Identity In Erika Lopez's Flaming Iguanas

Erika Lopez’s Flaming Iguanas addresses various constitutions of American identity, including ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. The protagonist, Jolene, is illustrative of how these constitutions of identity are complicated as she travels west. In particular, traveling westward typically consists of white men who reject the constraints of middle class life and decide to get on the road in hopes of finding selfhood. Flaming Iguanas demonstrates that gender, class, and ethnicity tie into the ability or inability to finding one’s self of self. Therefore, Jolene is unable to find her true sense of self because she is a woman. Lopez directs her readers’ attention to situations in her protagonist’s life where her mixed ethnicity, and ambivalent

sexuality impact her gender roles. In many instances, Jolene navigates between femininity and masculinity, which emphasizes her struggle to ground a gendered identity. As Jolene travels west, she expunges the socially constructed gender roles for males and females and demonstrates that identity is fluid and functions as means of flushing out different identities. This is important because Jolene does not settle on one identity, but she constitutes different gender and sexual roles which innately destroys the specification and social construction of identity.
To begin, there are three points that stand out when deconstructing identity.

Gender, ethnicity, and sexuality are core components that create a solid identity. In the western world Jolene is known as a bisexual Latina female. She is bisexual because she is sexually attracted to men and women, she is a Latina because she is a mixed company of Puerto Rican and German American, and she is a female because she has the physical attributes of a woman. Although gender, ethnicity, and sexuality are all relating factors, they are also separate units of identity. Gender refers to physical attributes and traits that make one appear to be male or female. Sexuality refers to how one feels about their body, one’s sexual orientation, and one’s sexual attraction for others. Ethnicity refers to a group of people who share the same cultural background and heritage. Lopez uses these three different factors of identity and crafts them together simultaneously to suggest the damage of stereotypes. Throughout the novel, Lopez’s Flaming Iguanas highlights the conformity of sex and gender stereotypes, and addresses the socially constructed stereotypes to challenge the patriarchy and expose the damage it does to one’s search for selfhood. Jolene exemplifies how they damage one’s sense of self as she ventures

west.
Before Jolene even gets on the road, Lopez introduces her reader’s to Jolene’s lost best friend, Shannon. Shannon and Jolene had an instant connection that made Shannon question her identity: “it’s hard to tell the difference between falling in love and wanting to fuck them or just becoming really good friends” (35). This becomes Jolene’s problem throughout the entire novel because in many instances, she can’t tell whether she just wants to have sex with someone whether they are male or female, or if the connection is on a whole different level. Shannon’s importance to the novel is her transformation from “spending a few groundbreaking years pounding her fist on the table demanding respect for being a single woman and artist” to conforming to a socially constructed heterosexual life of domesticity and motherhood. Lopez uses Shannon to ground her argument against the conformity of gender roles.
Jolene’s relationship with Bert, a truck driver, surprises readers and demonstrates the changeability in gender identity from an assertive female role to a passive female figure in a heterosexual relationship. This is Jolene’s first attempt to establish a female role in a heterosexual relationship, and she puts all of her effort into it; she claims that she “wanted to belong / look like the other women in the grocery store” (146) and begins to fulfill domestic duties like preparing food for Bert. The use of the virgule emphasizes her desire to be inclusive and belong to a particular identity of womanhood or femininity. This becomes problematic because she conforms to female gender roles and Jolene is a women’s advocate for feminists across the country. Her relationship with Bert becomes a failed attempt at domesticity when she worries about the future, and Bert admits to having an affair with a young dispatcher. Her willingness to forgo family life and how close she was to “having a fucking garden for this guy” (150) left Jolene with heartache and realization. She was hurt because she could have been happy living as a homemaker, but this image was interrupted by the fact that this relationship showed her that she had no agency or dominance over Bert. Therefore, Jolene moves on to seek another sense of self, and not in a heterosexual relationship.
Furthermore, Jolene proves that time and space do not transform the outcome or indefiniteness of identity when she finally arrives in California. Instead, she states: “I felt the same way after I lost my virginity./I figured and hoped the insights and profound sense of accomplishment would hit me later” (238). Jolene’s unchanged nature created a problematic idea of traveling west and being a woman on the road. It complicates the meaning of the West, and proves that only those who are white, and who are a part of a substantial class find something more when they get to the West. This causes her to want sex for other reasons than just trying to discover her true identity, she “wanted to immediately (have sex for some other reason) fall in love with someone I both pitied and was impressed by”…“[s]omeone who could give me answers / (sex for some other reason with) someone who appeared to have more problems than myself” (242). Sex is what she wants and she wants it immediately; sex fulfills an identity of satisfaction and unsettled resolution to a bigger problem. The problem is 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” (242). She is now looking for temporary satisfaction which is what she has found throughout her journey west.
While looking to fulfill this satisfaction of pure pleasure, she meets Hodie and has her first lesbian experience with her. She liked the simplicity of being with Hodie, and it was one of the most successful relationships she has had during her entire road trip west. However, she did not feel the urge to identify as a lesbian either:
To my relief, the next morning I didn’t feel like a member of a lesbian
gang. I didn’t feel this urge to subscribe to lesbian magazines, wear flannel shirts,
or wave DOWN WITH THE PATRIARCHY signs in the air, or watch bad
lesbian movies to see myself represented. No.

I wanted a Bisexual Female Ejaculating Quaker role model. And where was she, dammit? From now on I would demand to be represented.

She is relieved that she did not wake up with feelings that made her want to characterize with acts of lesbian women. She is relieved because she knows what it feels like to submerge herself into a certain role in order to fit into that role, because that is what she did with Bert. She does not want to feel like she lacks a voice or authority in any situation. Being that she came from several unsatisfactory relationships with men, and she was now in a content relationship with a female, she still felt disconnected from a specific identity. She realized she would be neither straight nor lesbian, but bisexual. She realized she would never be fully satisfied with any relationship because there is no one like herself, a Bisexual Female Ejaculating Quaker, and she would have to be her own role model and a role model for others like her. Jolene demonstrates that traveling across the American landscape does not contribute to the construction of her sexual and gender identity that she determines, but that it contributes to only revealing a sense of identity or sense of self.