Latina Super-heroines: Hot Tamales in Tights vs. Women Warriors, Wrestlers and Guerrilla Fighters of La Raza

The year 1977 saw the making of the first Latino superhero by a Latino artist. From the 1980s onwards it is also possible to find Latina super-heroines, whose number and complexity has kept increasing ever since. Yet, the representations of spandexed Latinas are still few. For that reason, the goal of this paper is, firstly, to gather a great number of Latina super-heroines and, secondly, to analyze the role that they have played in the history of American literature and art. More specifically, it aims at comparing the spandexed Latinas created by non-Latino/a artists and mainstream comic enterprises with the Latina super-heroines devised by Latino/a artists. The conclusion is that whereas the former tend to conceive heroines within the constraints of the logic of Girl Power, the latter choose to imbue their works with a more daring political content and to align their heroines with the ideologies of Feminism and Postcolonialism.

Second nature

Are ontological meanings somehow sacrosanct in arguments concerning psychology - particularly those scored by discursive accounts of human being? Or is the purposeful deferment of ontological concerns in discursive psychology (DP) another instance of method-fetishism (Koch, 1981)? Shotter's (1995) understanding of joint action and Chouliaraki's (2002) critical realist account of social action combine to support an alternate position to the predominant discursive psychological approach informed by epistemological constructionism (DPEC). The DPEC position is here contrasted with a discursive psychological approach informed by ontological constructionism (DPOC). Via this distinction, a path for future discursive psychological studies is charted, one which values understanding the kinds of practical-moral knowledges (Shotter, 1993) available to people in accounting for themselves and their actions as psychosocial agents. Contrary to claims that the DPEC/DPOC distinction is supercilious (Edley, 2001) or oxymoronic (Drewery, 2000), the importance of debating what ontology can mean for psychology is herein seen as central to the pursuit of personal, relational and collective wellness in contemporary life.