Weaving (Trans) Time in Mexican Cabaret's La Prietty Guoman

Abstract:

In the Mexican political cabaret piece, La Prietty Guoman—created in 2016 and since performed across Mexico and the United States—César Enríquez embodies La Prietty, a transgender sex worker dreaming her story alongside Julia Roberts’ romantic entanglement with Richard Gere in the 1990 romcom Pretty Woman. Building on performance and temporality studies done by scholars such as José Esteban Muñoz, Jill Dolan, Christina Baker, and Elizabeth Freeman, this essay critiques La Prietty Guoman as performing strategic temporality. In so doing, this research illuminates La Prietty Guoman and advances performance studies scholarship by unpacking intersections between past, present, and future temporalities in trans-of-color theatre, thus suggesting the performative potential of strategic deployment of trans and anti-trans time. Ultimately, resisting absolute temporal divisions, La Prietty Guoman entangles a performed trans time with the anti-trans present to summon hope for the trans future.