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NEW ICONOGRAPHIES: FILM CULTURE IN CHICANO CULTURAL PRODUCTION 3 Ramón Garcia THIS ESSAY examines Chicana/o cultural work whose citation of international ¤lm movements and various cinematic iconographies index a resistance to oppressive regimes of representation. While contesting the dominant culture’s abject markings, these same cinematic re®ections introduce a signi¤cant critique of gender, national, sexual, and cultural norms in contemporary Chicana/o culture. My argument is that ¤lm culture has been central to a critique of dominant culture while it has provided a way of interrogating a homogeneous Chicana/o subject. I will identify two currents in contemporary Chicano cultural work: Chicana/o literature which uses a cinematic apparatus, and what I de¤ne as Chicana/o counter-cinema and video. Chicano cultural work, which re®ects on new Chicana/o subjectivities through a citation of cinema, operates within very speci¤c geographical , historical, and ethnic networks and simultaneously highlights the localization and internationalization of Chicano/Mexicano cultures in the Southwest. In contemporary Chicano literature, a citation of cinematic icons, images, and themes has strongly in®ected Chicana feminist and queer literary production. Through a re®ection of a cinematic imaginary, Chicana/o writers have created a space from which to construct a form of political agency for subjects that occupy multiple subject positions. This project is directly related to earlier nationalist and monolithic Chicano subject formations in that it makes arti¤cial those universalizing foundational mythologies concerning a return to origins, heroism, or nativism. What marks this new form of identity formation is its irony and the interrogation of community and sexuality as it relates to speci¤c forms of feminist and queer agency. Mexican ¤lms and Mexican ¤lm stars play a central role in de¤ning the feminist agency of characters in various short stories from Sandra Cisneros ’s celebrated collection of short stories Woman Hollering Creek. In Ana Castillo’s short story “Subtitles,” in her collection Loverboys, a Chicana writer in Europe imagines herself as an exotic and “literary” star living inside of a foreign ¤lm. Denise Chávez, in the short story “The McCoy Hotel,” recounts the childhood experiences of two adolescents visiting the McCoy Hotel in El Paso, Texas, with their mother. It is in the transitory space of the hotel and from the viewing of classic Mexican ¤lms that the young girls learn about sexuality, men, romantic ideals, and gendered 64 expectations. Mexican cinema, for Cisneros and Chávez, is the political/ cultural structure that binds heterosexual romance, romantic expectations , and patriarchal morality. In Chicana theater, the signi¤cance of cinema to the construction of sexual identity is evident in Cherríe Moraga’s Giving Up the Ghost. Corky, one of the main characters in Giving Up the Ghost, de¤nes her butch identity in terms of cinematic role-playing: [W]hen I was a real little kid I usta love the movies every Saturday you could ¤nd me there my eyeballs glued to the screen then later my friend Arturo ’n’ me we’d make up our own movies one was where we’d be out in the desert ’n’ we’d capture these chicks ’n’ hold ’em up for ransom we’d string ’em up ’n’ make ’em take their clothes off “strip” we’d say to the wall all cool-like funny . . . now when I think about how little I was at the time and a girl but in my mind I was big ’n’ tough ’n’ a dude in my mind I had all their freedom.1 In this scene Corky is re®ecting upon the origin of her butch identity, which is to be located in the childhood role-playing of macho male characters in movies. The male role in cinema affords an erotic agency and a sense of freedom through its arti¤cial reconstruction in the form of play. This is the framework that has been analyzed in the context of what Judith Halberstam terms “female masculinity.”2 For Corky, the sense of heroic freedom is one that is adapted from the male’s violent aggressiveness on the screen. The internalization of cinematic male models of masculinity foregrounds a framework for the construction of a lesbian-butch identity, what Halberstam terms a “masculinity without men.” In reconstituting the myths of cinema as a critique of gender and sexual matters, cinematically based Chicano cultural work has entailed a radical departure from a uni¤ed, centered, and totalizing Chicano subject, what Angie Chabram-Dernersesian has de...

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