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

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

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