This dissertation presents a new tool for analysis of the way difficult experiences

or phenomena influence the process for constructing self-identity in the performance of everyday life. This concept, refraction, emerged as part of a grounded theory methods analysis of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Itacaré, Bahia, Brazil from January to July 2014. The work here contributes to the field of performance studies as a possibility for examining how affective responses to difficult experiences contribute to a shift in perspective and subsequently shifts in the performance of self in everyday life. This research was conducted with critical and reflexive autoethnographic methods in order to hold the research accountable for the ways subject position influences the research. In this case the most salient theme that emerged from these autoethnographic methods was an unpacking of unacknowledged tourist privilege in this setting. The resulting work-in-progress

performance will offer ways for spectators to question their own assumptions

regarding tourist privilege in Brazil, and in so-called developing countries in similar

tropical climates. An additional contribution to the field of performance-based research that resulted from this dissertation is the articulation of a dynamic locus of creativity wherein rigorous established qualitative research methods complement creative practices in conjunction with a spectrum of tacit knowledge and theoretical sensitivities. This juncture becomes the theoretical space where creativity in research can be articulated in ways that are legible to both artists and researchers.

This dissertation is a comparative study of three contemporary women filmmakers: Puerto Rican Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Chicana director Lourdes Portillo, and Brazilian director Helena Solberg. Informed by transnational theory, politics of location, feminism on the border, and approaches to documentary filmmaking, the study examines three filmic texts: Brincando el charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican (1994), The Devil Never Sleeps/El diablo nunca duerme (1994), and Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business (1994). Each film is narrated by a female voice who juxtaposes her personal and transnational identity with history to tell her migration story before and after returning to her country of origin. An objective of the study is to demonstrate how the film directors vis-á-vis their female protagonists, configure a United States Latina transnational imaginary to position their female protagonists and themselves as female directors and as active social agents. Further, the dissertation explores how the filmmakers construct, utilizing the cinematographic apparatus, specific forms of resistance to confront certain oppressive forms. The theoretical framework proposes that transnational documentary filmmaking offers specific contestatory representations and makes possible the opening of parallel spaces in order to allow for a transformation from multiple perspectives. Through the utilization of specific techniques such as archival footage, the three directors focus on historical biographies. Further, they make use of experimental filmmaking and, in particular, the transnational documentary to deconstruct hegemonic discourses. Lastly, transnational cinema is valued as a field for cultural renegotiating and as a result, the documentary filmmakers in this study are able to reconfigure a transnational imaginary and propose an alternative discourse about history, sexuality, family structures, and gender relations. In sum, my dissertation contributes to Chicana/o and U.S. Latina/o, American Literature, and other Ethnic Literatures by focusing on migration, acculturation, and multicultural dialogue.

The nature of the link between a literary text and its film adaptation has been a point of contention within academic thought since the inception of cinema due to the fact that film adaptation forms part of film history since the early 20th century. For most of the past century, the main concern of critics has been the level of fidelity that adaptations exhibit in terms of their relationship with the text, which was viewed as "the original" that directors needed to use as a model. In the last 25 years, however, the discourse of fidelity has been challenged by a number of intellectuals as a result of poststructuralist thought, which rejects the notion of an "original" text and proclaims the existence of infinite meanings within each text that are constructed by the reader, not the writer. The present investigation will take into account this type of epistemology as its starting point in order to review and defy a number of theoretical approximations from the last several decades that deal with the relationship between literature and cinema towards its main goal of overcoming the limitations of fidelity discourse. This will be carried out through an in-depth analysis of Latin American texts that have been adapted to film. Thematically both the literary texts and the films contain elements that portray the reality of marginalized groups that build their existence in opposition to the model of patriarchal heteronormativity. In current epistemological thought such a modus vivendi falls within the realm of queer theory. Another common thread that unites all the cultural productions is the presence of violence that showcases the high level of intolerance towards any subject who somehow seems to be different, hence threatening the dominant configuration of patriarchy. Furthermore, the different texts and films expose a general fragmentation within Latin American society, a result of the constant struggles among its diverse social groups, between the ones who occupy the position of socioeconomic power and those who are left outside of it; such a fragmentation also stems from the multiple clashes that occur within the marginalized groups themselves.