Performing Mexicanidad: Vendidas y cabareteras on the Transnational Stage (review)

1. Sex in the performing arts—Mexico. 2. Lesbians in the performing arts—Mexico. 3. Music-halls (Variety-theaters, cabarets, etc.)—social aspects —Mexico. 4. Women entertainers—Mexico. 5. Women performance artists—Mexico.

In this book, Gutiérrez employs the notion of “unsettling comforts” to call attention to the disruptive, transgressive quality of the queer cabaret and performance artists she studies. Such disruptions or transgressions challenge heterosexual national and nationalist culture, provoking audiences to question heteronormative paradigms. Additionally, Gutiérrez uses the concept of “unsettled comfort” to refer to the in-between space inhabited by queer artists. The author suggests that “in betweenness, particularly for minoritarian subjects, may, in fact, be the home address of all those involved in a queer world-making project” (20). This discomfort or unsettled comfort, she argues, opens a productive space for analysis.

Performing Mexicanidad is divided into two parts, the first of which concerns the ways in which several contemporary Mexican and Mexican American visual, performance and video artists interrogate national identity and its relationship with gender roles by appropriating and re-imagining feminine icons of Mexican national identity. For instance, Gutiérrez explores the ways in which Mexican and Chicano/a visual artists have deployed the image of the Virgen de Guadalupe, re-inscribing her with new meanings, as well as the critical response to such re-inscriptions. Other icons of femininity such as the china poblana, the rumbera figure popularized in the golden age of Mexican melodrama, and the female subjects of ranchera music standards become subject to re-visioning by the cabareteras Astrid Hadad, Jesusa Rodríguez, Liliana Felipe and Regina Orozco, as well as the video artist Ximena Cuevas. These artists’ performances serve to parody and interrogate the masculinist and heteronormative discourses that figure prominently in the Mexican national identitary, opening a space for a queer Mexican identity while inscribing the artists in a long-standing tradition of rule-bending women performers.

In the second part of the book, Gutiérrez profiles the avant-garde Chicana performance artist Nao Bustamante and Mexican video artist Ximena Cuevas, demonstrating that both women avail themselves of dominant mass-media forms in order to undertake “queer performative interventions.” Bustamante and Cuevas move beyond the traditional, contained spaces of the museum or stage in their artistic production, such as when Bustamante appears in character as a sexual deviant on the Joan Rivers show or Cuevas spools out a fabricated homosexual love affair with another artist for the benefit of a tabloid magazine. The author’s “coda” to the book describes how Jesusa Rodríguez and Liliana Felipe have left behind the enclosed space of the cabaret in order to take to the streets. She argues that in abandoning the cabaret, these artists transcend social, sexual and political borders to contest neoliberal policies of the Calderón administration through public performances and acts of civil disobedience.

Drawing on a broad base of performance studies, queer and feminist theory, Gutiérrez also clearly delineates and acknowledges the challenges and limitations inherent to using live art as an object of study. Perhaps because of such limitations, Gutiérrez’s close readings of Astrid Hadad’s “Heavy nopal” aesthetics and Nao Bustamante’s stage performances become vital to familiarize readers with pieces of cultural production that are ephemeral by nature and often unavailable for reviewing. This is especially true because Gutiérrez uses these and other anecdotal performances to illustrate methodological concerns raised at the intersection of sexuality, language, politics, nationalism and art, and in order to unsettle further comforts: those conventions that she considers as having, until now, largely conformed scholarly production on literature, film, and material culture of Latin America. In general, as a call to acknowledge the careful and detained study of embodied performances as important avenues for scholarship in Latin American cultural studies, Performing Mexicanidad succeeds most where it leads by example.