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Se analizan los contenidos ideológicos de la acuarela «Nacimiento de una nación» (2008), de Candice Lin. A partir de nociones como territorio, tropo caníbal, tipo botánico tropical y pensamiento fronterizo, se plantea una interpretación de esa paisajística pictórica, en que la artista-activista reflexiona sobre el régimen de representación visual. Mediante diversos procedimientos formales, Lin pone en entredicho preceptos centrales de la mentalidad colonialista, que contrapone a las concepciones indigenistas. Abstract An analysis is provided of the ideological contents of the watercolor “Birth of a Nation” (2008), by Candice Lin. This interpretation of this pictorial landscape is based on notions such as territory, cannibal tropes, tropical botanical types and border thinking. The artist activist reflects here on the regime of visual representation. Using different formal procedures, Lin questions central precepts of the colonialist mentality, in contrast with indigenous conceptions.

This article examines certain historical instances of the gyneco-scopic regime that established the rules and codes of perception, knowledge, and over-codification of the female body as a visible genital body, knowable and reducible to the vagina and the uterus. We then go on to examine a group of contemporary works that challenge this order or, at the very least, de-structure the modern, colonial, and androcentric ways of seeing genitalia. The gyneco-scopic regime of modernity is founded in the synecdochal slicing up of the female body (cuts that are visual, anatomical, and aesthetic), its ultra visibility (exploration, territorialization, and optical penetration), and the paradoxical covering up of the many forms of symbolic, historical, and material violence that have made and continue to make this visual order possible in the first place. A series of works, including installations and performances, by artists such as Frida Kahlo, Ana Mendieta, Enrique Chagoya, Regina José Galindo, Vik Muniz, and Candice Lin, among others, make the violence of this gyneco-scopic regime explicit; moreover, in some cases the art blocks or fractures the gaze set upon the genital body, disrupting the relationship of subordination between the observer and the observed, thereby resisting what Michel Foucault calls the power of the eye.