Precarious Settings, Intervening Performances

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Our session explores how performance practices and artistic endeavors illuminate and respond to manifestations of “precariedad” in Latina/o and Latin America. We investigate interventions that manage precarious circumstances. Our questions coalesce around the possibility that performance offers to alter exclusionary forces. We consider instabilities inherent to a colonized, marginal reality for Puerto Rican artists, both in Puerto Rico and the United States; performative contexts through which mestiza girlhood is constructed at the precarious intersection of gender, ethnicity, class, and sexuality; the influence of performance-driven experiences on the first Latina Supreme Court justice; and the alternative spaces that new performance technologies allow us to enter in order to reconsider precarious identities.

Sub Track

• Performance Studies

Chair

• Gad Guterman, Webster University

Individual Presentations

• "Esquizofrenia Puertorricensis" by José (Papo) Márquez: A Response to the "Precariedad" of Being Puerto Rican - Gloria F Waldman, CUNY Graduate Center, York College

• Constructing a Mestizaje Girlhood: (Trans)Indigeneity in the Coming-of-Age Performances and Rituals in the Americas - Cecilia J Aragón, University of Wyoming

• A Supreme Education: Sonia Sotomayor’s Early Exposure to Performance Practices - Gad Guterman, Webster University

• Precarious Spaces: Post-Human Aesthetic in Contemporary Chilean Theatre and Performance - Claudia Villegas-Silva, Arizona State University

• Midwest Boricua, Fred Arroyo: From Factory and Farmworker to the Halls of Academe - Geraldine J Casey, Indiana University