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3. Moving Violations: Performing the Limits of Representation in Marga Gomez’s jaywalker
- Rutgers University Press
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41 3 The sounds of screeching tires and crunching metal open Marga Gomez’s jaywalker , where a wide-eyed Gomez rushes out into the spotlight on a stage with only a small pile of automobile tires set to one side. Dressed in a short black lace slip, bright orange traffic safety vest, and precariously high platform sneakers, the title character “Jaywalker” enlightens audience members on the intricacies of Los Angeles pedestrian life. Debuting at New York City’s P.S. in , Gomez’s onewoman show jaywalker takes the audience on an hour-and-a-half-long journey detailing the protagonist’s struggle in the margins of multiple communities: a Latina in the Hollywood entertainment scene, one of a handful of pedestrians on the car-packed streets of Los Angeles, and an average queer girl-next-door in a disco sea of identical high-femme “Spice Girl replacement” lesbians. Via this “othered” protagonist—Latina, lesbian, female, pedestrian—Gomez’s performance provides an important commentary on the difficulties of shifting minority representation from the margin to the center of mainstream spheres. Her performance poses a sarcastic challenge to the hierarchies of power residing between the acts of being “marginal” and marginalizing others, as well as the impact of each on the movement and representation of subjects within the varying spaces afforded by a center/periphery model of society. The work addresses the possibilities for minority “invasions” of mainstream Hollywood spaces, and the control and containment of representational spaces through the practice of tokenism. A creative and critical contestation of the mainstream notion of an unmarked ideal can be found in Jaywalker, who uses the superficiality of Hollywood as the stage from which to confront complicated issues of identity and representation, especially with regard to the limits of identity labels of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and mobility. Moving Violations Performing the Limits of Representation in Marga Gomez’s jaywalker What happened? That what you want to know? I’ll tell you. It’s simple. She tried to walk in Los Angeles. —Marga Gomez, jaywalker 42 HOMECOMING QUEERS Marginal Bodies In her book on Latina performativity, Alicia Arrizón comments on the significance of the genre of performance for Chicana identity formation: “For Chicanas, the performative consists of the materialization of ‘acts’ which transgress normative epistemologies that affirm and deny cultural and subcultural affiliations of the collective self” (Latina Performance ). Clearly this statement may be expanded to include the efficacy of performativity as creative weaponry for other Latinas and women of color who view their representations as counterhegemonic . Of key import in Gomez’s work are the notions of materialization and action. Both suggest a moving and fluid body and corresponding discourse. In the current text, performance is an opportunity for Gomez to publicly acknowledge the voice and body of a previously silenced subjectivity, as actor, artist, and fictitious character. As an aspiring star in Hollywood, Gomez is unable to emerge from the shadows of ethnic and gender stereotypes. As a performer , however, she leaps from others’ margins into the center of her own discourse. The genre of solo performance, as Arrizón suggests, serves as a space for Gomez’s self-authorized counternarrative to Hollywood’s homogenizing and Anglocentric visions. In effect, Gomez stages her invisibility, enacting both the process and consequences of marginalization and intervening in her own erasure . Gomez’s Jaywalker recognizes her marginality and proudly claims her “bad girl” moniker, allowing a glimpse into the alternative spaces forged in response to the public and popular erasure of queer, Latino, and Latina subjects. The performance’s protagonist introduces her most pivotal marker of individual identity, her name, as colored by a dominant gaze imposed from outside. Instead of naming herself, the protagonist initially seems to concede to a representation grounded in this dominant external gaze, as she defines her identity by others’ perceptions of her, allowing others to name her at various stages of her story. Chronologically, the protagonist is known first as “,” a rule-follower whose uniqueness is lost to the Hollywood masses: “I wasn’t The Jaywalker back then . . . They called me ‘.’ That was the room number at my hotel in Hollywood” (Bonney ). Reduced to a mere number—not unlike her crushing experiences at mass auditions—Jaywalker is quick to claim her active role in choosing the sleazy motel and room in which she lives. She simultaneously reminds her public of the ease with which she surrenders her agency to the generic...