UC San Diego

In the last decades, there has been a proliferation of scholarship on embodiment and the body in performance. Likewise, the politics of language and the representation of hybrid, mestizo identities have been central in the study of Latina/o theater and performance. However, few scholars have attempted to discuss how the body works in relationship to bilingualism itself. In this dissertation, I argue that the body itself speaks and is thus a maker of meaning, just as it also receives and processes information. In looking at the specific sites of inquiry for this study, I show how the body articulates an argument that situates the performing subject in a web of intersectional identities, demonstrating how identities are produced through movement itself. The "speaking body" both draws upon and circumvents our understanding of language as a logocentric process and also as the principle way through which identity is perceived and the self is made knowable. Thus, I address theories of social construction that help us question the essential and fixed link between language and identity, while also insisting that the politics of language, in this case spoken and corporeal, continue to matter in very important ways. In doing so, I analyze how the performing, code-switching body can reveal racial construction, enact the contradictions of mestizaje, queer the way in which Latinidad is read through lenses of gender and sexuality, and finally, privilege the embodied experience of "bilinguality" over logocentric understandings of bilingualism. Looking at the work of primarily Puerto Rican performers, I engage this concept across a variety of performative registers, including solo performance, historical blackface performance, and the traditional Puerto Rican dance practice of bomba. I demonstrate that there are instances where the code-switching body re- enacts hierarchical power relations, and yet it in doing so, makes visible how power is enacted on and through the body in performance. Body bilinguality is thus a strategy for moving between and across codes of meaning-making, contesting narratives of fractured subjectivity through embodiment, and resisting hegemonic systems of representation, revealing sites of relative privilege and oppression