October 29, 2015

International Panza Featuring Claire M. Massey

The Panza Monologues has travelled far and wide all across the nation, not only in theaters but in college classrooms, community centers, and even in people's living rooms. Recently The Panza Monologues has even crossed international borders. This blog post focuses on the work of scholar and panza ally Claire M Massey, a doctoral candidate at Saarland University in Germany who tirelessly advocates for Chican@ literature internationally. Her dissertation is situated in the field of Cultural Studies, specifically looking at the Librotraficante Movement out of Houston, Texas. 

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Name: Claire M Massey
Hometown: Poynton, Cheshire, UK
Currently lives in: Saarbrücken, Germany
Field of study: Cultural Studies

How were you introduced to Chicano literature?
When I was a third-year undergrad (Warwick University, UK) I spent my year abroad at UCLA. The classes I had chosen from the catalogue put me in the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o Studies. It was here that the world of Chican@ literature opened-up to me. Although I was studying Comparative American Studies (CAS) at my home university, not once was the term “Chican@” used, no literature, no history, no ‘Mexican American’, ‘no Latin@’, nothing. I knew this was wrong because I had spent two years working on a US Army base in Frankfurt, Germany, where I’d met Chicanos from Texas, Washington State, Kentucky, and California. Yet, once I got to university here was a gaping hole in the narrative of the Americas. That’s why I went to UCLA. That’s where my education really started.

Why is Chicano studies important in your country?
If you Google, “Chicano Studies UK”, you get nothing. If you Google, “Chicano Studies England”, you get nothing. So, I Google’d “Chicano Studies Warwick” (My ‘Alma Mater’) and got a link to ‘Warwick Hispanic Studies’, founded 2012. Although ‘The House on Mango Street’ is mentioned in one of the modules, the course offerings are heavily Latin American and Caribbean in focus. Chican@ literature and history doesn’t appear to be a part of their syllabus. I have no doubt that there are courses at Universities in the UK that include the works of Gloria Anzaldúa, Ana Castillo, and others, and that there are independent researchers, but Chican@ Studies as an academic field does not appear to exist. 

In the country where I now study, Germany, there has long been academic interest in Chican@ Studies. However, that is not to say that there are stand-alone Chican@ Studies programmes at the universities, but more that scholarly research is very strong. As is it is in Spain. However, for many inside and outside university here, as in the UK, the term Chican@ is simply not known. Those who have heard of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, have not heard of Dolores Huerta or César Chávez. The Civil Rights Movement was the Black community. 

I believe Chican@ Studies is vital as a lens for Western Europe to view immigration, migration, and its communities. For Europe to see how it feeds off the labour of migrant workers, and how our schools render invisible all but the stories of the Anglo majority. How our university departments, faculty, staff and students do not reflect the communities they are set in. It is very easy in Western Europe to view racism, police violence, and political extremism as inherently of the United States. Through Chican@ Studies we have to ask ourselves: “What about here?”

Why is The Panza Monologues important to your field of study?
Like Borderlands/La Frontera, The Panza Monologues is a masterpiece of “theory in the flesh.” A narrative of female oppositional consciousness and agency, it reveals the counter-stories of communities rendered invisible in a city built upon their backs. Here the city is San Antonio, sold slick, and shiny, shrink-wrapped in mariachis and margaritas, no glimpse of darker realities beyond The Riverwalk. In this age of globalisation, neoliberalism, and citizen as consumer, The Panza Monologues framework challenges the reader/audience to actively disturb notions of place, of identity, beauty, belonging, and power; to push back against majoritarian myth, against patriarchy, and to develop strategies of survival that nurture self, community, agency, and love.

The Panza Monologues, like Chican@ Studies, offers mirrors of identity for those whose communities are distorted by societal narratives. Distorted by images in the media. By being rendered both visible and invisible. It offers the students who do not see themselves in the courses offered, the reading lists, the exam questions and their assumptions, well, The Panza Monologues offers them a voice, a chance to tell their story, a relatable familiarity. It is a powerful tool for self-recognition, and for self-love.

What part of The Panza Monologues book were you most drawn to and why?
"The Prologue" made me think of my mother, who is amazing, but has always worried about her weight. And when she has never been ‘overweight’ (whatever that is, right?), but when we were younger, when we’d all sit down together to eat dinner, she would eat off a smaller plate, she’d read it somewhere that that would work. Or she’d go to Weight Watchers, or eat cabbage soup for a week. Now when I see her she tells me how much weight she’s lost, it’s still an accomplishment for her. Perhaps in a house of six people this is something she has always felt she has control over. Perhaps when we went through periods when money was tight this was a strategy to keep the home together. My brother and my dad have never worried about their weight. My two sisters have. I went through a period of bulemia when I was in my late teens. Now if I put my mind to it I can eat very little. I don’t do that so much anymore, but I can become obsessed with what I eat. I always feel more confident when I’m thinner. I was bullied at school for being ugly, so I know I cannot get fat, for me that would a double curse, fat and ugly. So I try to watch what I eat. To draw attention away from my face. Well, that is quite a thing to reveal. This I guess is my Panza Monologue.

Favorite Quote from The Panza Monologues book?
“You gots to love the panza. You gots to love yourself.” -from "Panza Girl Manifesto"

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Claire Massey completed her undergraduate studies at Warwick University and received her MA from the University of Leeds. In 2014 she was a recipient of the LILIAS CMAS Benson Library Fellowship, at UT Austin. Claire is also the recipient of the Soho Theatre London’s Westminster Prize, has performed with the Old Vic’s community theatre company and in the summer of 2012 she took part in the closing ceremony of the London Olympics.



ACTIVATE YOUR PANZA!

Enjoy reading The Panza Monologues, Second Edition?

Share the love and help us out by writing reviews about The Panza Monologues, Second Edition on GoodReads.com, or by inviting us for an interview (print, web, radio, podcast or the like), or by writing a book review for a popular press, literary blog, or academic journal, or by encouraging others to purchase The Panza Monologues, Second Edition for your local library, your institution's library, or your local independent bookstore.

You can also send us a note, take a picture on social media, or tag us with #panzamonologues if you see signs of the book anywhere near you! We love to see the #panzamonologues on social media!




October 11, 2015

Pedagogy of the Panza Featuring Carla Della Gatta

Each and every time we learn of a teacher, activist, scholar, artist, professor, organizer, coordinator, or facilitator who is or has used The Panza Monologues as a teaching tool, we are extremely gratified and thankful. Our second edition of the play in publication was specifically conceived of and designed to help facilitate its use in classrooms of all kinds. We included numerous kinds of materials to accompany the script in order to inspire its use as a wide reaching teaching tool.

Our blog series "Pedagogy of the Panza" celebrates and profiles teachers and their innovative instruction using The Panza Monologues, Second Edition. These posts showcase important, determined, and ingenious teachers of all kinds who are taking our work to the next level of its manifestation. Are you using The Panza Monologues, Second Edition in your classroom? We’d love to hear your story – contact us! panzapower@gmail.com

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Name:  Carla Della Gatta
Hometown:  Los Angeles, where I currently live.

Where do you teach?  
I am an Assistant Professor of Critical Studies at the School of Dramatic Arts at the University of Southern California. I taught The Panza Monologues at Northwestern University earlier this year.

In  what class/type of class did you use The Panza Monologues in?  
It was an upper-division seminar called “Latina Theatre & Feminisms” that was cross-listed in Gender & Sexuality Studies, Latina and Latino Studies, and Theatre. 

Why did you choose to teach The Panza Monologues in your class?
I chose The Panza Monologues for a number of reasons. First, the class included the term “Latina Theatre” in the title but I wanted to challenge any limits that the term implies. The students read plays written by Latinas, but the subject matter of the plays varied widely. They also read a play written by a Latino with a strong Latina lead role and discussed various Latina performance pieces. Second, the class discussed the Latina body as a site of memory in the theoretical readings on Chicana Feminism and in discussions on other plays, so having The Panza Monologues as the penultimate text really brought a lot of the course themes together. Third, Virginia & Irma’s voice and Virginia's performance style are essential to discussing Latina performance as a genre today, and where it falls in the trajectory of Latina and Latino theatre history.

How did you teach The Panza Monologues (any fun or meaningful activities or panza teaching tools you want to share)?  
The class first watched the DVD of the performance without reading the book. This allowed students to experience the piece with the dramaturgy and performance elements. I also showed clips from Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, and the students discussed the different methods for solo performance, especially the use of voice and music.

After watching the video, we discussed some of the book’s contents, especially Virginia & Irma’s research process that led to the stories in the piece and the emphasis that Virginia and Irma place on pedagogy. Because of the first-person narration and the physicality of the storytelling style, the students initially thought that these were Virginia’s personal stories. We talked about theatre as a tool for raising consciousness and the ethics of performing other people’s narratives, especially when they focus on the body, sexuality, and violence. 

Why is The Panza Monologues important to your field of study? What conversations/issues did the book raise?  
The Latina body is often eroticized or maternalized in the media and in popular culture, but in Virginia & Irma’s work it is presented as a site of collective and personal memory.  The collective memory includes a history of structural violence toward the Latino community, especially Chicanas/os, in the form of food deserts and mis-education about diet and the body. We devoted a unit solely to Xicanisma early in the term, and the students related the concept of Theory in the Flesh and ideas about embodied knowledge to The Panza Monologues. Virginia & Irma’s piece brought all of it together.

What did you learn about your teaching or about your students from teaching The Panza Monologues?  
I learned that my students, who were from a variety of backgrounds, would each relate to something different in the piece. I expected to talk about solo performance as a genre and performance elements (the use of the altar, music, and physicality), but the discussions ranged from the representation of the female body in the mainstream media to the historical relationships of food and cultures to making the body an agent of activism.  

Favorite Quote from The Panza Monologues Book?
"I never wanted to look like her, but slowly the image of my mother crept into my own body." From "Cha-Cha to Panza" 

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Carla Della Gatta is an Assistant Professor of Critical Studies at the USC School of Dramatic Arts. She has published articles and reviews in academic journals, and served as a dramaturg, translator, and scholar for the theatre. Her research areas include early modern drama and theatre history, Latina/o Theatre, Spanish Golden Age theatre, adaptation theory, postcolonial feminism, and critical race theory.




ACTIVATE YOUR PANZA!


Enjoy reading The Panza Monologues, Second Edition?

Share the love and help us out by writing reviews about The Panza Monologues, Second Edition on GoodReads.com, or by inviting us for an interview (print, web, radio, podcast or the like), or by writing a book review for a popular press, literary blog, or academic journal, or by encouraging others to purchase The Panza Monologues, Second Edition for your local library, your institution's library, or your local independent bookstore.


You can also send us a note, take a picture on social media, or tag us with #panzamonologues if you see signs of the book anywhere near you! We love to see the #panzamonologues on social media!