Biopolitics, Colonialism and the Women’s Rights Question in Puerto Rico

By Marlene Duprey

In Puerto Rico, addressing the country’s colonial situation means denouncing its lack of sovereignty: the fact that the island is not a nation state. Since 1898, Puerto Rico has been a US territory. In 1952 we became a Commonwealth, a political status that has being constantly questioned as being colonial par excellence. My assertion in this essay is that this constant reference to colonial political status, paradoxically, avoids the discussion of colonial situations that do not specifically depend on political status in itself, such as the colonization of the body by a certain conception of health, the hegemony of moralizing discourses in the political domain, male violence on women’s bodies, the hegemony of the images of fear vis-à-vis the issue of freedom and the mass media’s monopoly in political representation, amongst many others.

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