Hija de Perra



The character of Chilean performer Hija de Perra (“Daughter of Bitch”) is precisely based on the mimicking of the normative roles of sacrificed mother, wife, and worker that define the respectability of a female subject, recipient of public policies in the Chilean transition. By fusing these roles with the aesthetic of the evil/femme fatale character of Latin American soap opera, Hija de Perra makes the whore/madonna binary explode on stage. In addition, while the character of Hija de Perra is performed by a biological (gay) man performing as a drag queen, performances regularly includes also a number of biological women who perform as drag queens with nicknames such as Perdida (“Lost”) and Zorras Rameras (“Whore Foxes”).

The mingling of bio-female and male bodies performing normative female roles, carried to a grotesque extreme, has the effect of exposing these roles that are naturally ascribed to women as social performances as well. Performances regularly include dancing and singing to lyrics of songs that talk explicitly about the pleasures derived from sharing fluids such as blood, feces, and urine with a sexual partner, and even the pleasures of sharing and transmitting STDs. The performances often also include the manipulation of fake bodily fluids alternatively to the queens carrying out domestic work —for instance, Hija de Perra might spread in the audience fake menstrual blood or pretend to discharge feces in Perdida's face—

If the transition in Chile is all about erasing the blood (representing the dead and the tortured) and the dirt (representing poverty), then these performances also succeed in bringing back was is trying to be repressed by the official discourse. Many times they will begin by Hija de Perra and the other drag queens performing domestic work in very submissive ways while complaining out loud about abusive husbands, and then slowly move into the characters engaging in suggestive S/M activities like whipping and riding each other or members of the audience, playing with the signifiers of passivity/activity. In this way, these performances ultimately point at the subversive sexual power that could potentially be articulated in the female domestic space.

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