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The Demon's Nun: FOMMA and the Embodied Politics of Gendered Visibility in Mayan Mexico

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 May 2010

Abstract

This contribution to the performance dossier situates this 2003 play within the larger body of FOMMA's work and within the sociopolitical context of neoliberalism within Mexico, which has disproportionately affected indigenous communities in general, and indigenous women in particular.

Type
Performance Dossier: Actions of Transfer – Women's Performance in the Americas
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2010

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References

NOTES

1 Comandanta Esther, ‘Speech before the Mexican Congress,’ trans. Irlandesa, in Shannon Speed, R. Aída Hernández Castillo and Lynn Stephens, eds., Dissident Women: Gender and Cultural Politics in Chiapas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), pp. 15–27, here pp. 21–2.

2 For a succinct critique from the Zapatista perspective see Speed, Hernández Castillo and Stephens's introduction to Dissident Women, pp. 33–54.

3 Marisa Belausteguigoitia, ‘Rajadas y alzadas: de malinches a comandantes: Escenarios de construcción del sujeto feminino indígena’, in Marta Lamas, ed., Miradas feministas sobre las mexicanas del siglo xx (México: Fondo de Cultural Económica, Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 2007), pp. 191–236, here pp. 231–2, my translation.

4 For more information on the history of both organizations see my Contemporary Theatre in Mayan Mexico: Death-Defying Acts (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004). An excerpt treating FOMMA specifically also appears in the May–June 2005 issue of American Theater. Other sources include Diana Taylor's introduction to The Demon's Nun in her collection edited with Townsend, Sarah J., Stages of Conflict: A Critical Anthology of Latin American Theater and Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), pp. 318–20Google Scholar; Erdman, Harley, ‘Gendering Chiapas: Petrona Cruz Cruz and Isabel J. F. Juarez Espinosa of FOMMA’, in Uno, Roberta, ed., with Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns, The Color of Theater: Race, Ethnicity, and Contemporary Performance (London: Continuum, 2002), pp. 159–70Google Scholar; and Steele, Cynthia, ‘“A Woman Fell into the River”: Negotiating Female Subjects in Contemporary Mayan Theatre’, in Taylor, Diana and Villegas, Juan, eds., Negotiating Performance: Gender, Sexuality, and Theatricality in Latin/o America (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 239–56Google Scholar.

5 Many of their works are archived on the institute's website: http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/

6 The Demon's Nun, in Taylor and Townsend, Stages of Conflict, p. 323. All subsequent quotations are taken from this version.

7 It should also be noted that the Catholic Church, especially through practitioners of liberation theology, has provided a space in which indigenous communities have come to reflect on the structural inequities of their lot, and while not focusing per se on gender issues, has opened up similar spaces for such thought among indigenous women. See Speed, Hernández Castillo and Lynn Stephens, Dissident Women, p. 60.

8 Demon's Nun, p. 325.

9 Demon's Nun, p. 325.

10 Taylor, introduction to Demon's Nun, p. 320.