As Corey (2006) notes:

I am not a social dancer, and when I attempt to dance with words like 'truth,' fiction,' 'honesty,' or 'objective,' I clunk and clatter when my feet contact the ground. But 'integrity,' is a word that moves modesty well with me; I am willing assess and discuss moral principles, professional standards, professional standards, reputation, and the willingness to put my name to a tenuous idea"(331).

I use this quote again because when I look at the readings by Gómez-Peña and the lecture by Pinter I am drawn to the notion of truth-multiple truths and capital "T" truths. Whose truth/s do we value and whose truth/s are dismissed as invalid, or dismissed as not being true at all? I think I know some answers but I think it is also necessary to discuss the principle of authenticity when discussing truth. Whose performances are authentic?

As Gómez-Peña (2004) writes:

You may now experience anything you want, become whomever you wish, or purchase whichever cultural, sexual, spiritual, artistic or political experience you desire. You can impersonate other genders or ethnic identities without having to suffer any physical, social, or political repercussions, or be subjected to the rage of the excluded. You don't even need to belong to any 'real' community. And you can do all of this from the solitude of you own home.

If a person in this postmodern world can "be" anything and not have to take a stand what is at stake? Again whose performances are authentic and whose performances are true? Corey quotes Joni L. Jones in his piece:

Performance offers a new authenticity, based on body knowledge, on what audiences and performers share together, on what they mutually construct. As a form of cultural exchange, performance ethnography encourages everyone present to feel themselves as both familiar and strange, to see the truths and the gaps in their cross-cultural embodiments. In this exchange, we find an authenticity that is intuitive, body-centered, and richly ambivalent.

Jones and Gómez-Peña seem to be at slight odds with one another. Although Gómez-Peña is not discussing the possibilities for performance in essence she is discussing the daily performances people can engage in. So does performance up the possibility for body performances or is it problematic in that it encourages people to explore multiple performances of the "other" without ever having to take a stand for the "others" position? I have to think that Jones believes that performance offers the possibility to explore the positions of others-but in a responsible and ethical way-one that implicates the bodies with one another and takes a stake in one another's lives. As she says we have to feel the "cross-cultural embodiments" that require the bodies involved to be invested in each other in order to construct meaning.

This may be a tangent but a necessary one because these articles are discussing the ways that bodies have not been extremely ethically committed to each other and the result is invading Iraq according to Pinter, and making extreme stereotypical judgments about Chicana/os.

to be continued...