Teatro Luna S-E-X-Oh!

Teatro Luna, Chicago’s first and only all-Latina theatre troupe, came to St. Mary’s College for a post-Valentines Day show about sex, women, and Latina culture. Although not advertised or loudly proclaimed as being a "feminist" performance, my literacy in the language of feminist theory and rhetoric enabled me to look beyond the entertainment factors of the show and locate the subversive meanings behind the performances. That is not to say that I took more away from the show than another audience member who may not have a rich background in feminist performance theory—to the contrary, I was impressed by how accessible the feminist messages were. Whether or not the average audience member walked away from the performance with the clear notion that what just transpired on stage was feminist, everyone left Bruce Davis theater feeling invigorated and empowered by those five women. Their autobiographical stories—sometimes poignant, sometimes hilarious—were experienced by the audience in fascinating ways. As a collective group of witnesses to these “real-life” accounts (embellished with performative qualities, but not fictionalized), the audience were given the opportunity to glimpse into the lives of Hispanic women within the context of our contemporary world. The audience laughed innocuously at Tanya Saracho as she performed herself as "Carla," the exotic Latina phone sex character, moaning about her "huge brown nipples," but also had to contemplate Saracho’s more realistic disgust with the popular exotic fantasy among the Caucasian male customers: "Brown is hot right now, it's in with perverts… We play out our colonized histories over and over again for $2.99 a minute." Bringing to the surface the complicated issue of sexual colonization is a strong (and, some may say, brave) choice. I was blown away that this particular feminist critique of post-colonial desire was finally being liberated from the stuffy confines of my text books and performed on the Main Stage.

The set was also influenced by feminism. Behind the performance space were five life-sized (or maybe larger than life!) posters of each of the members of the theatre troupe naked. Overlapping these photos was added text that was hand-written by the subjects of each poster. The text added a certain "relief" to the photos, since it discreetly covered any points of female body parts that might be read as "pornographic" (Heaven forbid!). Additionally, the text served as a personal statement from each troupe member on the subject of her own body—the Latina body, which is used in the media without consent in harmful ways that promote degrading stereotypes. In this way, the Teatro Luna members reclaimed their bodies with these multi-textual images.

I enjoyed Teatro Luna’s S-E-X-Oh! performance immensely, and was ultimately inspired and empowered by the subjects raised and the feminist techniques employed.