Performing Mexicanidad: Vendidas y Cabareteras on the Transnational Stage (Chicana Matters)

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. Dedication 6 Contents 8 Acknowledgments 10 Introduction. Unsettling Comforts: Notes on Language, Politics, and Sex/Sexuality in a Transnational Context 16 PART ONE: REIMAGINING THE ARCHIVES OF FEMININITY AND SEXUALITY 44 1. Sexing Guadalupe in Transnational Double Crossings 46 2. Gender Parody, Political Satire, and Postmodern Rancheras: Astrid Hadad’s “Heavy Nopal” Aesthetics 79 3. Fue en un cabaret: Nation, Melodrama, Gender, and Sexuality in Contemporary Mexican Performance 116 PART TWO: CHICANA AND MEXICANA QUEER PERFORMATIVE INTERVENTIONS 148 4. Nao Bustamante’s “Bad-Girl” Aesthetics 150 5. Ximena Cuevas’s Critical Collages 166 Coda. Transtortilleras: Political Cabaret in the Twenty-first Century 182 Notes 203 Works Cited 241 Index 249 An examination of the intersection of public discourses on sexualities with recent political, economic, and social shifts in the national context of Mexico and the Mexican diaspora in the United States.