The Choteadora's Body in Performance: Carmelita Tropicana and the Intersectional Strategy of Choteo
This dissertation undertakes an analysis of Carmelita Tropicana’s body in performance as it enacts “self” across the representational strategy of choteo. Carmelita Tropicana is the performance persona of Cuban-American, queer performer Alina Troyano. Choteo is a representational strategy that irreverently subverts the context and content of its referent. This doctoral study proposes that Carmelita’s work activates choteo in an intersectional and disidentificatory manner that opens up a site of negotiation, wherein the politics of representation are queried, and identity is revealed as an eventness. Specifically, by outlining choteo as an intersectional, disidentificatory strategy, I formulate choteo as an act that mobilizes through and against the complex process of identification across intersectional axes. Drawing on performance scholar José Esteban Muñoz’s suggestion of applying choteo as an optic for reading Carmelita Tropicana’s performance work, I map out the terms of this practice of “critical Cubanía,” foregrounding the intersectional and disidentificatory potential of this representational strategy. Utilizing this methodological groundwork, the project analyzes two performances—Memorias de la Revolución/ Memories of the Revolution and Milk of Amnesia/ Leche de Amnesia. My analysis of Carmelita’s body in performance and its embodiment of choteo hopes to make visible the problematics of representation and the alternative modes of self-enactment that this choteadora’s body negotiates in theatrical space. The act of choteo subverts site, memory, and identity, as Carmelita’s body in performance enacts stereotypical iconography, and simultaneously resists this reductive process of identification through excessively self-ascribing it. Moreover, the choteo within these works finally turns its bite on itself, enacting a choteo of choteo, which subverts its own framework, reckoning with the limitations of representation. My application of the intersectional, disidentificatory hermeneutic onto Carmelita Tropicana’s body in performance is rooted in a commitment to engaging and elaborating on critical scholarship and spectatorship, and querying its own framework.
Carmelita, choteo, performance, politics, representation, Tropicana
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