red wine from raisin juice, and a kiwi
from a sapote’ (Santodomingo 2007, p. 108)). The final section aims at con-
cluding with somewhat contradictory comments on how she sees the
relationship between economic and cultural capital (without using those
terms) and closes with an intertextual reference to a book she wrote titled
Gentlemen prefer them stupid which was made into a very successful TV
series in 2010: ‘Now that I think of it, I will title my next book Ladies prefer
them lobos’.
While the text is aimed at savaging an imaginary lower-class man, the pic-
tures that accompany it shame lower-class women. They show Santodomingo
in a heavily class-inflected attire: a black dress with a deep cleavage, open at
the back and shorter in the front of her legs, a very thick plastic-looking belt
crowned with an oversized buckle, and what appears to be a diamond on her
tooth added with Photoshop. Both text and pictures can be read as a chain of
meta-performances of gender and class: she is an upper-class woman that is
performing her upper-classness by means of performing lower-classness on a
imaginary man (represented in words) and an imaginary woman (represented
in pictures).
Santodomingo’s own performance of class and distinction also seems to
spill over SoHo as the theatre of such performances and into real life. Indeed,
she is a very marginal member of the Santo Domingo family, one of the
richest and most powerful in Colombia. Yet, unlike some of the core
members of that family, who not only appear in the Forbes list because of
their enormous wealth but who now make part of the British and Monegas-
que royal families (Hola.com 2016), her fame and social positioning is far less
impressive and confined to Colombia. Thus, unlike her second cousin, Tatiana
Casiraghi (née Santo Domingo), which changed her last name because she
married Andreas Casiraghi, fourth in the line of succession to the Monegas-
que throne, Isabella recurred to a more artificial method of deploying the
whiteness device: officially changing her original first name, Miriam Isabel,
both Colombian and unfashionable, for the Italian version of the second
item (see Jordan 2018). Santodomingo’s meta-performances of class both
in the text and in real-life are instances of that form of difference that is
mimicry – almost the same but not quite (Bhabha 1994, p. 127): she is
almost a real Santo Domingo (although she spells her name without the
space) yet not quite and she takes issue with those who aspire to sophisti-
cation (which is certainly not-Colombian by default, therefore the
CULTURAL STUDIES 23
importance of replacing Isabel for Isabella) but hopelessly fail because they
are too truly Colombian, that is, lobos in excess.
It might be important to address whether engaging with a text written by a
woman complicates my argument about the inherent maleness of the ‘let-
tered city’ and SoHo’s gender ideology which, I claim, equates femaleness
with nature, and maleness with intellect. This inherent maleness does not pre-
clude women from positioning themselves within it, in the same way that the
‘whiteness device’ can be deployed by subjects who are non-white. Indeed,
and as mentioned above, SoHo featured female writers though some
caveats were in order (see p. 10). This granted the magazine some
benefits:24 first, it pre-empted feminist critiques on that respect. Second, it
endowed the magazine with the patina of contemporary worldliness and
postmodern style that was always actively pursued. This is crucial because
SoHo has always been enmeshed in postmodernism and neoliberalism,
whose politics of inclusion and diversification commodify difference (trans-
forming it into lifestyles) while actively hindering the dismantlement of the
structures of power. Third, it helped reinforcing the ‘postfeminist regime’
(Giraldo 2016 2020a) the magazine was in the business of establishing
(Giraldo Forthcoming a). The postfeminist regime, in turn, constituted the
crucial point around which SoHo articulated its teleological aim of bringing
about a cultural transformation that maintained the social hierarchies
unchanged (for a fuller development of this last point, see Giraldo 2020b;
Giraldo Work in progress).
More importantly, the women writing for SoHo were controlled in ways
the men were not. If they were to fall out of line, the backlash was ruthless.
In 2012, for instance, one of the women that contributed in a number of
occasions to SoHo, Alejandra Azcárate, published in Aló a pretended humor-
ous diatribe – badly written and concatenating insult after insult in a poorly
performed pseudo-ironic tone – against fat women (Azcárate 2012). While
she deserved the wide backlash she received, the event provided an oppor-
tunity for certain male core members of the lettered city to put her in her
place. Thus, Ricardo Silva Romero wrote a column for El Tiempo explicitly
likening Azcárate’s ‘lack of literary talent’ with that of Isabella Santodomin-
go’s.25 In it he asserted that although he had not read Azcárate until then,
he already knew she used to deploy (in her shows) ‘the very demanding
approach of political incorrectness without having the competence to do
so’ (Silva Romero 2012). Though Azcárate’s defence included explicitly com-
paring herself to Daniel Samper Ospina (in his Revista Semana weekly
column), Silva Romero was quite clear he thought she had a nerve for
doing so (Silva Romero 2012).
Another example is provided by María Jimena Duzán, a reputed female jour-
nalist, colleague of Daniel Samper Ospina at Revista Semana, and who contrib-
uted on a number of occasions to SoHo during the period of study. In 2011
24 I. GIRALDO
Duzán dared writing a column for Semana where she criticised some young
female radio journalists who agreed to be featured in SoHo’s edition 136
(Duzán 2011) and Samper Ospina responded (in his respective column in
Semana) by personally savaging her (Samper Ospina 2011). Elsewhere
(Giraldo 2020b) I show that his response was, from beginning to end, a
vicious attack against Duzán structured around four features he assigned to
her: prudery, hypocrisy, pomposity, and sexual non-desirability. This last
point, he suggests, would entail from her being ‘ugly’, a term never mentioned,
yet, ostensibly present, and from a supposedly outdated aesthetic sense, which
he implies would derive from her being rather oldish (Giraldo 2020b).26 Hence,
although the borders of ‘the lettered city’ might appear as fluid, they are rather
rigid for those who do not truly belong. Any attempt (by the non-core
members) to challenge the rules of the game, will be punished.
Zuleta’s and Santodomingo’s texts can be read as their respective authors
strategies of cultural distancing. In Bourdieu’s terms, they highlight those
‘symbolic manifestations whose sense of worth depend both on those who
perceive it and those who produce it’ and constitute therefore ‘privileged
signs of social class at the same time that they become the tool par excellence
of strategies of distinction’ (Bourdieu 1979, p. 70). They also emphasise the
ideology of ‘natural taste’, which grants two things to those who are supposed
to have it: first, a self-assurance that translates into the certitude of having cul-
tural legitimacy, and second, the ease associated with excellence and which
derives its effectiveness from its capacity to transform the differences in the
acquisition of culture into differences of essence (Bourdieu 1979, p. 70–71).
They further constitute examples of the colonial continuities in postcolonial
times by showing how the ‘whiteness device’ and ‘the lettered city’ are still
fully operative in the contemporary Colombian context. This highlights that
what is at stake in these strategies of cultural and social distancing is the
keeping of the structure of social inequality unaltered because equality
reduces the social distance that is necessary for distinction to be operative.
In other words: they exemplify the cultural strategies deployed by the
upper-classes aimed at keeping the higher social-ground.
8. Conclusion
This article aimed to make some contributions. Firstly, it aimed at recentring and
showing the relevance and theoretical potential of the concepts of ‘the lettered
city’ and the ‘whiteness device’ for explaining the continuities between colonial
New Granada and postcolonial Colombia. While the lettered city is a concept
mostly operative in Colombia and Latin America, the whiteness device has
the potential to be applied beyond. Secondly, it aimed at providing the first
analysis of a media product of great contextual importance and thus contribute
to the study of consumer culture in Colombia at the turn of the century. Thirdly,
CULTURAL STUDIES 25
Notes
1. After Samper Ospina’s stepping down as head of SoHo, Diego Garzón, who had
been general editor since Edition 78 (Oct. 2006), took up his position. The maga-
zine is still being published on a monthly basis in Colombia and in the other
countries where it was independently established under Samper Ospina.
2. As I show elsewhere (Giraldo Forthcoming a), a number of facts attest to the
claim that SoHo was successful in converting consumers into value. Most
notable of all is the fact that women that were already established as celebrities
kept agreeing to being featured in it for free while non-celebrities went to great
lengths in order to achieve this.
3. As an adjective, ‘virtual’ has been entirely absorbed by computer science and in
that context, it refers to technological mediation that allows/encourages
viewers’ participation from the part of the viewer. Working from within this
approach Giannachi defines ‘virtual theatres’ as ‘open works in which the
viewer is variously participating to the work of art from within it’ (Giannachi
2004, p. 4). I am reclaiming a more mundane use of the term ‘virtual’ that
puts the emphasis on the process of mediation, even ‘remediation’ (Giannachi
2004, 4 cited in: Bolter and Grusin 2000), while removing the technological
aspect.
4. NOTE ON THE CORPUS. This article is part of a larger project on SoHo – comprising
four to five more articles and a book chapter – whose larger argument is that at
the turn of the century, SoHo operated as a powerful tool in the establishing of
26 I. GIRALDO
9. The juridical system was organised so that ethnic inequalities did not derive
from subjective appreciations but were registered in the law, which situated
individuals in its corresponding ethnic category through the issuing of certifi-
cates that guaranteed direct descendance from the first settlers (Castro-
Gómez 2010, p. 73). The Universidad Tomística in Bogotá, for instance, included
in the diploma issued to its graduates the statement Purus ab omnia macula san-
guinis certifying the holder’s blood was pure, i.e. 100% creole and hence untarn-
ished by mestizaje (see Castro-Gómez 2010, p. 66–67).
10. Emphasis in the original in Spanish.
11. The ‘whiteness device’ is connected with the principle of the ‘purity of blood’
which was implemented in 16th century Spain in order to establish the distinction
between Christians and convert Jews or Moors (Castro-Gómez 2014, p. 82–83).
12. The study of masculinity was on the rise during the eighties while the production
of new masculine subjects, such as the ‘new father’, the ‘new man’, the ‘new lad’,
saw an explosion at the turn of the century in mainstream academia (see Gill
2003). Contributing to the wider debate on masculinity and masculine subjects
lays outside of the scope of this article. However, I admit that it would be interest-
ing to explore how the various masculine subjects I claim are constructed and
mobilised in SoHo – the traditional letrado, the metrosexual, the new lad – articu-
late within a broader cultural analyses that take into consideration the question of
hybridity and the never ending modern-postmodern debate in Latin America.
13. Son of Daniel Samper Pizano (one of the most reputed 20th century Colombian
journalists), nephew of Ernesto Samper Pizano (president for the 1994-1998
period), great-grand son of Daniel Samper Ortega (director of the National
Library between 1931 and 1938 and behind the national programme of cultural
dissemination implemented during the 20th-century Liberal Republic), Daniel
Samper Ospina has managed to position himself as one of the most powerful
figures dominating public opinion in contemporary Colombia (La Silla Vacía
2013). He achieved this partly through his family connections and through his
work during the SoHo years and has maintained it through his work in Revista
Semana (up to April 2020), his very active Twitter account (2,7 million followers),
and through his YouTube channel (more than 700K subscribers).
14. For Foucault, the ‘universal intellectual’, a figure he dates back to the eighteenth
century, ‘derives from the jurist or notable, and finds his fullest manifestation in
the writer, the bearer of values and significations in which all can recognise
themselves’ (Foucault 1980, p. 128).
15. Edition 173, the SoHo’s fifteenth anniversary edition, features a full size picture of
a nude Daniel Samper Ospina covering his crotch with both hands and looking
shy, displeased, and almost terrified (SoHo 2014). He is far from embodying the
metrosexual model of masculinity and is very proud of his being bald, ‘old’ (b.
1974), unfit, etc. In fact, this is one of his usual self-deprecation lines in his
column in Revista Semana, his YouTube channel, and his Twitter account. See
Giraldo (Forthcoming a) for an analysis of Edition 173 and of the ‘media
event’ that constituted its production in urban Colombia.
16. Emphasis mine.
17. Racial statistics for Colombia show that Afro-Colombians are mainly located in
the coastal departments. Moreover, all but one coastal counties have an Afro-
Colombian population density of at least 10%, going up to 82% for Choco,
57% for San Andres, around 27% for both Bolivar and Valle del Cauca, etc. (Her-
nández Romero 2010, p. 30).
28 I. GIRALDO
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributor
Isis Giraldo holds a PhD from the University of Lausanne (2017, honours). Her work
belongs within the fields of cultural and media studies from critical approaches that
CULTURAL STUDIES 29
recentre power and social justice. Empirically, it mostly focuses on Colombia and aims
at showing how cultural hegemony has helped maintain stark imbalances of power
along the axes of gender, race, and social class, and justify regimes of rule by a privi-
leged few. Theoretically, it aims at connecting Northern feminist theories and postco-
lonial studies with critical thought on gender, race, and coloniality as developed from
within Latin America. Giraldo’s work has been published in journals such as Feminist
Media Studies, Feminist Theory, and Debate Feminista.
ORCID
Isis Giraldo http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5453-7175
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