Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics by José Esteban Muñoz (review)

Reviews someone other than "the boys," Clum's book is a worthwhile contribution to a growing body of scholarly work on the musical from a gay male perspective, like that of D.A. Miller, Ethan Mordden, David van Leer, Richard Dyer, and Patrick Horrigan. JOSE ESTEBAN MUNOZ. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Perjonnallce of Polilies. Cultural Studies of the Americas, no. 2. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Pp. ix + 227, illustrated. $49·95 (Hb); $19.95 (Pb). Reviewed by Frederick Luis Aldama. Stanford University Those curtains held tight by white, straight male actors and dramatists have been ripped open. Feminist performance artist Karen Finley forces mainstream audiences to question constructions of desire in a phallocentric world. Robbie McCauley complicates the feminist perfonnance art landscape by heavily peppering her acts with scenes of racist violation. Martin Shennan's Bent (1979) opened eyes nationwide to the queer side of the Holocaust, while Tony Kushner picked up accolades with his allegorical AIDS epic Angels in America (1991). Thanks to a new breed of performance art and theatre, audiences can no longer turn a blind eye to the intersections of race, sexuality, and gender that infonn the society we inhabit. Jose Esteban Munoz's Disidentifications : Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics colors the shapes that make up the queer Latino strands of this newly stretched dramatic and perfonnance art canvas. Munoz focuses on perfonnance art, exploring specifically how Latino-identified queer artists recycle techniques, styles, and genres familiar to a mainstream audience to create spectacles that form critiques from within yet not absorbed by a white, heterononnativc social matrix. For Munoz, race- and queer-identified performance art by artists such as Carmelita Tropicana, Vaginal Creme Davis, and Marga Gomez opens up the possibility of creating a new "collective sense of worldliness" for the culture as a whole (200). He writes that the work by Cuban-American Tropicana and mixed-race (or mestiza) African American/Mexican Vaginal Creme Davis is all about making a spectacle of racial hybridity and of crisscrossing homo-, hetero-, and bisexual desire: while both traditional Latino communities and the Euro-AngIo mainstream perpetuate myths oJ racial and sexual purity, Tropicana and Davis sidestep easy us/them, straight/queer identity paradigms. The filmed perfonnance Carmelita Tropicana (1993) "disidentifies" (Munoz's tenn to describe the strategy of recycling dominant images and structures to fonn a politics of resistance from within the mainstream) pervasive domination/subordination master narratives by exaggeratedly adopting the Latino chusmeria style. Traditionally, chusmerfa refers to the working class's tacky styles of dress, comportment, and home decor. Tropicana's REVIEWS delight in such Latino low-brow aesthetics disarticulates both the macho, middle -class elitist Latino culture - and, as she vogues Ricky Ricardo-style, the xenophobic mainstream U.S. culture. Munoz argues that these performances become specifically "disidentificatory" when Tropicana forces traditionally restrictive images and genres to cross over into a queer performance space. She mixes Latino "ranchera" musical scores - a genre traditionally associated with heterosexual couplings - with lesbian activist protest imagery and drag cabaret performances to express a culturally hybrid queer identity that both participates in and stands outside the mainstream. Munoz offers up drag artist Vaginal Creme Davis as an example of another disidentification strategy. Davis's "terroristic drag" acts intend to restructure the way phobic mainstream audiences imagine "notions of the self and the social" (lOa, 97); previously a member of the L.A. punk band iCholitai, Davis fuses a punk aesthetic with traditionally Latino choteo (parodic) humor. As well, his/her drag parodies drag itself; Vaginal is interested not in flawless makeup and delicately nippled bras but in a raunchy look that borders both masculine and feminine gender types. In a mustache and a nurse costume, Davis taunts audiences used to the safe and mass-consumable Hollywood representations of drag queens found in films such as To Wong Faa and The Bird Cage. Not all of Disidenti/ications focuses on performance art. Munoz turns briefly to demonstrate how, for example, Asian film director Richard Fung disrupts the white gay porn imaginary that naturalizes stereotypes of the Asian male body as passive by presenting queer Asians as active, speaking subjects. Fung's disidentification strategy...