By BROTHERS*
Hija de Perra's gaze scrutinized the coloniality of knowledge about new gender debates, centered on the Global North
1.
Paul B. Preciado, in the introductory text of the collection of chronicles An apartment in Uranus, writes that the processes of reproduction of life are at the center of the contemporary industrial revolution: “The body and sexuality occupy, in the current industrial mutation, the place that the factory occupied in the 2020th century”; however, the author states, “there is a revolution of the subaltern and the stateless underway” (Preciado, 39, p. XNUMX). This revolutionary march is opposed by another, counterrevolutionary one, which fights for control of the processes of reproduction of life. The subaltern and the stateless are the forms of infra-human life in the context of a biopolitical logic.
It is not difficult to see the assertiveness of Paul Preciado’s reflection. A contemporary example is the controversy surrounding the participation of Algerian boxer Imane Khelif in the Paris Olympics. Imane was accused – yes, that is the verb, which is emblematic, since the accusation is a legal device applied to those who are supposed to have committed crimes – of “passing as a woman”, of being a transgender woman, even though the Algerian Olympic Committee has reiterated that the athlete is a cisgender woman. And when they say that Imane Khelif is a trans woman, her detractors are shouting, “she is a man!”
There are many other cases in the field of Olympic sports, but Imane Khelif's was the one that attracted the most visibility, either because she is an athlete who competes in the women's sport under the (unfounded) suspicion of having male genetics, or because the Italian far right appropriated the case as a political banner. The participation of Filipino athlete Hergie Bacyadan, who identifies as a trans man, for example, did not raise any major controversy. It is difficult not to consider that the stereotypes of men and women in sports are also present in the way in which the cases were appropriated by the political debate.
In any case, we know, Imane Khelif or Hergie Bacyadan, that this is the revolutionary march of the subaltern and stateless being confronted by this other counterrevolutionary march, whether in sports, education, or in the minutiae of who is allowed to use which type of bathroom in the United States Congress. In the “world’s largest democracy,” Congresswoman Sarah McBride, the first trans woman elected to Congress in that country, is prohibited from using the women’s bathroom because cisgender Congresswoman Nancy Mace approved a measure that defines bathroom use according to the “biological sex” of individuals.
Although Sarah McBride has stated that she will not fight for bathrooms, believing that there are more pressing causes on which she needs to invest her efforts, we know that it is not bathrooms, but violence against “monstrous” bodies that Nancy Mace’s movement is about.
2.
I begin with these questions because they seem to illustrate some of the problems that the Chilean “queer” artist Hija de Perro (1980-2014) discussed and confronted, as well as the underlying issue that heteronormativity, or ciscoloniality (to use a concept discussed here by Viviane Vergueiro) is, fundamentally, a question of colonialism and coloniality produced from a certain “Global North”.
And here I am reminded of the conversation between Paul B. Preciado and Caetano Veloso at the 2020 Paraty Literary Festival, in which Paul Preciado, reflecting on the idea of the State’s monopoly of violence, said that what escaped the reflections of Max Weber, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida is that the “legitimate” monopoly of violence belongs to a specific group of bodies, namely, the male, especially the white man. And it is this binary, colonial, patriarchal, heteronormative logic that Hija de Perra confronted with her artistic work, her lectures, but mainly in the existence of her body. She confronted it as a monstrous body in which she assumed herself.
In testimony for the documentary Lost Daughter of a Dog (2008), Hija de Perra stated “people have humiliated me all my life. Is that normal? Of course it is. How many people are humiliated all their lives”. Hija de Perra assumed herself as a wounded body, as a body marked by pain, to fabricate her existence. As Christine Greiner (2023) argues, in the case of wounded bodies, bodies marked by pain, fabrication as an encounter with that which is the genesis of suffering is what makes the crip (strange, monstrous) body potentially creative, tensioning world-bodies that should not exist in order to “want to live and not let die”.
In her participation in the 1st Biennial of Art and Sex held in Chile in 2012, Hija de Perra denounced the violence of the inaugural act of European colonialism in America, which denied the bodies of the original peoples, considered bizarre, effeminate and lascivious for the Judeo-Christian lenses of the Eurocentric patriarchy that landed on our shores.
Oswald de Andrade, when he wrote his well-known poem “Erro de Português” in which he says “When the Portuguese arrived/ Under a heavy rain/ He dressed the Indian/ What a shame!/ If it had been a sunny morning/ The Indian had undressed/ The Portuguese”, he was not referring only to clothes, and the text denouncing, the political text by Hija de Perra at the 2012 Biennial, lays bare the violence that covered bodies, covered specificities and tried to eliminate all those who did not fit (and do fit) into the colonizer’s paradigm, into the colonizer’s possibilities of intelligibility.
This is also the complaint made by Viviane Vergueiro, when she writes that “All bodies and genders have a history, and binarity as a Eurocentric sociocultural normativity defines and restricts the destinies of many of them around the world” (Vergueiro, 2016, p. 259).
Hija de Perra’s perspective scrutinized the coloniality of knowledge about the new gender debates, centered on the Global North. The way she referred to names like Michel Foucault (Saint Foucault) and Judith Butler (Saint Butler), for example, was iconoclastic. Hija de Perra’s entire discourse was situated. She spoke of a place, which is geographical, the Southern Cone, but which was also her humiliated, spat upon, violated body, which recognized itself as queer without thereby assuming a queer identity.
A “faggot theory,” she argued, would be more honest than a “queer theory,” but it would not have the glamour needed to survive in the Academia shopping mall, and this is one of the central points, it seems to me, of Hija de Perra’s critique, that an intellectual construction that emerged to think about transgressive bodies could be bought as a commodity by the capitalist system.
Hija de Perra assumed her utopia, that of a queer struggle that would challenge institutions and ways of understanding the world, and that of a queer theory that would continue to seek to understand different modes of sexual desire and how cultures define them. Ten years after her death, the present shows us how alive the words and entire monstrous performance of Hija de Perra are, who denied the binary invention imposed by colonialism on our bodies. Who was, with her entire body, on the front line in the revolution of the subaltern and stateless.
*Viegas Fernandes da Costa, is a history professor at the Federal Institute of Santa Catarina (IFSC). Author of, among other books, There were days of humanity in me (Potoo).
References
Greiner, Christine. Crip bodies: establishing strangeness to exist. Sao Paulo: n-1 editions, 2023.
Daughter of a Perra. Filthy interpretations of how Queer Theory colonizes our South American context, poor in aspirations and third-world, disturbing humans enchanted with heteronormity with new gender constructions. Periodicus Magazine. 2nd edition, Nov. 2014 to Apr. 2015, pp. 1-8.
Dear, Paul B. An apartment on Uranus: chronicles of the crossing. Translated by Eliana Aguiar. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2020.
Preciado, Paul B. and Veloso, Caetano. Transitions: table 8, Paraty International Literary Festival, 05. Dec. 2020, 01'33 min. Available here.
Lost Daughter of a Dog. Dir. by Vicente Barros, Sebastian Gonzalez and Melisa Miranda. Chile, 2008, 22 min. Available here.
Vergueiro, Viviane. Thinking about cisgenderism as decolonial critique. In: Messeder, S., Castro, MG, and Moutinho,b L. (orgs). Interweaving sexualities: an interdisciplinary weaving in the realm of sexualities and gender relations. Salvador: EDUFBA, 2016, pp. 249-270.
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