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6. Performing the Erotics of Home: Monica Palacios, Marga Gomez, and Carmelita Tropicana
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121 6 Performative forms of expression not only allow for an additional element of corporeality so important to marginalized subjects combating silence and erasure, but also emphasize the performative nature of the representational process. By breaking free from the constraints of the page and the written word, artists “become”/embody their texts, circumventing—at least in part—the limitations of language. In the world of performance we no longer read words. We read the performer, her expression, her gestures, her orality, and her silence. Language is a tool for the communication of ideas, but it ceases to be the sole or principle communicative instrument. The dethroning of language is essential to understanding the freedom that performativity affords artists and its boundless potential for transforming identity politics for those subjects whose voices have been silenced or deferred within dominant historical and cultural domains. The centrality of corporeality is an undeniable force in performative manifestations of dissent, for as David Román states, “In solo performance the body of the performer emerges as the primary site of representation, interpretation, and, consequentially, possible intervention.” (Acts of Intervention, ). Alicia Arrizón also notes that Latina performativity “literally embod[ies] cultural resistance,” and when these staged bodies are marked by sexual as well as ethnic or racial alterity and accompanied by a voice in overt opposition to the institutions of heteronormative patriarchy, the performance’s transgressive potential is amplified (Latina Performance ). José Esteban Muñoz expands this possibility with a conceptualization of “queer worldmaking” where performers move beyond the staging of a single subject and instead transport spectator and artist Performing the Erotics of Home Monica Palacios, Marga Gomez, and Carmelita Tropicana It was turning into a kinky ritual. What lured me was the way she used her sexy mouth, and god— she loved to CHEW! Yes, I watched her eat carne asada tacos from afar. —Monica Palacios, Greetings from a Queer Señorita 122 HOMECOMING QUEERS alike to transgressive worlds that defy hegemonic institutions of power: “The concept of ‘worldmaking’ delineates the ways in which performances—both theatrical and everyday rituals—have the ability to establish alternate views of the world. These alternative vistas are more than simply views or perspectives; they are the oppositional ideologies that function as critiques of oppressive regimes of ‘truth’ that subjugate minoritarian people. Oppositional counterpublics are enabled by visions, ‘worldviews,’ that reshape as they deconstruct reality” (Disidentifications –). Through their staging of both body and voice, Gomez’s, Tropicana’s, and Palacios’s performances challenge homogenizing stereotypes and create spaces for a multiplicity of experiences and perspectives within minority and majority groups. On the importance of visibility, Gomez notes, “We need to be telling our own stories. If we never see anyone who looks like us, then we never include ourselves in our fantasies and dreams” (Durnell ). Gomez keenly delineates the connection between discourse and corporeality, since she posits “seeing” as a prime impetus for self-affirming discursive production . Performance holds the potential to flip the proverbial script here since the stage becomes Gomez’s means to interrupt her own public erasure as a queer Latina. In the performances of Tropicana, Gomez, and Palacios, audiences and critics alike witness that the convergence of multiple identity categories within a single subject further complicates and refutes the claims of purity or unmarked status purported by any dominant or minority community. Yet as performance critic Kate Davy posits, “An understanding of how the lesbian performer represents herself on-stage is useful not to separate and valorize her forms of expression as unique from those of everyone else, but to understand how some lesbian performance has begun to push at the boundaries of representation itself” (). The three artists included in this chapter utilize elements of performance and performativity to stage the complications of a singularly defined “minority subjectivity ,” to embody their textual creations, and to complicate the politics of identity formation and representation afforded to subjects defined through alterity by dominant spheres. Monica Palacios’s Erotics of Symmetry In a traditional model of desire, typically only the subject speaks while the desired object is merely spoken to or of. This paradigm is largely one-sided since it is constituted not of two subjects, but rather of one subject and one object. Such a representation of desire largely silences one subject, because this individual ’s participation is irrelevant to the act of desiring. In this way, the transition from subject to object is performed as the object of desire...