Moderator: John Caughey (American Studies, University of Maryland)
"Sanctified Acts: Performing Wedded Bliss in Robert 'Cyclona' Legorreta's East Los Angeles , 1970"
Robert Hernadez (American Studies, University of Maryland)
The Performance art of Robert "Cyclona" Legorreta is little known in Chicana/o contemporary art, LA queer history and the historicizing of the Chicana/o Civil Rights Movement. Relatively unknown beyond the sparse photographs and newspaper clippings evidencing his work, Cyclona's experimental and confrontational performances reflected a number of shifting artistic trends and social waves in the Chicana/o civil rights struggle and larger gay and lesbian liberation movement from the late 1960s to the present day. It is quite telling that this controversial performer who's very severe, stormy, cyclonic and confrontational nature of his namesake has all but erased him from the historical record, archive and larger cultural studies of Los Angeles at a time of social unrest. Contesting the rigidity of gender categories and taxonomies of drag, Cyclona's painted, contorted body and outrageous denouncement of the U.S. government, the contemporary Chicana/o art scene and white gay organizations has found his work little communal affinity, neither solely Chicano, queer, or avant-garde.
This essay will examine just one of many collaborative performances with ASCO co-founder, Chicano muralist and conceptual avant gardist Gronk and painter/photographer and designer Mundo Meza. Entitled "The Wedding of the Marriage Conchita Theresa Con Chin Gow," Cyclona and friends performed a same-sex wedding in the middle of California State University - Los Angeles in June of 1970. Dressed in a wedding gown complete with veil and wedding party, this "liberation" of East LA was received with hostility and violence. Cyclona's demonstration as "bride" distorted the public's expectation of the archetypical marriage and reconfigured queer Chicano desire as an otherwise offensive sanctified act. This essay is interested in recuperating this historic moment in an effort to examine the very "shocking" and "disruptive" forces at play in this wedding's formation. Though it is tempting to revisit and revise this act as a precursor to or in anticipation of today's same-sex marriage debates and further some cultural lineage for gays and lesbians in their greater pursuit of social and equitable civility, it is the affect of wedding-as-performance that remains Cyclona's most significant contribution. Reconsidering his art through an affective lens, this essay attempts to consider the value of political activism in an emotional register, and the racialized and sexualized implications for the wedding ritual itself. Borrowing interviews from the artist, archival evidence and photographs, Cyclona's cultural experiment of feeling demonstrates new critical considerations in Chicana/o artistic expression, the gay marriage movement and cultural justice through the surrealist wedding form.
"Overcoming Narratives: Antidepressant Marketing and Women's Depression Memoirs"
Dawn Reynolds (American Studies, University of Maryland)
This paper probes memoirs of the 1990s to assess how women writers manage and treat depression. Calling specific attention to the sources of depression cited by the memoirists, I explore potential connections -- and their attendant repercussions -- between popular notions of women's mental health and drug treatment, and women's self-assessments of their own mood disorders. The period from 1994-2000 marked the start of aggressive, influential "educational" antidepressant marketing campaigns proffered by pharmaceutical companies, focusing on gendered biochemical sources of depression (ie, defective hormones or neurotransmitters within a woman's body). I theorize that cultural insistence on drug treatment seeking to correct women's errant biochemistry has contributed to contemporary women's conception and management of depression, as their memoirs show. The women's voices illuminate potential repercussions of the gendered emphasis on faulty body and brain chemistry as main causes of women's mood disorders. Along with Janet Stoppard, I argue that the medicalization of women's bodies and minds negates important social aspects of women's lives that have been shown to contribute to depression, such as caregiving and career responsibilities. As the first-hand discourses of depression testify, however, women are increasingly serving as influential role models, advocating for and teaching each other creative ways of improving their mental health and overall social positioning, in many cases through use of the very drugs designed to "correct" their flawed biology. I conclude by suggesting that women have re-narrated the dominant scientific paradigm accusing women's bodies of defects by (re)appropriating medical rhetoric to their own ends, ultimately eliciting excellent mental health outcomes.
"'I was Here Before You saw Me': The Cultural Production of African American Adolescent Girls in Hip Hop Music and Culture"
Tee Leathers (American Studies, University of Maryland)
The debates circling around African American adolescent girls and their involvement with hip hop culture tend to position them as passive consumers rather than producers within the culture. The objective of this work is to provide a foundation for the understanding (contextual and otherwise) of the cultural production of African American adolescent girls in regards to their relationship to hip hop music and culture, and to look at the ways they act as producers. To lay the foundation for future ethnographic work, I turned to black women and girls immersed in the culture through the use of various narratives. These narratives were obtained from films, autobiographies, and interviews.