| This dissertation considers the role of performance, performative constructions of self and culture, and theatricality within the aesthetic logics of Chicana Expressive Culture. Chicana artists, whom I position as cultural workers, use their expressive products to critique and resist dominant culture as well as examine the multiplicity of subject positions that intersect in Chicana subject formation such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality. My dissertation argues that the use of performance, theatrically rooted strategies, and theatricality within Chicanas' expressivity enables them to organize and describe the complexity of competing, often incongruous, elements of identity. Thus, as minoritarian U.S. subjects characterized by a history of silence and invisibility, Chicanas' expressive products become one of the primary cultural sites in which to "hear" Chicana voices and their reflections of self, as well as the conditions of their communities, in relation to the social. Hence, I investigate the multiple ways in which Chicana artists develop metaphoric and aesthetic strategies reliant on a performative sense of self and theatrical articulations to describe their subjecthood. My investigation begins with Michele Serros's poetry volume Chicana Falsa and its evolution to spoken-word performance on her CD Selected Stories from Chicana Falsa. I consider how Serros's CD situates its listeners in a theatrical spectatorial position. As well, I use dramaturgical analysis to read Serros's work as a cultural text that "performs" post-Movement Chicana/os. My examination of Celia Herrera Rodriguez's performance art piece Cositas Quebradas suggests her use of indigenous story-telling enables a decolonial practice of performance art. In her photographic essay "My Alamo," I suggest Kathy Vargas utilizes a theatrical and performative mode of image-making to critique dominant history and explore a structure of feeling Tejana/os hold towards their socio-political history. Through close reading, I analyze how Ana Castillo uses the metaphor of performing and performance to describe the shifts subjects-in-process such as Chicanas perform in her novel Peel my Skin like an Onion. To conclude, my site of analysis focuses on drama to explore Cherrie Moraga's The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea, analyzing how a heightened theatricality in the play's staging describes the intra-cultural skirmishes women and lesbians encounter within Chicana/o culture.*.;*This dissertation is a compound document (contains both a paper copy and a CD as part of the dissertation). |
