Kaleidoscope:
An SCO Journal
of Graduate Student Research
Vol.
1, No. 1, Fall 2002, pp. 37-49
Body and Soul:
Performed Spiritual Enfleshments
of Chicana Identity
Denise A. Menchaca
_____
Denise A. Menchaca is
currently an Assistant Professor in the
and the Department of
Theatre and Film Studies at
completing her
dissertation, a performative autoethnography
exploring the centrality of the
Catholic icon Our Lady
of Guadalupe to the construction, constitution, and assimilation processes
of Mexican-Americans.
She is a performance studies scholar whose research focus is the writing
and performance of identity.
_____
A
theory in the flesh means one where the physical
realities of
our lives--our skin color, the land or concrete
we grew up on,
our sexual longings--all fuse to create
a politic born
out of necessity. Here, we attempt to
bridge the
contradictions in our experience. We are
the colored in
a white feminist movement. We are the
feminists among
the people of our culture. We are often
the lesbians
among the straight. We do this bridging by
naming our
selves and by telling our stories in our own
words. (
In
the epigraph above, Chicana feminists Cherri Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, claim
a “theory in the flesh,” an enfleshment, that frames how one comes to
understand the ways in which certain identities are performed, embodied,
somatically enlightened and understood as a means for shaping a Chicana
feminist epistemology. While not directly referenced above, there is also a
spiritual element that infuses the physical knowledge of lived experience.
There is also an undeniable something, a mystical healing, a metaphysical
reality, a soul-tie that is only hinted at, one that penetrates silently, like
the wind, these performances of identity. This essay considers the enfleshed
and spiritual—body and soul—performance of Chicana identity.
I
use the term performance to imply that particular enactments by certain Chicana
feminists are purposefully marked as aesthetic, as meant for an audience, even
if the performance is not a “live, in-the-flesh” spectacle that immediately
marks it as such. The two Chicana feminists I consider in this essay—Gloria
Anzaldua and Sandra Cisneros--are both creative writers accustomed to working
with words on the printed page and reading audiences as opposed to
performance stages with witnessing audiences. Even though Anzaldua and
Cisneros can be described as “word artists,” I don’t want to give the
impression that I am applying the performance metaphor hastily. I am aware that
there are some in performance studies who have become somewhat protective
lately about what they consider to be the “fashionable” use as well as the
overuse, if not misuse, of the performance metaphor (
The shift in the field of Performance
Studies makes possible the study of a written text as a performing text. This
shift also allows one to mark cultural identity as a responsible performance of
both aesthetic and mundane knowledge. The shift from the literary model of oral
interpretation studies, one that traditionally focused on the study of
canonical literature, to a more inclusive and open-ended “text” model in
performance studies, one that contests an authoritarian treatment of what
constitutes textual legitimacy (Pelias and Van Oosting 1987), makes claiming
that a written text can indeed be a performing text not at all
out of the realm of possibility. Both
To further understand what this renaming
entails, Pelias and Van Oosting claim in their essay “A Paradigm for
Performance Studies” that:
Performance
studies calls into question the privilege of
academic
authority by including all members of a speech
community
as potential artists, all utterances as potentially
aesthetic,
all events as potentially theatrical, and all
audiences
as potentially active participants who can
authorize
artistic experience. (221)
While this spirit of inclusion is one that
is welcome, particularly by those who have experienced marginalization within
the field, further clarification of what constitutes performance in the
performance studies paradigm is necessary. Pelias and Van Oosting (221) list
the following conditions as useful in determining whether a communication event
is aesthetic in nature: 1) there is
intended aesthetic communication by the initiator regardless of what shape the
actual event takes; 2) the event possesses generally understood aesthetic
qualities; and 3) there are willing respondents that engage an audiencing role,
marking the initiator as performer. In addition to these definitional markers,
it is also important to note that one must take responsibility for claiming a
communicative event as aesthetic, otherwise no differentiation exists between
mundane doings and aesthetic communicative events (Pelias and Van Oosting 221).
Mary S. Strine, Beverly Whitaker Long,
and Mary Frances Hopkins claim, “performance is an essentially contested concept”
(emphasis theirs, 183). They argue that interpretation and performance studies
scholars both value performance as a means for making epistemological claims,
but also acknowledge that both camps define and recognize differing criteria
for what appropriately constitutes performance (183). In fact, the authors
claim that the tension between interpretation and performance studies scholars
is a healthy one as it provides the necessary spark for inciting passionate
scholarly discussion (183). Dwight Conquergood is in agreement when he claims
“performance flourishes within a zone of contest and struggle” (1995).
Therefore, the contentiousness in performance studies should not be seen as a
weakening and fracturing of identity, but rather a building and strengthening
of one. The struggles that interpretation and performance studies scholars
wrestle with are healthy, regardless of where one sits in relation to what
constitutes performance and performance scholarship.
Certainly one of the tensions that exists
concerns the claim by some in the field that since the shift, literature has
lost its mooring as the flagship genre in a sea of emerging performance
categories. In fact, an entire colloquy addresses this particular issue.
(Please refer to Communication Education, volume 45, April 1996.) And,
yet I wonder to what extent this is actually so. For example, my current
department teaches many undergraduate courses focusing on the principles of
oral interpretation studies privileging the performance of literary texts over
the performance of other kinds of texts. So, when I come across
I was schooled in oral
interpretation and the study of literature maintains a warm place in my heart,
one that will always remain. But, I am grateful for the shift as it provides
rich opportunities that allow for the study of literature written by
non-canonical authors, as well as the engagement of alterative texts primarily
created by marginalized, subjugated, and formerly silenced others. While I
don’t want to construct a list of who those marginalized others might be—for it
would be embarrassingly long-- if I were to create such a list, I would place
Chicanas and Chicana feminists squarely on it.
Who are Chicanas? Simply put, Chicanas
are those women who are born and raised in the
Given this, then, who are Chicana
feminists? Chicana feminists are those Chicanas who move within a critical
framework that consider oppression along the lines of race, class, gender, and
sexuality and voices how inequity within these vectors both affect and effect
women of Mexican descent in the
Gust Yep argues that identity is one’s
“conception of self within a particular social, geographical, cultural, and
political context” (79). Mary Jane Collier argues similar ideas when she
claims, “cultural identities are historical, contextual, and relational
constructions” (131). Delores Tanno casts a slightly different light when she
argues how names and labels marking cultural identity serve as a “rhetorical
device insofar as it communicates a particular story” (28). Chicana feminists
aren’t content with the identities that have been forced upon them by
oppressive, even racist, dominant
Elizabeth C. Fine and Jean Haskell
Speer, in the introduction to their book Performance, Culture, and Identity,
claim that there is power in performance “to shape, reflect, and embody human
identity” (1). They look to anthropologist James Clifford for further guidance
on this issue: “James Clifford reminds
us that we can better understand cultural identity not by studying the
artifacts of museums or libraries, but through observing emergent performances”
(1). In other words, cultural identity is better understood in the study of its
actual enactment. But, when does cultural identity become performance? As I’ve
already mentioned, when citing Pelias and Van Oosting, it is aesthetically
marked communication that ultimately defines certain human actions as
performance. If you’ll recall, that marking comes from three possible
sites: performer intent, understood and
accepted performance markers, and audience reciprocity. Once these three
vectors are in place, a communicative event can be marked as performance. But
when performance meets identity, both intentional and repetitive qualities
emerge: “Stories of self and community that have been repeated often enough to
become artfully shaped performances are clear indices of a person’s sense of
identity”(Fine and Speer 9). Therefore, Fine and Speer claim that to study
performance is a “critical way for grasping how persons choose to present
themselves, how they construct their identity, and, ultimately, how they
embody, reflect, and construct their culture” (10).
Part II:
Writing as a Performed Spiritual Enfleshment of Chicana Identity
I
met Sandra Cisneros before I met Gloria Anzaldua and in a strange way has since
then only been known as “Sandra” to me. I didn’t feel that formalities were
necessary. She was the first author I read--not Chicana author, not
Mexican-American author, but author--who wrote about my hometown. Now,
perhaps others have written about
But, it was Gloria Anzaldua who
helped me to have grace for the darkness, to understand it and embrace it for
its potentially curative properties. I discovered her in the campus bookstore
of
The writing of this essay challenges me
in ways that I did not originally anticipate. My thesis charges me with the
responsibility of claiming a writerly-self who must be capable of crafting
language that does justice to the delicate and intricate theorizing inherent in
Cisneros’ and Anzaldua’s writings. It challenges me to understand the
writerly-self as a performing-self who must aesthetically mark this
communicative moment. It challenges me to make the case that the writing of
Anzaldua and Cisneros, as well as my own writing, is indeed a marker of Chicana
identity. It challenges me to articulate this process as a spiritual one that
knows the flesh in a unique and blessed way. I am humbled before this task.
But, it is ultimately trust that allows me to move toward humility and I trust
Anzaldua when she reminds me that “in the ethno-poetics and performance of the
shaman, my people, the Indians, did not split the artistic from the functional,
the sacred from the secular, art from everyday life” (88). Therefore, I have to
rely on the enfleshment of the everyday to provide the necessary means with
which to connect to the aesthetic.
Theresa Martinez, who cites Rebolledo and
Rivero, claims that the developing Chicana literary voice is “the emergence of
the conscious Chicana herself […] as a full-blown speaking person […] [who]
firmly states her mind in a ‘deliberately conscious essay’” (116). Writing,
then, becomes the performance venue allowing Chicana voices and identities to
take shape, to have breath, to become flesh. Both Anzaldua and Cisneros mark
writing as being both powerful and alive. First, Anzaldua:
My “stories”
are acts encapsulated in time, “enacted”
every time they
are spoken aloud or read silently. I like
to think of
them as performances and not as inert and “dead”
objects (as the
aesthetics of Western culture think of art works).
Instead, the
work has an identity; it is a “who” or a “what” and
contains the
presence of persons, that is, incarnations of gods or
ancestors or
natural and cosmic powers. The work manifests the
same needs as a
person, it needs to be “fed,” la tengo que banar
y vestir. (Anzaldua 95)
With this passage, Anzaldua clearly marks
the embodied, as well as spiritual, presence that her writing evokes. She marks
her writing as life, not death, not cold and stiff as the post mortem of
printed text can sometimes create. Her
writings are performances, not objects, are spiritual enfleshment that breathe,
that need.
Also claimed within her performed
writing, are the deep recesses of her psyche that stored the psychic poison
causing physical and spiritual illness that are healed through the act of
writing:
When I create
stories in my head, that is, allow the voices
and scenes to
be projected in the inner screen of my mind,
I “trance.” I
used to think I was going crazy or that I was
having
hallucinations. But now I realize it is my job, my
calling, to
traffic in images. Some of these film-like
narratives I
write down; most are lost, forgotten. When I
don’t write the
images down for several days or weeks or
months, I get
physically ill. Because writing invokes
images from my
unconscious, and because some of the
images are
residues of trauma which I then have to
reconstruct, I
sometimes get sick when I do write. I can’t
stomach it,
become nauseous, or burn with fever, worsen.
But, in
reconstructing the traumas behind the images, I
make “sense” of
them, and once they have “meaning”
they are
changed, transformed. It is then that writing
heals me,
brings me joy. (91-92).
It is, then, by extension that
Anzaldua’s enfleshed writings heal Chicana shame by becoming the vehicle
through which clearer understanding and eventual marking make themselves
available for a sturdier declaration and necessary performance of Chicana
identity. It is then, too, that my writing becomes a vehicle for healing as
well as for inquiry. There is a power in being able to name both the joy and
sorrow of malady. To write is to create stories--creation stories--that are
capable of forging from dry dust the very body and soul of life.
Discovering
sex was like discovering writing. It was
powerful
in away I couldn’t explain. Like writing,
you had to go
beyond the guilt and shame to get to
anything good.
Like writing, it could take you to deep
and mysterious
subterranean levels. With each new
depth I found
out things about myself I didn’t know I
knew. And, like
writing, for a slip of a moment it could
be spiritual,
the cosmos pivoting on a pin, could empty
and fill you
all at once like a
a tulip bending
in the wind. I was no one, I was nothing,
and I was
everything in the universe little and large—twig,
cloud, sky.
(48-49)
The
aliveness, the enacted somebody, takes on a force of passionate resonance, a
drumming pulse that beats to the timing of lived cycles. Quite simply, writing
is life, a sometimes messy birth that is an act of marking and meaning that is
undoubtedly an enfleshed performance of identity.
Part
III: My Performed Spiritual Enfleshment
of Chicana Identity
When
these Chicana feminists write, they are engaging in overt political acts that
challenge comfortable norms. They lock horns with the commandants of oppressive
cultural practices and declare an awareness that disrupts the “business as
usual” attitude of habit. Because of this, some perceive these performative
acts as “dangerous.” And, they are. Because, ultimately, they threaten a
complacency that has grown too comfortable in looking the other way, of not
wanting to meet the face of wounded others who are the casualties of ubiquitous
indifference. This is how I read the Chicana feminist project, and it is this
read that ultimately constitutes my Chicana identity and how I, then, voice
that particular consciousness through my writing, performative or otherwise,
and my performance work.
A few years ago, I created a performance
art installation piece that considered the virgin/whore dichotomy already
alluded to above. I “scrapbooked” this performance and keep it filed with my
other “Chicanismas.” I flipped through it recently and was struck by my
own reaction: It’s been four years since
I performed this piece and I still struggle with the very questions I wanted
the piece to set into motion in the first place. The impetus came from a single
line in Sandra Cisneros’ essay “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess”: “I’m obsessed with becoming a woman
comfortable in her skin.” The title of my installation piece is “One Story of a
Virgin/Whore: Exploring the Dichotomous
Extremes of Chicana Sexuality.” There were three areas arranged on the stage
floor and audience members were invited to come in and encounter any and all of
those areas at their leisure. I arranged the first area as an interactive space
that asked audience members to select a folded piece of paper out of a wicker
basket. Each piece of paper had a word from that Cisneros quotation that
corresponded with a photocopy of Our Lady of Guadalupe taped to the floor. There
were eleven pieces total. Scattered around the puzzle arrangement of images of
Guadalupe and Cisneros’ words, were pictures of me through various stages of
body size: thin, too thin, chucky,
plumb, obese, and “just right.” This area marked my declarative voice,
announcing that various social rhetorics have literally and figuratively shaped
who I was/am in the world.
Area two was set up as an altar
space dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe marking those social rhetorics as
partially belonging to the Catholic Church. This altar also marked my
subversive reclaiming of Guadalupe in her entirety, as spirit and as flesh, in
addition to her role as “Holy Mother.” And area three marked a
birth/death/re-birth space where I lay covered with nothing more than a “death”
shroud. This space marked the possibility for resurrection.
What this performance named was
the life-long struggle over the right to “feel comfortable in my own skin.” To
name the desire to have complete dominion over my own flesh challenges the norm
of silence and passivity Catholic Mexican-American women are supposed to
maintain in the face of such oppression. By naming this desire and enacting it
through performance, I accept certain Chicana feminist declarations that
challenge and charge the patriarchy of Catholicism. Those Chicana feminist
writings, then, constituted the understanding of my own Chicana identity that,
in turn, further shaped how I chose to enflesh that understanding. And these
choices are not safe ones. They challenge and, therefore, create distress and
discomfort. It isn’t comfortable seeing my naked body lying “in state” on the
floor covered only by filmy gauze. However, my naked body’s presence is
necessary in this performance piece to overtly remind that communication has real
and felt consequence.
The personal is political and
this performance was overtly so. By making an overt political statement that
reclaims my right to be comfortable in my own skin, I open up an opportunity
for dialogue around these issues where one may not have existed prior. It is
here, in this political space of performed Chicana feminist identity, where
performance studies praxis enfleshed the alterative text of one marginalized
voice. It is here, through performance studies praxis, that opportunity arises
for learning how to breath through the anxiety that chokes when one realizes
that even the most innocent and unaware participate in oppressive structures.
And, it is here, through performance studies praxis, that we learn to make
room, allowing for subjugated voices and identities to find a possible outlet
for healing.
When I am asked whether or not it is wise
to introduce the political dimensions of race, class, ethnicity, and gender
into the performance classroom (or any classroom for that matter), I answer
simply by telling my story, a story that twenty years ago would not have been
heard. And, I remind that one of the claims of performance studies praxis is
that we actually learn something in the doing of performance and that we
actually learn something in the witnessing of performance and that we actually
learn something in the writing of performance. It is this learning that
ultimately outweighs the risk of offending. It is this learning that instigates
necessary discussion.
Works Cited
Anzaldua, Gloria and Cherrie
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Writings By Radical Women of Color. 2nd ed. San
Francisco: Kitchen Table Press,
1983.
Anzaldua,
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New Mestiza. 2nd edition. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1999.
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Copyright © 2002 Kaleidoscope/Speech
Communication Association/Department of Speech Communication, SIUC. All rights
reserved.