A Queer Feminist Demo and Retrospective

Renowned New York-based performance artist, writer, and actress Carmelita Tropicana will discuss her astonishing career spanning almost three decades in theatre, performance art, and film on the transnational stage. The event will include demos of Tropicana's past work in an archival retrospective made available by the artist's own collection of her recorded works. A critical conversation with moderator Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé on the intersection of queer, feminist, and racial politics, which have remained central in Tropicana's performance work from the cultural climate that pushed her to create her performance persona in the late 80s to her more current political, social, and cultural interests.

Please RSVP to rsvp@clags.org.

Performing Que(e)ries takes place over the 2012/13 academic year and explores LGBTQ performance in the 21st century, particularly the ways in which contemporary queer performance is tied to past, present, and future explorations of queer identity. The series includes performers, scholars, and writers of diverse backgrounds and styles coming together to discuss their work in multiple formats, including roundtables, interviews, discussions, lectures, readings, and/or performances. Performances and discussions will track the legacy of queer performance onstage and off, querying the efficacy and vitality of live performance in the age of media-based and digitized communication.

Carmelita Tropicana (a.k.a. Alina Troyano) is a performance artist, playwright, and actor. In Tropicana's work, humor and fantasy become subversive tools to rewrite history. Tropicana's performances plays and videos have been presented at venues such as the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, Hebbel Am Ufer in Berlin, Centre de Cultura Contemporanea in Barcelona, the Berlin International Film Festival, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Mark Taper Forum's Kirk Douglas Theater in Los Angeles, and El Museo del Barrio in New York. Her work has received funding support from the Independent Television Service, the Jerome Foundation, and the Rockefeller Suitcase Fund. She has received numerous awards including fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts as well as an Obie for Sustained Excellence in Performance.

Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé is professor of Spanish, Comparative Literature, and Latin American and Latino Studies at Fordham University in New York. His most recent book is Queer Latino Testimonio, Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza: Hard Tails (Palgrave 2007), a book about the relationship between high art and queer Latino popular culture in the gentrifying New York of the 1980s. He is also author of a study on the intersections of nationalism and queer sexuality in the prose fiction of the Cuban author, José Lezama Lima, El primitivo implorante, and coeditor, with Martin Manalansan, of Queer Globalization: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism (New York UP 2002). He has published widely on Hispanic Caribbean and U.S. Latino literatures and cultures. His essays have appeared in anthologies such as Entiendes? Queer Readings/Hispanic Writings (Duke 1995), Sex and Sexuality in Latin America (NYU 1997), and Queer Representations (New York UP 1997), and in journals such as Revista Iberoamericana, differences, Revista de Crítica Cultural, Cuban Studies, and Centro: The Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies.