Posted by Margaret Carson on April 21, 192003 at 11:31:50:
While reading this week’s plays, I wondered about the history of women’s humor in Latin America – who were the role models for Jesusa Rodríguez, Diana Raznovich, Denise Stoklas? Are they a late-20th-century phenonemon with few precursors? (Sor Juana, who has many humorous and satiric verses, can be claimed as one “mother,” and then . . . ?) As Diana Raznovich glorious Manifesto 2000 of Feminine Humor points out, the power to laugh and make people laugh is a gender issue. If it is an act of subversion for women to laugh, it is doubly subversive when they write sophisticated humor that makes others laugh and sometimes even feel uncomfortable. They are not being “good girls” when they are defiant, ribald, scathing, merciless, outrageous in their humor. When did this transgressive space open for Latin American women and how difficult was it for them to claim? Another question is how is their humor different? What previously unexplored areas are they opening up and interrogating in their work? I have kept these questions in mind while thinking back on this week’s plays.
Jesusa Rodríguez’s imaginative pastorela virtual, Sor Juana en Amoloya, with its heavy political satire, took aim at the major figures on the Mexican scene in the mid-90s. It is the way in which she takes aim at these figures and sacred cows that makes the play so original. Rodríguez uses Sor Juana, a wit, a freethinker, a poet, and lesbian of the 17th century, as the main character in this 20th century play. It is a creative choice that in Rodriguez’s hands becomes both an homage to Sor Juana and a kind of personal manifesto as well. Sor Juana escapes from the confines of historical scholarship, most notably in the scene in which the views of Octavio Paz (a sacred cow) concerning Sor Juana’s sublimated Sapphism are juxtaposed with a scene of Sor Juana and Lysi kissing and frolicking in bed. Rodríguez, a lesbian performera, does not let Paz’s sanitizing ambiguity stand and claims Sor Juana. As “Sor Juana” Rodríguez can explore the oppression of the Mexican moral majority, the conservative, fundamentalist PAN party (to which the current President, Vicente Fox, belongs). It is the rise of a new tyranny much like the Holy Inquisition of Sor Juana’s time (the essence of which is expressed in the hymn of the PAN party, as sung by the cross-dressed prosecutor: Death to faggots/Kill the blind/Then the prostitutes and degenerates!/Clean the earth of unclean vertebrates!) The absurdity of the charges against Sor Juana (that she’s shown the Baby Jesus in full frontal nudity) make us laugh, but we might also recall that Ashcroft had classical statues covered in some federal building – was it because female breasts were exposed? Rodríguez plays with the absurdities of Mexican politics (as in the U.S, an inexhaustible source for ridicule and lampooning. In doing so, by reaching into this overwhelmingly male domain, she is in asserting a power that I believe is new to women – to drag down and ridicule corrupt, pompous, dangerous figures, to consider these subjects fair game, to not limit themselves as humorists to only the personal and domestic.