Final Reading. Corpus Delecti

I read the 13th story. Luis Alfaro. This is about a play that took place in 1996. In Los Angeles, California. He performs a ritual re-enactment of his mothers slow suicide by consuming the table full of Twinkies. He inhabits her form. He relives her body and voice through his production. There is a poem written that expresses the shame this second-generation Latino feels because of his grandmothers refusal to assimilate into North American culture. The first half of the text is trans-fixed upon the artists conflicted relationship to the past, to his grandmother, and his own 11-year-old Chicano self. The second half of the reading discusses queer theater and social theory. Showing studies of the meaning of sexuality than from thinking the social. The final section of the performance takes on a voice of the charismatic minister, one who might be preaching at his mothers church. Alfaros memory performance, with its focus on the production of hybrid selves and space, is in and of itself a mode of queer theory-making that also functions as social theory.