Media Portrayal (Fetishization) of LatinX Individuals

The Twitterverse Objectifying...Children Too???

     If the objectification and fetishization of Latinx women weren't enough on their own, the modern day social-media powerhouses known as Twitter and Instagram have come to serve as the arenas where millions of netizens have used the most of their 150 character word count to reduce the worth of a Latinx person (especially women) to acting as a reproductive vessel for "beautiful mixed babies."   




     The picture on the right displays that this specific Twitter post has been mentioned over 20,000 separate times and has had over 20,000 users look and disseminate its content. It is quite clear that the ubiquitous and user-friendly nature of something like Twitter makes this sort of phenomenon much easier and more accessible to different kinds of people, showing the social media platform's exacerbating nature in this context.

     Once again, the twitter posts found above were picked because they were amongst the top five search results when the key word Latinx was typed into the twitter search bar, which ties back to the original purpose of the this project: accurately portraying the way in which real-time media most commonly portrays Latinx individuals and ends up both creating and enforcing subjectively imposed sexualized beauty standards and false narratives.

 
     There are two major issues with the post pictured to the left. Firstly, as the Twitter post so clearly relays, even young, partly Latinx children are now being fetishized in a very perverted way that seems to mirror the sexual and dating preferences of the users who upload these sort of posts in the first place. Secondarily, however, the usage of the wording "production" acts as a testament to which Latinx women in particular are dehumanized and have their value as an actual person diminished to simply being a tool or a unit of capital used to create aesthetically pleasing children who will also end up being sexualized at a young age as well.

         

     Another incriminating post showing Twitter acting as a medium for the derogatory disrespect of Latinx women is displayed above. This time around, the user attempts to be humorous via listing a bevy of utterly offensive, racist, and disgustingly patriarchal reasons as to why "every Spanish women" should be with a White man, with one of the reasons once again being to create mixed children. The more disturbing characteristic of this particular Twitter post however is that it actually went viral, being categorized under the hashtag "#spicylatinas." Not much has to be said to indicate just how much easier it is to create a false, misrepresentative, and dehumanizing image of an entire group of people and spread it to millions of other people just with the tap of a phone screen or the clicking of an enter on a keyboard. This is in part because of the advent of 21st century interfaces like Twitter, a troubling phenomenon not set to disappear for a while.

 

This page has paths:

This page references: