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2019, Women's Studies in Communication
This critical essay describes and demonstrates the uses and unique contributions of performative writing as a form of inquiry into the materialities and mobilities of sociocultural communicative phenom- ena. Embracing an Anzaldu an approach, the author utilizes Mesoamerican Aztec and Chicanx history, iconography, and mythos to argue for an ontological reimaging of where research should begin and end. As a methodological intervention, this article chal- lenges traditional impulses regarding where knowledge generation occurs, which knowledges are valid, and who counts as a valuable knowledge producer. By shifting genres, breaking grammatical rules, and creatively constructing poetics and rhythm (flor y canto), this “flight of the imagination” focuses on what Chicana, Latina, and indi- genous scholars have termed “fleshing the spirit” or “spiriting the flesh.” By embracing the soul work and spirituality of writing, this piece offers an art-based approach to methodological inquiry that functions as a sharp critique of the White capitalist cisheteropatriar- chal structure of higher education that maintains status quo under- standings of knowledge. When rerouting our methodological impulses toward a critical and decolonial telos and embracing the soul and spirit of performative writing, I argue that our first move must be to make an ontological shift in how we see the world and our place in it—we must begin and end with “theories in the flesh.”
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2018, The Popular Culture Studies Journal
2014, Journal of International and Intercultural Communication
This collaborative essay seeks to chart new methodological pathways for intercultural scholars with a specific focus on Critical Race Theory and Decolonizing and Indigenous Research Methodologies; Activist/Engaged Methodologies; and Performative Methodo- logies. Each section begins from our own researcher subjectivity, then outlines the constellation within the development of Critical Intercultural Communication (CIC); identifies the constellation’s methodological commitments, thematics, and concerns; highlights key exemplars; and raises key questions. At the end of the essay, we explore through a dialogic performance the larger implications that these methodological constellations hold for CIC as a field.
Utilizing performative writing to interrogate the experiences of a queer Xicano male in the discipline of Communication Studies, this essay argues for specificity in dialogue with specificity to disrupt dominant and/or normalized power relations in Queer of Color Critique (QOCC) and beyond. After defining QOCC, the potentiality of jotería critique is offered as a decolonial queer praxis that focuses on hybridity, radical interconnectedness, and nonheteronormative mestiza/o sexual and gender subjectivities. Further, by embracing the ambiguities of hybridity and the politics of radical interconnectedness, Jotería communication studies is a nascent sub-discipline that works in the borderlands between the academic, the artistic, and the activist world, which contributes to and challenges the greater discipline to disrupt the multiple logics of the center in emancipatory, transformative, and embodied forms.
2005
2018, Text and Performance Quarterly
In front of our peers, we methodologically marry ideographic analysis and queer of color worldmaking to map out the complex terrain of <marriage> as it functions as an ideograph. However, we propose the embodied notion of the archive and the repertoire to offer “embodied ideographs” and extend analysis into the performative and bodily dimensions of <marriage>. As an embodied ideograph, <marriage> dances as it interacts between and betwixt dominant social institutions and the ways <marriage> is performed in everyday life. We argue that this liminal crack is an opportunity for queer of color worldmaking—a process of agency and resistance.
2007, Text & Performance Quarterly
We examine Chicano on the Storm, performed in 1991 by Richard Montoya of the theater group Culture Clash, and Border Brujo, performed in 1990 by Guillermo Gómez-Peña to explore the ways that the performances stage identities. We contend that the performances advance commentaries about the cultural milieu shaping Chicana/o identities and the notion of a foundational “Chicano” identity by performing psychic trauma so that struggles and tensions may be exorcized. Subsequently a ChicanoBrujo subjectivity is possible. Both performances yield insights about the confluence of culture, performance, and narratives that position us to advance the contours of a decolonial performance practice that melds insights from cultural performance scholarship with that of emancipatory cultural concepts derived from Mexican oral tradition
In this article, I examine the relationship between self-knowledge practices among women of color and structural patterns of ignorance by offering an analysis of Gloria E. Anzaldúa's discussions of self-writing. I propose that by writing about her own experiences in a manner that hails others to critically interrogate their own identities, Anzaldúa develops important theoretical resources for understanding self-knowledge, self-ignorance, and practices of knowing others. In particular, I claim that in her later writings, Anzaldúa offers a rich epistemological account of these themes through her notion of autohistoria-teoría. The notion of autohistoria-teoría demonstrates that self-knowledge practices, like all knowledge practices, are social and relational. Moreover, such self-knowledge practices require contestation and affirmation as well, including, resistance and productive friction.
2012, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies
Published in Text and Performance Quarterly
“A Letter From My Students” is a performance that weaves intertextual narratives drawn from whiteness studies, personal experiences in the classroom, and qualitative course evaluation data through four critical junctures of whiteness. Between 2012-2013, this letter was embodied as a one-man staged performance performed at a communication studies regional conference, at black box theaters and open mic nights, and at fundraisers across the U.S. Southwest. This is a critical intervention that advocates for new metaphors to address higher education spaces, and the aim of this work is to open up conversations on the way(s) power and privilege move through the classroom. If students are able to finally voice their classroom concerns/traumas or teachers are able to make the critical changes needed to their courses/programs because of the discussions that arise out of this performance and auto/ethnographic report, then the vision of an academy that empowers both students and teachers will be that much more achievable. In the end, trickster performances and nagualismo offer an alternative approach to the classroom that embraces failure as a process not a product, which is a necessary tool for transforming the education system towards social justice.
This essay presents personal narratives co-constructed with queer men regarding their experiences of queerness and maleness. As the narrators chart their journeys toward identifying as queer, they recount incongruity between and within identities, which the author argues creates queer consciousness. Intersectional and reflexive queer consciousness is demonstrated in narratives that recount how critically evaluating identities led the narrators to contest elements of misogyny, effemimania, hypermasculinity, and other discourses and practices that have implications for our bodies. Espousing a queer identification opens up new discursive and material spaces for queer men to critically explore our bodies, while remaining cognizant of and reflexive about the messy and contradictory aspects of queerness.
2012
2013, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies
2017, Qualitative Inquiry
Utilizing performative writing and personal narrative, this poetic essay dives into the personal and collective trauma of the massacre at Pulse nightclub in Orlando. As part of a special issue on Pulse, the co-authors (re)perform the dialogue and queer of color worldmaking that emerged from their frantic text messages to each other in the aftermath of this horrific moment in the Latinx and/or LGBTQ community. We argue that spiritual activism in the form of soul healing and radical interconnectedness is one path of many to consider for those who continue to question if their bodies matter in this political moment in culture and society.
2014, Hypatia
2017, Women's Studies in Communication
This essay tracks how author Norma Cantú uses “fictional autobioethnography” as a Chicana feminist methodology to envision new ways of telling stories about the Mexico-Texas borderlands in her text, Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera. While this term has been underappreciated in some of the existing scholarship on Canícula, I argue that Cantú invents fictional autobioethnography to tell stories that straddle (without necessarily attempting to reconcile) not only generic categories, but also national, cultural, and linguistic borders. This strategy derives its unique feminist vision of South Texas from lingering in the spaces between these overlapping categories while remaining firmly embedded in actual issues that women have been forced to confront in their everyday lives since the early years of the twentieth century. The first section of this essay situates fictional autobioethnography within a tradition of Chicana feminism that employs the quotidian, at the intersections of history and literature, as a mode of feminist representation. The second section brings together visual analysis and close reading to focus specifically on the book’s response to the legacies of the cowboy and other popular symbols of masculine agency and Anglo heroism in South Texas. The final section describes a Canícula-based activity I use in the classroom entitled “Your Life in Pictures.” This section concludes by showing how fictional autobioethnography can provide students with a framework for thinking about how their own lives intersect with and challenge hegemonic narratives of race, place, and gender both within and beyond the Mexico-Texas borderlands.
The video vixen holds a special place in American society’s underbelly. Good hair, firm breasts, round ass, slim waist, and pouty mouth, she is beautiful according to European and African American standards. She personifies sex. After seeing Case serenade and propose to Beyoncé in his music video “Happily Ever After,” I wanted to be the video vixen. I wanted my desirability memorialized in a video. Nelly was my chance, or so I thought. In this autocritography, I use performative writing to confess my short-lived career as a video vixen. My intention is to trouble boundaries of gender and sexuality by telling and re-telling my experience on the set of Nelly’s “Country Grammar (Hot Shit)” music video shoot alongside my anthem at the time, Jay-Z and Pharell’s “I Just Wanna Love You (Give It 2 Me).” I illuminate how bodies move between and beyond boundaries established by language due to the intersectional properties of our experiences, counter-memory, and re-membering.
2012, Equity & Excellence in Education
2014, Hypatia
In this article, the authors set forth an articulation of women of color feminisms through a multidimensional conceptual lens comprised of three interconnected components: processes of identity-formation, assertion of intellectual political projects, and creating alternative method- ological practices. The thinking together of these components offers a critique of Western, male-centered, and heteronormative dominant forms of philosophical knowledge that restrict scholarly interventions by women, people of color, and queers. The authors, through their collective, creative, and collaborative writing process, build on Marıa Lugones’s work to argue that early women of color feminist formations offer foundational elements of decolonial forms of feminism (Lugones 2010). Implicit within this article is a recognition and tracing of intergenerational relations of “women of color” feminists and philosophers who have histori- cally critiqued normative, colonial, and modern understandings of knowledge while construct- ing interdisciplinary and alternative spaces for theorizing and sustaining communities of resistance across constructed borders. Central goals of this article are to: 1. emphasize the complexities and contradictions of women of color feminisms; 2. highlight the three compo- nents of women of color feminisms along with their productive tensions; and 3. document the importance of creative collectivity in theorizing, building solidarity, and working toward sustaining struggles of radical transformation.
2014, Hypatia
2011, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies
“Citlali, La Chicana Super Hero” performatively exists in a political comic strip series and as a large-scale mixed media art installation. Artist Deborah K. Vasquez’s renderings of Citlali are framed here as a “macha femme” performance of Chicana resistance and a communal vehicle by which to imagine new gender identities and strategies for social change. Many studies of comics focus on the formal aesthetics of graphics and text, modes of production, and fan practices; this article reads Citlali’s performance around issues of representation for women of color and considers Citlali’s “disidentificatory” function within an activist Chicana/o community in San Antonio, Texas and beyond.
2020, [Special Issue]: International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education
This piece will be walking, writing, meditating in in-between spaces with me. I call this act queer walking meditation, which blended autohistoria, the Coatlicue State, and meditation to examine my own queer self. This queer walking meditation helps me move between stories, initiates dialogues with a self, recognizes my self’s confusion, and leads to a series of actions to fight against the struggles and complicatedness in my identities. As a result, I learned how to mediate and take actions for myself and with my students from the standpoint of a Vietnamese queer, accented, Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) teacher and Chicana-feminist writer. This walk witnesses the cathartic process through which I came to understand intersectional identities and how I used them into teaching, researching, and writing in a white gay world. I came up with another question, Is that the feeling of intersectionality?, at the end of this walk in order to open another walk in the future.
2019, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education
In this article, I examine the engagement of pre-service teachers with US feminist of color theory. Centering coalition relations, re-mediation, and dialogic narrative, I argue that the field of women of color thought is pedagogical in thinking through the intersectional and multidimen-sional problems of teaching and schooling, particularly when working with under-resourced schools and displaced and dispossessed students and their families. A framework based on the intellectual labor of US women of color, where the pedagogies of coalition, re-mediation, and dialogic narratives support powerful epistemological interventions that support pre-service teachers as they think about the complex problems of schools in this era of the defunding and the dismantlement of public education. It is a US women of color pedagogy that engages teachers in developing alternative accounts of their relationship to the world, how these new accounts are unavoidably theoretical and provide a starting point for new thinking about pedagogy, power, and praxis.
2019, Text and Performance Quarterly
Drawing on several years of bringing students on a tour of a maximum security prison, I posit the prison (tour) as a live performance that is only legible through distinct but interlocking registers of presence. I argue that the prison (tour) positions and assembles recalcitrant bodies conditioned by live, virtual, and spectral encounters with each other. The convergence of present and absent bodies at the site of the prison and the intermingling of these three registers reveal that while the prison (tour) may function primarily as an embodied performance of discipline, it unravels in salient ways and the participants therein find meaningful, if often subtle, ways of exploiting the resulting ruptures.
Cultural Studies <=>Critical Methodologies
This article contributes to the Communication Studies’ literature on cultural dialogue, based on challenges we faced when putting theory into practice in community-based research courses and local social justice struggles. Specifically, we attempt to elaborate theories of cultural dialogue on/in the streets—considering how Cultural Studies, Critical Intercultural Communication, Critical Pedagogy, and Performance Studies work synergistically to illuminate particular aspects of the process of applied cultural dialogue in new ways. As we engaged in discussions on race and immigration in Aurora, Colorado, our experience required us to theorize particular aspects of the process of dialogue in new ways. This article contains voices of multiple authors in conversation and addresses the negotiations of dialogue, identity, and power. Ultimately we address dialogue writ large as process that combines shared experiences in different yet connected sites of education, community conflict, and cultural differences.
Although Gloria Anzaldúa's critical categories have steadily entered discussions in the field of philosophy, a lingering skepticism remains about her works’ ability to transcend the particularity of her lived experience. In an effort to respond to this attitude, I make Anzaldúa's corpus the center of philosophical analysis and posit that immanent to this work is a logic that lends it the unity of a critical philosophy that accounts for its concrete, multilayered character and shifting, creative force. I call this an “affective logic of volverse una.” Starting with the understanding of a situated modality of all subjectivity, Anzaldúa's work exhibits a logic of three moments distinguished by states of awareness. Each state of awareness is characterized by the generative degree of the subject's responses to its conditions: critical, individuating, and expansive. Led by her late concepts of conocimiento and nepantlera, I return to her earlier works and trace Anzaldúa's innovative exploration of undoing the oppressive condition of marginal subjectivities from “La Prieta” through Borderlands/La Frontera to her final published essay “now let us shift.” I find a liberatory schema of volverse una/becoming whole that is grounded in an active receptivity of sensibility and facilitated by affective technologies for transformation.
The video vixen holds a special place in American society's underbelly. Good hair, firm breast, round ass, slim waist, and pouty mouth, she is beautiful according to European and African American standards. She personifies sex. After seeing Case serenade and propose to Beyoncé in his R&B video "Happily Ever After," I wanted to be the vixen. I wanted my desirability memorialized in a video. Nelly was my chance, or so I thought. In this autocritography, I use performative writing to confess my short-lived career as a video vixen. My intention is to trouble boundaries of gender and sexuality by telling and re-telling my experience on the set of Nelly’s “Country Grammar” video shoot alongside my anthem at the time, Jay Z’s “I Just Want to Love You.” I illuminate the ways in which bodies move between and beyond boundaries established by language due to the intersectional properties of our experiences, counter-memory, and re-membering.
2019, Women's Studies in Communication
Gendered violence is historically and presently a colonial tool that wields power over and against Indigenous peoples, attempting to destroy or erase their sovereignty and lives. Decolonization is necessary in movements addressing gendered violence in settler colonial nation-states. In this article, we forefront Indigenous organizing as a practice of survivance and decolonial feminist theory building. We argue that decolonial feminist critique deepens our understanding of complex iterations of gendered violence. By witnessing resistant Indigenous community responses to sexual violence, we can begin to imagine and build coalitional decolonial feminist possibilities. Witnessing, we argue, is a decolonial heuristic for engaging with resistant subjectivities at the colonial difference as embodied theory and praxis of decolonial feminism.
2011
I write performance autoethnography as a methodological project committed to evoking embodied and lived experience in academic texts, using performance writing to decolonize academic knowledge production. Through a fragmented itinerary across continents and ethnicities, across religions and languages, across academic and vocational careers, I speak from the everyday spaces in between supposedly stable cultural identities involving race, ethnicity, class, gendered norms, to name a few. I write against colonizing practices which police the racist, sexist, and xenophobic cultural politics that produce and validate particular identities. I write from the intersections of my own living experiences within and against those cultural practices, and I bring these intersections with me into the academic spaces where I live and labor, intertwining the personal and the professional. Within the academy, colonizing structures manifest in ways that value disembodied and objectified Western knowledges about people, while excluding certain bodies and lived experiences from research texts. My thesis locates the academy as both a site for struggle and an arena for transformative work, turning from Others as objects of study and toward decolonizing academic knowledge production, making Western epistemologies themselves the objects of inquiry (Smith 1999; Denzin 2003; Moreira 2009). Connecting with a tradition and community of scholars in the ‘seventh moment’ of qualitative research (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005b), I disrupt acts of academic(s) writing as the textual labor most privileged in the academy. In this thesis I write messy acts of embodied knowledges (Weems 2003; Moreira 2007), including this abstract itself, while each act resists and breaks forms of ‘traditional’ academic writing to varying degrees, ranging from subtle to overtly transgressive. My ‘fieldwork’ invokes my 35 years of perpetual migration: observed through my messy and unvalidated perspectives, recorded and transcribed through my messy and unreliable body, distorted by my messy and deceptive memories, and experienced every single day in messy encounters out of my control, while I live and labor as a perpetual betweener. I write visceral texts as performance acts that invite us all, as betweeners, to write and read from the flesh in order to turn our gaze toward decolonizing academic knowledge production.
2017, Departures in Critical Qualitative Research
2019, MELUS
This essay brings together critical discussions in the areas of decoloniality, race, sexuality, ecology, and diaspora to consider Chinelo Okparanta’s “America” (2013). For Nnenna Etoniru, the aspiring Nigerian immigrant who narrates the short story, the United States promises both juridical legitimacy and badly needed methods of environmental restoration. The text suggests, however, that the logics of subject formation underlying homonormativity and academic knowledge also underlie racializations that inform neocolonial assaults on the environment. In “America,” a decolonial sensibility emerges; interludes and narrative forms best described as instances of border thinking suggest a critique of gender categories that preclude felt experience. n ethics of indeterminacy, empathy, and even fertility takes shape, demonstrating the novel forms of self-knowledge and ecological consciousness that might be produced and embodied by queer people of color.
2014
2004, Critical Studies in Media Communication
2018, Research Repository_University of Essex
In this research I explore artivist performance proposals that lead to an analysis of the spectator position intrinsic to the spectatorial, as a construction linked to colonial discourses of otherness. This investigation presents the encountering processes of the transnational troupe of La Pocha Nostra and the Puerto Rican persona of Freddie Mercado with their respective spectators, where local-global constructs of coloniality become unveiled, made and unmade spectacle through their re-reproduction of otherness. Side by side with performance art-life, I explore the deconstruction and de-linking possibilities of the spectatorial taking the work of these artists to build and develop the dilemmas and alternatives presented. From these complex hyper-othering performance practices I research the social implications on the spectatorial at a local and global level. The artistic proposals discussed are focused under the decolonial lens and researched as practices that make possible the co-creation of decolonial relationalities. I focus in the trans-possibility these ‘other’ encounters produce and are produced by. This work inserts the issue of the spectator within broader social concerns and it is under this umbrella that the ‘question’ of the Other arises within the mechanisms of the modern spectacle. These artistic practices exert diverse tactics that directly imply the figure of the spectator within this social configuration.
Auto/ethnography is not an apolitical endeavor, and as a queer researcher, I never lose sight of the sensibilities that influence my work. Leading with an explicit queer positionality and relying upon critical reflexivity, this essay focuses on my two-year fieldwork in rural, conservative Old Shawneetown, Illinois. I begin by navigating the natural landscape, illustrating how Shawneetown's flood-ravaged landscape implicates (my) queer identity—as both a lens for reading queer sexuality and as a metaphor for queer loss. Then, I shift to the human landscape—my interactions with the town's residents—where I feel the necessity to stifle my queer persona in favor of a performance that passes as heterosexual. Both landscape contexts position geography as a catalyst for the autobiographical, complicating issues of ethnographic dialogue, ethics, and risk—a queerscape—as divergent selves and subjectivities challenge one another in a charged, site-specific space of heteronormativity.