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168 8 Ela Troyano’s  short film Carmelita Tropicana: Your Kunst Is Your Waffen stars Troyano’s sister Alina as her performative alter-ego, Carmelita Tropicana, a radical Cuban-born, New York City, Lower East Side–dwelling, lesbian performance artist with a penchant for colorful sequined costumes, platform sneakers, and fruit as a fashion accessory. In the film’s opening scene, Carmelita prides herself on being “good with the tongue.” The film’s title, Your Kunst Is Your Waffen (Your Art Is Your Weapon), is a mixture of German and English that illustrates her linguistic talents and artistic ideology while simultaneously (and certainly not inadvertently) sounding a little sexy and scandalous to non–German speaking viewers who might only guess at the meanings of “kunst” and “waffen.” Another of Troyano’s performances, Memorias de la revolución/Memories of the Revolution, tells of Carmelita Tropicana’s origins and also develops the critical metaphor of art as a weapon. The drama begins in  Havana as Carmelita and her friends and family attempt to overthrow the evil dictator Maldito. When the assassination plot fails, Carmelita is forced to flee her home in a small rowboat , which quickly becomes lost at sea. As she is tossed about the choppy waters, the Virgin Mary appears to Carmelita and informs her she has been selected to be “the next hottest Latin Superstar” (A. Troyano ). The Virgin— played by the cast’s only male actor—also instructs: “Oh, the revolution. Let it be your art. Your art is your weapon. To give dignity to Latin and Third World women: this is your struggle” (). Before this drag queen Virgin exits, she warns Carmelita that along with its rewards (of superstardom and eternal youth), her artistic mission will have a price. The Virgin cautions, “listen Carmelita, there is more. You must never, Our Art Is Our Weapon Women of Color Transforming Academia I look at my fingers, see plumes growing there. From the fingers, my feathers, black and red ink drips across the page. Escribo con la tinta de mi sangre. —Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands: The New Mestiza OUR ART IS OUR WEAPON 169 ever, ever . . . let a man touch you. You must remain pure, like me,” to which Carmelita quickly retorts, “Believe me, to Carmelita Tropicana Guzmán Jiménez Marquesa de Aguas Claras, that is never to be a problem” (). So we come to understand Carmelita’s revolution as an artistic one, specifically grounded in the interests of Latina and Third World Women, and necessarily queer in nature (since Carmelita reinterprets the Virgin’s allusion to celibacy as a call for radical lesbianism). In this way, Memorias de la revolución and Your Kunst Is Your Waffen provide readers and audiences with specifically queer and Latina frameworks for cultural revolution. This metaphor of art as weapon suggests a framework with which to understand the creative, political, and—certainly not least of all—theoretical possibilities offered to readers and viewers of artistic expression in general, and of queer U.S. Latina creativity specifically. Tropicana’s translation of art into weapon is most powerfully understood not as destructive but rather deconstructive in as much as politically and socially conscious art is able to break down cultural stereotypes and institutions of oppression. In Tropicana’s performance, as well as the context of this project as a whole, a weapon is also a tool that not only takes apart but also rebuilds. The artistic production of Latina lesbians is equally reconstructive through its practices of building and rebuilding spaces for the launching of theory, history, and identity from the perspectives, the mouths, and the bodies of queer Latinas in the United States. Queer Latina art as a weapon can be understood as destructive in as much as it is able to break down cultural stereotypes and institutions of oppression. Works such as Carmelita Tropicana’s “excess-as-norm” performance of Latinidad in Your Kunst Is Your Waffen and Memorias de la revolución reinscribe outrageous cultural stereotypes as purported by dominant discourse and have the potential to dislodge stereotypical images from their fossilized foundations. So we see the power of queer Latina art to dismantle and deconstruct existing structures of oppression, but how can this same art be recontextualized as equally reconstructive? In this concluding section I map out the ongoing revolution occurring among some women of color and queer women of color scholars, intellectuals, artists, and authors in the United States. This revolution, within a system...

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