The Construction of the Liminal Subject: Monica Palacios's Latin Lezbo Comic as Dramatic Autobiography

Monica Palacios's Latin Lezbo Comic (1991) is a work that is liminal in terms of its genre as well as the subjectivity it performs. This performance piece combines elements of stand-up comedy, dramatic monologue, and autobiography in order to explore the construction of identity. Palacios is part of an emerging group of writers who seek to represent the experience of the subject who is doubly or triply "marginal" in the sense of identifying with more than one class of peoples that are oppressed because of race, ethnicity, economic class, gender or sexual preference. In these works, writers including Gloria Anzaldua, Sandra Cisneros and Cherrie Moraga, as well as Dorothy Allison, Audre Lorde, and Maxine Hong Kingston, have narrated the experience that George Mariscal has described as "contradictory subjectivity" (5). In this form of subjectivity, the interests of one's ethnic group or social class are at odds with the priorities that are constrained by gender or sexual preference. These contemporary writers are exploring the formation of a "liminal subject," which I will describe below, as a corrective to marginalization that goes beyond the traditional Anglo-American metaphor of the melting pot. The subject who is marginalized by sexual preference and gender as well as race faces a particularly complex set of obstacles, because the liberation projects of most groups emphasize a unified subject, one who belongs to the dominant culture in all but one respect, in order to facilitate their attempts to obtain civil rights (Smith and Bergmann 6-7). Palacios offers a unique perspective on the construction of liminal identity, because the theatrical representation of an autobiographical narrative permits the performance of identity, in which the professional performance itself constitutes an element of the "production" of that self (Butler 18). As a professional scholar who is neither Latin nor lesbian, and not particularly comic, my own positionality could be seen as a potentially problematic appropriation of minority discourses. However, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has offered the term "anti-homophobic" reading to describe a non-oppressive approach to "the epistemology of the closet," and Jonathan Culler argues that reading is an interpretive activity that is not inevitably "bound to shared life experiences," provided that the critic is committed to investigating "whether the procedures, assumptions and goals of a current criticism are in complicity with the preservation of [hierarchical] authority" (cited in Jay and Glasgow 5). I have substituted the word "hierarchical" where Culler wrote "male" in order to emphasize the multi-dimensional nature of the oppression against which the liminal subject defines itself, and which ethical literary criticism defines as its object of study. Many critics have observed that autobiographical writing, particularly by members of marginalized groups, is often marked by fragmentation and discontinuity, and that this formal experimentation plays a key role in the elaboration of an alternate poetics (Morgan 7). Jose David Saldivar points to Cherrie Moraga's Loving in the War Years, a personal and political autobiography written in the form of verse and prose dispatches from the front lines of a battle, as an example of this type of poetics. Gloria Anzaldua's autobiographic Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza also combines poetry with personal and political essays. Renato Rosaldo explains that unconventional genres are used by Chicano writers as "the sites of political innovation and cultural creativity" (88). Mary Meigs notes that the mixture of genres is common in lesbian writings, and that the space between genres is "a territory of possibilities" (37). Palacios makes full use of the possibilities of the genres she combines. In Latin Lezbo Comic, her first autobiographical performance, she narrates her life in part through a chronological series of "vignettes" whose structure appears to have derived from stand-up comedy: many of the segments are brief descriptions of a formative experience concerning her ethnicity, sexuality or gender, which conclude with a "punch line. …