Traversing the Stage examines the Latina subject whose work as dramatist, actress, theorist, and/or critic further defines the field of theatre and performance in the United States. Alicia Arrizon looks at the cultural politics that flows from the intersection of gender, ethnicity, race, class, and sexuality. The analysis ranges from the transgressive/innovative roles played by Latina performing artists and dramatists to the configurations that result from the intersection of third world feminist politics and Anglo American discourses.
Traversing the Stage considers the emergence of a Latina aesthetics developed in the United States, but simultaneously linked with Latin America. Latina as an allegory for identity encompasses women of Latin American descent who reside in the United States. These women may be descendants of natives or longtime migrants; in either case, they are subjects of conquest, revolution, annexation, dislocation and patriarchal subordination. As dramatists, performance artists, protagonists and/or cultural critics, the women Arriz—n examines in this book, foreground their own divided position. In the space along the unstable border between “mainstream” and “margin,” these women experience their subjectivity as in process. They are neither Latin American nor Anglo, neither third nor first world; they are feminists, but not quite “American style.” This in-between-ness, Traversing the Stage argues, is precisely what dictates the development of Latina performance studies.