"Maybe She's Born With It, Maybe It's Maybelline": Balancing
Acts and Transformations in Nao Bustamante's "America, the
Beautiful"
Laura G. Gutiérrez, Spanish and Portuguese
The University of Iowa
Laura G. Gutiérrez is an Assistant Professor in
the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at the University of Iowa
where she teaches courses on Latin American and Latina/o
cultural production, in particular performance, visual and media
culture, and other non-literary representations. Her current
research is on contemporary Mexican and Chicana performance and
video art, which engages an approach that is always
interdisciplinary, cross-cultural and transnational. Her work is
enriched by the methodologies performance studies indexes, which
are based on interdisciplinary research paradigms (visual, oral,
ethnographical), and her professional formation within literary
studies, which has prepared her to undertake close textual
readings. In contemporary academic discourse and cultural
production, performance (artistic or otherwise) occupies a
privileged site to address a number of concerns related to
cultural and material flows across borders; they include: race,
class, gender, and sexuality, which are all bound to the (human)
body. Central to her research is the question of the body as
image/discourse; one of the overarching questions within her
research is how this idea informs and/or alters the manner in
which subjects (transnational, gendered/sexualized, and
racialized) are constructed.
Abstract:
This essay is only a pinhole view into my current manuscript
project Unsettling Comforts: Sexualities in Contemporary
Mexicana and Chicana Performance. This work-in-progress
examines performance art production by women and/or so-called
racial and/or sexual minorities and questions of the
avant-garde, which is conceived as a bad-boy (i.e. white
bourgeois) aesthetics with its “shock-value” strategy and which
is often thought to be incompatible with identity-based cultural
production. Taking my cues from critics who are looking at
avant-garde and racialized performance/conceptual art, I examine
America, the Beautiful, a performance piece by Chicana
performance artist Nao Bustamante in order to situate it within
a historically wider context of an avant-garde performance/
performative poetics. But I also analyze the racialized and
gendered body-centered piece as an important critical
intervention in dominant and mass-mediated (Latino) American
discourses in regard to notions of femininity and the female
body. And, because it is a work-in-progress, your comments and
feedback are most welcomed.
[Thursday, November 18;
7:30-9:30
PM; 302 Schaeffer Hall]
