Flaming Iguanas: Summary And Analysis

Erika Lopez’s chapter on the Canadian Johns is the longest chapter in her novel, Flaming Iguanas, possibly because it displays an empowering moment for Jolene, wherein Lopez’s protagonist undergoes a masculine sensation that fulfills her own needs and desires as an independent woman on the road. She meets the Canadian Johns, middle-aged bikers from Canada, who help her get her broken bike fixed. She uses one of the Canadian Johns for a thrilling ride on his motorcycle, and for a place to stay for a night. Jolene imagines herself riding the motorcycle and puts herself in the Canadian Johns’ place: “I only want to have sex with this Canadian guy when we’re going seventy miles around curves, not when he turns around” (Lopez 125). When she realizes

that he is driving, her feelings of wanting to have sex with the driver of the vehicle fade away because she only falls in love with the idea of him as a competent biker, which she aspires to be. Jolene’s intention is not to attempt a relationship with men on the road, but to use their power and dominance to fulfill a sense of self on the road. Since most male characters have more agency then their female counterparts, Jolene uses the Canadian Johns to experience a real motorcycle ride that she cannot give herself due to her inability to properly maneuver her vehicle. Jolene’s consistent effort to fulfill these male gendered experiences on her own illustrates Jolene’s effort to destroy the gender ideology of masculinity and femininity. For that reason, Lopez directs her readers’ attention to situations in her protagonist’s life where her mixed ethnicity, and ambivalent sexuality impact her gender roles and how she is seen as a woman on the road.
As Jolene travels west, she complicates the socially constructed gender roles for males and females and demonstrates that identity is fluid and indefinite just like her mobility on the road. In many instances, like her encountering with the Canadian Johns, Jolene navigates between femininity and masculinity, emphasizing her struggle to ground a gendered and sexual identity. This mutability signifies the inability to settle on an assured sense of self, emphasizing the myth of the west. Jolene, plans to accomplish finding a sense of self as a middle class woman, who also rejects the restricting life of domesticity. Traveling westward is considered a male gendered movement that rejects the constraints of middle class life, therefore, men decide to get on the road in hopes of finding selfhood, while also avoiding and rejecting the commitment to family life. Lopez’s Flaming Iguanas addresses various constitutions of American identity, including ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, through the character—Jolene, who is illustrative of how these ostensibly discrete social locations are complicated as she travels west. Her ability to constitute different gender and sexual roles innately destroys the specification and social construction of identity, and reinvents gender and sex on the road by abolishing the restrictions and standards that society has placed on men and women.
Jolene’s navigation between femininity and masculinity, and her identification as a bisexual create a bardo state, a transitional space, which Melissa Solomon argues to be a state of confusion or a “[period] of deep uncertainty” (202).

Bisexuality is a sexual identity that lies in the middle of heterosexuality and homosexuality; it is neither one nor the other, but both. It is similar to Melissa Solomon’s argument of the lesbian bardo. The word bardo refers to “an ‘in between’ state” (202). During her road trip, Jolene appears to be in Solomon’s period of deep uncertainty because she struggles to identify as either heterosexual or lesbian. There is a part in the novel where Jolene fantasizes about the female model in her art class: “I wanted to go up and bury my face between her legs for the afternoon” (Lopez 218). However, once there, Jolene admits that she wouldn’t have known what to do once she reached that point. She starts by asserting a dominant lesbian role in her lesbian fantasy, but then becomes submissive because she doesn’t know how to control the situation. She needs the power and dominance of men to radiate onto her in order to feel like she is in control. There is this constant tension between constituting a specific gender, and sexual role. Jolene’s uncertain nature creates a problematic idea of traveling west and being a middle class woman on the road because she struggles to master the male gendered road with independence and

contentment.
During Jolene’s road trip, Lopez introduces the gendered and sexed standards set upon women that demand them to be passive objects, praised for their beauty and left to tend homely duties. Jolene’s former friend, Shannon, is the antithesis of Jolene’s own character because she submits to the gendered expectations for marriage. Shannon’s transformation from “spending a few groundbreaking years pounding her fist on the table demanding respect for being a single woman and artist” (Lopez 36) to living out a “dime store heterosexual life” (Lopez 36) pregnant with her “boring personal ad guy” (Lopez 30) husband, demonstrates her lack of robust agency. Like Jolene, Shannon initially uses men to assert her radical individualism as a female artist. She tries to do so by discussing sexual politics with her dates in a paradoxical effort to build a homosocial relationship and establish equality between them. When her approach does not work, she becomes flirtatious and feminine and uses her sexuality to ruse them. She uses men for sex, also exemplifying a stereotypical idea of how men use their tricks to get women in bed with them. Similarly, Jolene struggles to assert her political and intellectual agency without using her femininity to cover up her failed attempts to assert her agency.
Like Shannon, Jolene tries to build a homosocial relationship with Bert, a truck driver she falls in love with on the road: “By nightfall, we pulled in front of his trailer home, went inside, listened to Lynyrd Skynyrd albums,” and “ate Cap’n Crunch cereal under the neon Budweiser sign that buzzed on the wall” (Lopez 144). These activities display a depiction of boys hanging out rather than a woman and a man in a romantic relationship. Instead of having sex with Bert at nightfall, they were getting together like two men and hanging out listening to rock music. Jolene stayed with Bert because he was a truck driver and Jolene wanted to be a truck driver. Just like the Canadian Johns, affiliating herself with Bert was a way for Jolene to immerse herself in a position that she could not obtain herself as a woman. However, after a while, Jolene found herself falling into the same pattern as Shannon. She started taking on a feminine role and she even found herself stalking her man and going to the beauty parlor like other trailer park women.
Jolene’s relationship with Bert, demonstrates the same changeability in gender identity, from an assertive female role to a passive female figure in a heterosexual relationship.

Jolene’s attempt to establish a female role in a heterosexual relationship demonstrates the domesticity and passiveness women, like Shannon, succumb to. Jolene puts all of her effort into being feminine; she claims that she “wanted to belong / look like the other women in the grocery store” (Lopez 146) and begins to fulfill domestic duties like preparing food for Bert. The use of the virgule emphasizes her desire to be inclusive and yet still belong to a particular group of womanhood or assert a particular notion of femininity. Then again, it also reverts to her desire to be a truck driver and experience something she cannot as a woman, which initiates her attraction to Bert. In Flaming Iguanas, most men tend to have more agency than women, and women crave the same power and independence. In order for her to be a truck driver or to align herself with a life of truck driving, she realizes she needs to fall in love with a truck driver and live with one in order to delve into the whole

experience.
Jolene’s use of sexually straight men does not terminate the prominence of men, but instead uses their gendered roles of dominance and superiority to exult in experiences that she desires, while also keeping her withdrawn from the trap of middle class American life. In a way, conforming to societal means would be easier than fighting against them, and like her former friend Shannon, she seeks to belong and express her individuality. But, because men do not take notice or are taken aback by the assertive female, women give up. This becomes problematic because Jolene conforms to female gender roles and Jolene is traveling on the road to be a sign of a women’s advocate for feminists across the country. When her relationship with Bert becomes a failed attempt at domesticity, she is left with heartache and the realization that she can’t express her individuality through her artwork while living with Bert because she is too busy trying to balance the domestic duties of cooking, cleaning, and looking the part of a potential homemaker. When Bert admits to having an affair with a young dispatcher she is hurt because she could have been happy living as a homemaker, but this image was undermined by the fact that this relationship showed her that she has no agency or dominance over Bert, or any other male: “I couldn’t bend him over and fuck him doggy-style the way the guys in South Philly do it” (Lopez 125). Her reference to fucking him doggy-style suggests the way dogs hump one another, which is a way for them to uphold their dominance over the other. Like her experience with the Canadian Johns, Jolene cannot access power over Bert, because she is subjugated by her femininity.
Not only is Jolene physically subjugated by her ideological gender roles, but she is emotionally subjugated by male characters. In order to manage this emotional domination, she uses sex as a stand in. When she got across the country she realizes she was hardly any different, so to substitute this feeling she wanted “to immediately (have sex for some other reason)”… “s]omeone who could give me answers / (sex for some other reason with) someone who appeared to have more problems than myself” (Lopez 242). Sex is what she wants and she wants it immediately; sex fulfills a feeling of satisfaction and people use sex to undermine bigger problems, like an unsettling sense of self. She also wants to have sex with someone who has more problems than herself, which means she wouldn’t have to worry about her own. She is upset because she has not found just one identity, so she doesn’t care who she has sex with, male or female, as long as she is having sex. In these kind of instances she says that there lies no respect and when she wants to leave, she says you can easily “pull out the reason why like an ace up your sleeve, and saunter out the door” (Lopez 242). She is now looking for temporary satisfaction which is what she has found throughout her journey west. She knows she can just leave if it doesn’t work out, because sex for Jolene is emotionless and transient like her sense of self. In fact, sex becomes an identity because it is the only thing Jolene comfortably talks about and connects with.