Cuban girls and visual media : bodies and practices of (still-) socialist consumerism

This paper examines Cuban girls’ use of photography in coming-of-age rituals to consider what mediated girlhood might look like beyond the reach of neo-liberalism and post-feminism. Cuba offers an interesting context for such considerations, as a place in which the effects of global neo-liberalism remain buffered, and sharply contested by the prevailing tenets of socialism. It is also a place in which many feminist goals have been realized for the average woman, but with minimal reference to the debates of feminism and post-feminism. Despite these apparently serious differences, Cuban girls engage in many of the same mediated practices and rituals as their counterparts across the Americas. Cuban girls’ lives are relatively rich in the products of globalized consumer culture and typically include watching US-produced television shows, dancing to music videos and poring over imported magazines. But such incorporation of cultural products that flow (mostly) from the capitalist Americas by no means negates the lived experience of Cuban girls as subjects in a socialist society, whose rights and responsibilities impact in very direct ways upon how they manage their emerging womanly bodies.