Author: Laura G. Gutiérrez Publisher: University of Texas Press ISBN: 0292779194 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 272
Book Description
Using interdisciplinary performance studies and cultural studies frameworks, Laura G. Gutiérrez examines the cultural representation of queer sexuality in the contemporary cultural production of Mexican female and Chicana performance and visual artists. In particular, she locates the analytical lenses of feminist theory and queer theory in a central position to interrogate Mexican female dissident sexualities in transnational public culture. This is the first book-length study to wed performance studies and queer theory in examining the performative/performance work of important contemporary Mexicana and Chicana cultural workers. It proposes that the creations of several important artists—Chicana visual artist Alma López; the Mexican political cabareteras Astrid Hadad, Jesusa Rodríguez, Liliana Felipe, and Regina Orozco; the Chicana performance artist Nao Bustamante; and the Mexican video artist Ximena Cuevas—unsettle heterosexual national culture. In doing so, they are not only challenging heterosexist and nationalist discourses head-on, but are also participating in the construction of a queer world-making project. Treating the notion of dis-comfort as a productive category in these projects advances feminist and queer theories by offering an insightful critical movement suggesting that queer worlds are simultaneously spaces of desire, fear, and hope. Gutiérrez demonstrates how arenas formerly closed to female performers are now providing both an artistic outlet and a powerful political tool that crosses not only geographic borders but social, sexual, political, and class boundaries as well, and deconstructs the relationships among media, hierarchies of power, and the cultures of privilege.
Author: Xiomara Verenice Cervantes-Gomez Publisher: NYU Press ISBN: 1479829161 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 226
Book Description
Proposes a queer way to be in the world and with others Invoking queer aesthetics, ethics, and politics, Bottoms Up explores a sexual way to be with others while living with loss. Xiomara Cervantes-Gómez demonstrates how aesthetic representations of sex—namely, bottoming—function as allegorical paradigms, revealing the assemblages of violence that have constituted the social, cultural, and political shifts of Mexico and US Latinx culture from 1950 to the present. With playful, theoretically nuanced prose, Cervantes-Gómez builds upon queer of color theory and continental philosophy to present the “bottom” as a form of relational performance, which she terms “pasivo ethics.” The argument develops through a series of compelling case studies, including a series of novels by Octavio Paz and Luis Zapata that trace the position of the bottom in Mexican nationalist literature; the forms of exposure, risk, and proximity in the performance work of artist Lechedevirgen Trimegisto; a reading of violence and the erotic in the work of artist Bruno Ramri; and reading artists such as Yosimar Reyes, Yanina Orellana, and Carlos Martiel as they build a framework of sexual inheritance that carries the traumas of Mexicanness into the diaspora. Through a broad archive rooted in hemispheric Latinx performance, Bottoms Up considers how sexual and political power are bound up with each other in the shaping of Mexicanness. Placing particular emphasis on questions of queer and trans Mexican embodiment, the book explains how Mexicanness is constituted through discourses of exposure.
Author: Arturo J. Aldama Publisher: Indiana University Press ISBN: 0253008778 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 523
Book Description
In this interdisciplinary volume, contributors analyze the expression of Latina/o cultural identity through performance. With music, theater, dance, visual arts, body art, spoken word, performance activism, fashion, and street theater as points of entry, contributors discuss cultural practices and the fashoning of identity in Latino/a communities throughout the US. Examining the areas of crossover between Latin and American cultures gives new meaning to the notion of "borderlands." This volume features senior scholars and up-and-coming academics from cultural, visual, and performance studies, folklore, and ethnomusicology.
Author: R. Blanco-Cano Publisher: Springer ISBN: 023037039X Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 406
Book Description
In this book, the authors propose a multilayered reading of contemporary transnational cultural manifestations in which it is possible to recognize challenges and cultural strategies that transnational Mexican communities conceive in order to claim cultural, political and social agency.
Author: Susana Vargas Cervantes Publisher: NYU Press ISBN: 1479853089 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 279
Book Description
The surprising true story of Mexico’s hunt, arrest, and conviction of its first female serial killer For three years, amid widespread public outrage, police in Mexico City struggled to uncover the identity of the killer responsible for the ghastly deaths of forty elderly women, many of whom had been strangled in their homes with a stethoscope by someone posing as a government nurse. When Juana Barraza Samperio, a female professional wrestler known as la Dama del Silencio (the Lady of Silence), was arrested—and eventually sentenced to 759 years in prison—for her crimes as the Mataviejitas (the little old lady killer), her case disrupted traditional narratives about gender, criminality, and victimhood in the popular and criminological imagination. Marshaling ten years of research, and one of the only interviews that Juana Barraza Samperio has given while in prison, Susana Vargas Cervantes deconstructs this uniquely provocative story. She focuses, in particular, on the complex, gendered aspects of the case, asking: Who is a killer? Barraza—with her “manly” features and strength, her career as a masked wrestler in lucha libre, and her violent crimes—is presented, here, as a study in gender deviance, a disruption of what scholars call mexicanidad, or the masculine notion of what it means to be Mexican. Cervantes also challenges our conception of victimhood—specifically, who “counts” as a victim. The Little Old Lady Killer presents a fascinating analysis of what serial killing—often considered “killing for the pleasure of killing”—represents to us.
Author: Linda Saborío Publisher: Lexington Books ISBN: 161147468X Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 198
Book Description
Embodying Difference: Scripting Social Images of the Female Body in Latina Theatre explores contemporary theatrical productions by Latina dramatists in the United States and focuses on the effects that neoliberal politics, global market strategies, gender formation, and racial and ethnic marginalization have had on Latinas. Through the analysis of select plays by dramatists Nao Bustamante, Coco Fusco, Anne García-Romero, Josefina López, Cherríe Moraga, Linda Nieves-Powell, Dolores Prida, and Milcha Sánchez-Scott, Embodying Difference shows how the bodies of Latinas are represented on stage in order to create an image of Latina consolidation. The performances of a dynamic female body challenge assumptions about ethno-racial expressions, exoticized “otherness,” and political correctness as this book explores often uneasy sites of representations of the body including phenotype, sexuality, obesity, and the body as a political marker. Drawing on the theoretical framework of difference, including differing gender voices, performances, and performative acts, Embodying Difference examines social images of the Latina body as a means of understanding and rearticulating Latina subjectivity through an expression of difference. By means of a gradual realization and self-acclamation of their own images, Latinas can learn to embody notions of self that endorse their curvaceous, sexualized, and oversized bodies that have historically been marked and marketed by their “brownness.”
Author: Deborah R. Vargas Publisher: U of Minnesota Press ISBN: 0816673160 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 338
Book Description
Explores the resounding musical performances of Mexican American women such as Chelo Silva, Eva Ybarra, Eva Garza, and Selena within Tejano/Chicano music
Author: Sean Metzger Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1350123196 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 553
Book Description
This is a guide to contemporary debates and theatre practices at a time when gender paradigms are both in flux and at the centre of explosive political battlegrounds. The confluence of gender and theatre has long created intense debate about representation, identification, social conditioning, desire, embodiment, and lived experience. As this handbook demonstrates, from the conventions of early modern English, Chinese, Japanese and Hispanic theatres to the subversion of racialized binaries of masculinity and femininity in recent North American, African, Asian, Caribbean and European productions, the matter of gender has consistently taken centre stage. This handbook examines how critical discourses on gender intersect with key debates in the field of theatre studies, as a lens to illuminate the practices of gender and theatre as well as the societies they inform and represent across space and time. Of interest to scholars in the interrelated areas of feminist, gender and sexuality studies, theatre and performance studies, cultural studies, and globalization and diasporic studies, this book demonstrates how researchers are currently addressing theatre about gender issues and gendered theatre practices. While synthesizing and summarizing foundational and evolving debates from a contemporary perspective, this collection offers interpretations and analyses that do not simply look back at existing scholarship, but open up new possibilities and understandings. Featuring essential research tools, including a survey of keywords and an annotated play list, this is an indispensable scholarly handbook for anyone working in theatre and performance.
Author: Suzanne Bost Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1136221603 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 586
Book Description
Latino/a literature is one of the fastest developing fields in the discipline of literary studies. It represents an identity that is characterized by fluidity and diversity, often explored through divisions formed by language, race, gender, sexuality, and immigration. The Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature presents over forty essays by leading and emerging international scholars of Latino/a literature and analyses: Regional, cultural and sexual identities in Latino/a literature Worldviews and traditions of Latino/a cultural creation Latino/a literature in different international contexts The impact of differing literary forms of Latino/a literature The politics of canon formation in Latino/a literature. This collection provides a map of the critical issues central to the discipline, as well as uncovering new perspectives and new directions for the development of the field. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the past, present and future of this literary culture.
Author: Laura G. Gutiérrez
Author: Xiomara Verenice Cervantes-Gomez
Author: Ramon H. Rivera-Servera
Author: Arturo J. Aldama
Author: R. Blanco-Cano
Author: Susana Vargas Cervantes
Author: Linda Saborío
Author: Deborah R. Vargas
Author: Sean Metzger
Author: Suzanne Bost