Performing Mexicanidad

Cover

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Title Page, Copyright

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Contents

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Acknowledgments

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pp. ix-xiii

The book that you are now holding is heavily marked by my alternating moments of attachment—from grappling with ideas to learning to reconfi gure them—and of detachment, of learning to let go. This dual process, at times simultaneous, which has been going on for the last ten years, more or less the time that...

INTRODUCTION. Unsettling Comforts: Notes on Language, Politics, and Sex/Sexuality

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pp. 1-27

In the fall of 2003 Mexico City–based queer cabaret performance artist Astrid Hadad performed two successive shows—on two separate nights—as part of the Sabor a México (A Taste of Mexico) series during the 2003–2004 season of the University of Arizona’s UA Presents program. As one of the primary artists...

PART ONE. REIMAGINING THE ARCHIVES OF FEMININITY AND SEXUALITY

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pp. 29-

1. Sexing Guadalupe in Transnational Double Crossings

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pp. 31-63

The overwhelming presence of the Virgen de Guadalupe image in all forms of commercial objects across the United States and Mexico, as well as in noncommercial makeshift canvases, primarily human skins (tattoos) and static walls (murals), helps one to easily argue that this image is perhaps the most...

2. Gender Parody, Political Satire, and Postmodern Rancheras: Astrid Hadad’s “Heavy Nopal” Aesthetics

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pp. 64-123

In her numerous performances, Mexican queer cabaret performance artist Astrid Hadad takes pleasure in dismantling dominant conceptions of national, cultural, sexual, and gendered identities. She has been doing this consistently since the late 1980s. Her performances critique Mexican patriarchal structures,...

3. Fue en un cabaret: Nation, Melodrama, Gender, and Sexuality in Contemporary Mexican Performance

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pp. 101-131

In contemporary Mexican cultural practices, and for over two decades now, the queer cabaret performance artists examined in this chapter have been engaging in strategies of pleasure seeking and giving, all the while making social and political commentaries through their embodied performances. By way...

PART TWO. CHICANA AND MEXICANA QUEER PERFORMATIVE INTERVENTIONS

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pp. 133-

4. Nao Bustamante’s “Bad-Girl” Aesthetics

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pp. 135-150

This fi rst chapter of the second part of Performing Mexicanidad, which focuses on experimental performance and videoart practices by female artists Ximena Cuevas and Nao Bustamante (considered doyennes of Mexican and Chicano avantgarde art, respectively), reconceptualizes the avant-garde...

5. Ximena Cuevas’s Critical Collages

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pp. 151-166

Mexico City–based video/conceptual artist Ximena Cuevas is obsessed with the fi ne line between truth and fi ction, the performance of everyday life, and what she perceives to be the “impossibility” of Reality. Highly regarded in the United States, Cuevas has been consistently producing intimate...

Coda. Transtortilleras: Political Cabaret in the Twenty-First Century

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pp. 167-187

During the process of thinking and writing—for ten years and counting—about queer sexuality, the female performing body, and contemporary cultural production, there have been undeniable twists and turns. These last pages come as a result of the shifts within my own intellectual trajectory; they are, in other words, a sort...

Notes

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pp. 188-225

Works Cited

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pp. 226-233

Index

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pp. 234-250