For this presentation, I want to focus on one of FOMMA’s central missions: to stage how embodied gender dynamics in performance play a role in promoting a collective intersectionalidentity.  Specifically, I will investigate Reflejo de la Diosa Luna’s “Migración” (1996) to underscore that identity is not only performed but also choreographed and gendered. Particularly, I am focusing on the shared, though distinctive, experience of intersectionality among indigenous women in Mexico. The term “intersectionality,” is borrowed from Kimberle Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality in which she questions the ways that experiences of Black women are excluded because feminism presumes whiteness and blackness assumes masculinity. In this case, I would add that studies of indigeneity most often elide the issues of gender that oppress indigenous women. This presentation will focus on two performance strategies aimed at critiquing gendered indigenous roles for women: cross-dressing and a materialist use of objects. I argue that the forms of cross-dressing employed and the ways performers cite or use objects define their body techniques and forms of identification. I argue that the performer modifies her body movements depending on the character she plays and the contextual factors of the performance. She uses objects to situate the body and the scene. In doing so, the performer provides alternative options for gendered representations, which in turn influence representations of indigeneity.

This dissertation addresses issues of gender and indigeneity through an analysis of ceremonial and quotidian objects used within contemporary Mexicana and Chicana performances. Performances by women residing on either side of the U.S.-Mexico border— specifically works by artists Jesusa Rodr?guez, Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya (FOMMA), Cherr?e Moraga, and Paulina Sahagun— draw on embodied forms of knowledge to resignify myths, record testimonies, construct forms of female solidarity, and demonstrate lateral connections among oppressed populations. This project posits the concept of transindigenous materialities as the shared though distinct ways that Mexicana and Chicana performances tactically use material items, which have indigenous markers, in ways that strengthen female agency. In contrast to other work that focuses on objects in more static environments like museums or archives, this project centers on the study of objects used in performance since a reading of objects as stationary risks relegating indigenous cultures to the past and European cultures to the present. This dissertation focuses on performances that rely on objects to stage dynamic relationships between objects and subjects.