Love and Architecture: Race, Nation, and Gender Performances inside and outside the State

In this essay, I will use the metaphor of "performance" to describe the complicated interplay of power and identity. Each of the essays in this Cluster, I suggest, is concerned with some facet of identity performance within the power fields of gender, race, and nation. Perry calls our attention to how skin color, though typically subsumed by "race" in legal discourse, is a resource for performing identity that in fact complicates our understanding of racial subordination. Nancy Ehrenreich and Nicholas Espiritu are concerned with how states mobilize individual and collective race and gender performances as a way of inciting and legitimizing organized violence.

Anita Tijerina Revilla and Marta Ndfiiez Sarmiento describe attempts by two groups of Latinas to rewrite the scripts according to which gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and nation are performed by individuals. Revilla's essay, finally, introduces a disturbing concept that potentially destabilizes both the metaphor of performance and the metaphor of architecture: "love."