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4 Performing the border and queer rasquachismo in Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s performance art Where Gregory Scofield’s negotiation of the practice and habitus of citizenship in Canada is focused on the Métis, a group whose rights and identity have been debated and unjustly dismissed for centuries, this chapter recrosses the 49th parallel and returns to the border between the United States and Mexico, the site that features most prominently in work by Mexican- American and self- identifying Chicano performance artist and cultural theorist Guillermo Gómez- Peña
the potential to be a strategy of resistance against dominant paradigms of identity, particularly in relation to how performance art allows for a space in which queer Latina/o subcultures can resist the racism and homophobia implicit in hegemonic norms. As he puts it, ‘Disidentification is a strategy that resists a conception of power as being a fixed discourse. Disidentification negotiates strategies of resistance within the flux of discourse and power’.48 As a strategy of resistance, disidentification does not function as a counter-stance; that is, it is not a
man is reflected in his use of Métis two-spirit vernaculars, and he shares these vernaculars with his readers, who, in reading his work, will learn more of the experiences of the Métis in Canada and elsewhere. Guillermo Gómez-Peña builds alternative civic communities and his performances work to create a more concrete, ‘real’ text, in collaboration with his readers and audiences. For Gómez-Peña, performance art holds within it a distinct and special potential to sow the seeds of social and political change, because of its immediacy. Erín Moure’s 178 Crossing
: University of British Columbia Press,1998); Davidson et al., Border Crossings; Winfried Siemerling, The New North American Studies Reader: Culture, Writing, and the Politics of Re/Cognition (New York: Routledge, 2005); Ila Nicole Sheren, Portable Borders: Performance Art and Politics on the U.S. Frontera since 1984 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015); Rachel St John, Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 23 Levander and Levine, Hemispheric American Studies, p. 3. 24 Gillian Roberts and David
2015). 4 Jane Ciabattari, ‘The 21st Century’s 12 Greatest Novels’ (19 January 2015). www.bbc.com/culture/story/20150119-the-21st-centurys-12-best-novels (accessed 11 October 2015). 5 Christopher Taylor, ‘Performance Art’ (23 February 2008). www. theguardian.com/books/2008/feb/23/featuresreviews.guardianreview20 (accessed 11 October 2015). 6 Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (London: Faber & Faber, 2008 [2007]), p. ix. All subsequent references will be included in parentheses in the main body of the text. 7 Megan O’Rourke, ‘The
-Peña’s performance art and writing works in the queering of citizenship (The Gathering p. 34). ‘Down here there is a different kind of poetry’, writes Scofield: Not classical poetry With smooth & eloquent verse Not even love poetry Taking you to some far-off gazebo by crashing waves But survival poetry Raw, unflinching Watching your back in some skid row bar Down here Each line will give you a day –or make it your last. (lines 1–10) This poetry is neither what he calls ‘classical’ nor ‘love’ poetry, but one that is ‘raw, unflinching’. Writing this kind of poetry, Scofield