The Choteadora's Body in Performance: Carmelita Tropicana and the Intersectional Strategy of Choteo
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation undertakes an analysis of Carmelita Tropicana’s body in performance as it enacts “self” across the representational strategy of choteo. Carmelita Tropicana is the performance persona of Cuban-American, queer performer Alina Troyano. Choteo is a representational strategy that irreverently subverts the context and content of its referent. This doctoral study proposes that Carmelita’s work activates choteo in an intersectional and disidentificatory manner that opens up a site of negotiation, wherein the politics of representation are queried, and identity is revealed as an eventness. Specifically, by outlining choteo as an intersectional, disidentificatory strategy, I formulate choteo as an act that mobilizes through and against the complex process of identification across intersectional axes. Drawing on performance scholar José Esteban Muñoz’s suggestion of applying choteo as an optic for reading Carmelita Tropicana’s performance work, I map out the terms of this practice of “critical Cubanía,” foregrounding the intersectional and disidentificatory potential of this representational strategy. Utilizing this methodological groundwork, the project analyzes two performances—Memorias de la Revolución/ Memories of the Revolution and Milk of Amnesia/ Leche de Amnesia. My analysis of Carmelita’s body in performance and its embodiment of choteo hopes to make visible the problematics of representation and the alternative modes of self-enactment that this choteadora’s body negotiates in theatrical space. The act of choteo subverts site, memory, and identity, as Carmelita’s body in performance enacts stereotypical iconography, and simultaneously resists this reductive process of identification through excessively self-ascribing it. Moreover, the choteo within these works finally turns its bite on itself, enacting a choteo of choteo, which subverts its own framework, reckoning with the limitations of representation. My application of the intersectional, disidentificatory hermeneutic onto Carmelita Tropicana’s body in performance is rooted in a commitment to engaging and elaborating on critical scholarship and spectatorship, and querying its own framework.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".