Following the cfp’s invitation to un-disciplined conversation, our panel, “Performing Anzaldúan Trickery,” brings together three presentations featuring promiscuous/unlikely/electric assemblages of Latin@ texts, bodies,... [ view full abstract ]
Following the cfp’s invitation to un-disciplined conversation, our panel, “Performing Anzaldúan Trickery,” brings together three presentations featuring promiscuous/unlikely/electric assemblages of Latin@ texts, bodies, sounds, and silences conducive to the question of how Latin@ studies can be energized and de-disciplined by new aesthetic movements. From Alice Bag’s raw punk DIY rage, to Julie Tolentino’s sonic drama of a mouth overfilling with honey, through Gloria Anzaldúa’s queer shapeshifting desire to fuck a tree, we pursue reparative readings about vibrant performances enacting unordered spectacles of brown bodies in pleasure, pain, and shock. Anzaldúan concepts provide the glue to our panel.
In “La Prieta was a Violence Girl: Chicana punk autohisteorías and cultural memory,” Susana Sepulveda analyzes Violence Girl (2011) by Chicana punkera Alice Bag. Drawing from Anzaldúa’s writing methods and conceptualizations of conocimiento, as non-binary connectionist modes of thinking and perceiving, and autohisteoría-teoria, the telling of life stories of the self and of others and that includes “reflection on storytelling processes” (AnaLouise Keating), Sepulveda reads Bag’s memoir as autohisteoría and argues that it contributes to and creates a broader Chicana and punk cultural memory and collective narrative. In turn, Sepulveda brings Anzaldúa’s queerness into sharper relief by bringing the DIY punk ethos to bear on her story, “La Pieta.”
Félix Solano Vargas traces reparative brown queer and trans forms of communication with attention to sound and silence in his presentation, “Mouthful of Honey: The Ecoacoustics of Brown Bottomhood.” Weaving Anzaldúan mestiza consciousness with an analysis of a performance art piece, Honey, by the Filipina/Salvadoran artist Julie Tolentino, Vargas asks a series of questions about sound and knowledge: What does sound carry in the ways that it shapes knowledge that is otherwise erased from historical record? How do hearing and listening work differently? How do they shape recordings of silence made into the audible, the reparative? How do such renderings relate to and complicate the languages, utterances and silences in Latina/o, Trans and Performance Studies?
Francisco J. Galarte and Sandra Soto close out the presentations with their experimental dialogue: “Anzaldúa’s Queer Worldbuilding: A Conversation on Femmes, Marimach@s and the Sexual Borderlands.” Re-animating the butch/femme conversation/dance by Cherríe Moraga and Amber Hollibaugh in “What We’re Rollin’ around in Bed With” (1981), Galarte and Soto perform a vibrant Chican@ queer inter-textual, inter-generational, cross-temporal conversation with Anzaldúa’s fiction as the motor. Focusing on her “minor” works (some unpublished), they explore her unseen/forgotten/unspoken contributions to queer theory, transgender studies, and Latin@ studies, particularly around pain, pleasure, region, embodiment, fantasy, imaginaries, nepantla, marimacho, mita’ y mita’, and patlache.”
