Description:

Laura G. Gutiérrez, Associate Professor
Performance as Public Practice Program
University of Texas at Austin

This presentation introduces the audience to my previous scholarly work on Latina performance at the same time that it actualizes it by bringing to the fore the ways in which a number of artists from different disciplinary and artistic formations—some from my book Performing Mexicanidad: Vendidas y Cabareteras on the Transnational Stage as well as new material—interrogate neoliberalism from a feminist and queer vantage point. In more specific terms, “Feminist and Queer Interrogations of Neoliberalism” looks at the work of different artists and/or collectives who are situated within a transnational circuit of performance and exhibition and examines how they (at times subtly at other times less so) respond to the ways society and culture ha ve been re-structured under this ‘new’ economic regime. Lastly, in pondering about the valence of the concept of “performance” to critically examine feminist and queer experimental art, public interventions, political cabaret, and mass-mediated representations, this presentation also serves as a way to further think about and expand the capaciousness of Latina/o Studies.