From Drug Mule to Miss America: American Exceptionalism and the Commodification of the “Other” Woman in María Full of Grace

Commenting on his motivations for his movie Maria Full of Grace (2004), director and writer Joshua Marston explains that he intended to make an educational movie about the people who are engaged in international drug trafficking and about the dangers that such work entails.1 His choice to depict Colombia's drug industry echoes his deep interest in world politics, Colombia's forty-year civil war and guerilla wars, and the country's stagnant economy. With Marston's advocacy of issues in world politics and human rights, HBO, the movie's US distributor, continues to add diversity to its playbill.2 Still, despite these noble intentions of promoting issues of Third World countries, the movie only partly succeeds in its attempt to "humanize the drug mule."3 This becomes evident from the general response the movie received from American viewers: while many are positively captivated by the movie, the attention of their enamored attachment to the movie almost exclusively focuses on Catalina Sandino Moreno, the young Colombian actress who plays the role of Maria. While her convincing performance certainly aided in the successful transference of the movie's intended message about the complicated entanglements that affect the lives of transnational drug mules, the ways in which many movie critics (professional and amateur) see in Moreno a representative of the Colombia she depicts is rather troublesome.However, as this article argues, such resonance with the audience is not entirely beyond Marston's control. On the contrary, there are several instances in the movie that invite the audience to see in Moreno a spokesperson for Colombian social realities, and in Maria a " 'windowsQ' into the presumed alterity of other cultures" (Amireh and Majaj 2). One movie review makes a particularly problematic assumption about the movie when it characterizes Maria Full of Grace as a portrayal of "the enormous complexity of Hispanic life in America, especially of the illegal variety" (Brunette). Such is the general tenor in the responses Marston's movie has received from journalists and online bloggers alike.While this essay does not endorse such reviews, it addresses a selection of such responses for its investigation of the degree to which Marston's movie itself suggests an objectified representation of Colombian female drug mules. Such representation, it seems, appears to resonate with the American audience more than the careful crafting and sensitive gaze with which Marston approaches the subject of his film. It is therefore particularly interesting to examine in what way the movie objectifies Colombian women by appropriating Colombia as stereotypical global South. Taking its cue from recent discussions in transnational feminism, this essay analyzes a recurrent dilemma in Western representations of the Third World through images of the "Other" woman to emphasize the difference between the First and the Third World for an ultimate projection of American supremacy.Third World Women on American TV-ScreensRecent US feminist culture criticism has increasingly shown interest in transnational feminist issues,4 most particularly in the orientalist and essentialist over-generalizations of Third World cultures that US academia, popular culture, and the mass media have produced when attempting representations of Third World women.5 Recognizing the danger of such generalizations, Rey Chow offers two useful concepts for a critical evaluation of Western mass media's depiction of "the other country." In her critique of American coverage of the "China crisis" of the late 1980s, Chow refers to a sensationalist interest of Western audiences that manifests itself in what she calls "China watching." Symptomatic of China watching, specifies Chow, are detailed accounts in which US mass media depicts the Chinese government as controlling and ruthless, and portrays the protesters without respecting their right to anonymity (Third World 83). The second concept, the "King Kong syndrome," which Chow defines as intricately connected to the sensationalism that is at the center of China watching (Third World 84), echoes Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's contention that the Third World is often depicted as a site of "raw" materials that invoke "monstrosity," which appears in contrast to the First World both as entertainment and as evidence for the persisting, Western notion of cultural elevation (In Other Worlds 90). …