Las Choras del Puerto


The collective Las Choras del Puerto (“The Port Mussels”) from the coast city of Valparaíso defines itself as a “feminist guerilla” and has specialized in carrying out unexpected performances in public spaces. Here they play with the double meaning of the word “chora” (literally “mussel” in Spanish): while it is used to refer to female genitalia colloquially in Chile, “choro” and “chora” are also used to denote someone with “an attitude”, with “street knowledge”, and/or from working-class extraction.

The protagonists of the performances are four characters (the four choras) of different colours —who wear masks and wigs in their public performances — The description of the characters emphasize precisely the marginality of the female subjects that have been denied by the official discourse in the post-dictatorship: the poor, the domestic workers, the bisexual and the indigenous; the sexually and politically active women, unruly subjects of an heterosexist, racist, exploitative model, who resist what state policies of democratic governments are willing to offer: microcredits.

Their first public performance, called “A trail of roses with thorns or shove your roses up your asses” on International Women's Day, consisted on returning the red roses that the government was distributing to women. Gathered in front of the offices of the Woman's National Service, they spread the red roses that they collected, and extended a series of slogans like “on international women's day, we don't want roses, nor breakfasts with the military, nor packages of numbers”. In this way, they denounce the government's official discourse on gender equality not only as complicit with an essentialist definition of women, that is (hetero) normative and functional to a neoliberal project, but the logic itself of the transition of compromising women's demands for the sake of not upsetting the conservative sectors.

In a discoursive system that does not recognize the existence and value of the female body outside systems of economic production and sexual reproduction, and where particularly women's bodies have been deemed as a vehicle of production and reproduction, these performances seem like an effectively subversive counter-narrative through the affirmation of women as active sexual subjects of pleasure and politics. However, I am always suspicious of feminist tactics of organizing around the vagina (Choras= vagina). The Choras do imply that we are talking about "vaginas in resistance", to put it somehow. But in their second performance they called for a massive vasectomy if women were not to access free emergency contraception bringing back the vagina as the fundament for feminist politics and exluding the chance of meaningful alliances with men.

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