Anti-colonial Feminist Ramblings About Everything and Anything

Fusco, Coco. (Ed.) Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas. Introduction and pp. 203- 222. New York: Routledge, 2000. Fusco notes in the introduction that the body is the most suitable material for political performance in Latin America, as it is also the material and concrete site where political power is (violently) articulated. The body can be seen then as the 'stage' for the individual and the collective to come together, and the support for social reproduction and sexual domination. The performances compiled here by Fusco all construct particular versions of the body and address that violence inflicted upon the body politic. Fusco sees the problem in sustaining the existence of a sort of regional and national performance art, and the risk to equate art with a certain political project or one singular meaning (like in nationalist art), but many artists themselves are ever struggling not to become tokenized as representatives of a singular identity. It is also true h...

Image from: http://www.larepublica.com.uy/mundo/256063-madres-de-plaza-de-mayo-cumplen-hoy-30-anos Taylor, Diana. “Opening Remarks”, pp. 1-16 and "Performing Gender: Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo", pp. 275-305. In Negotiating Performance: Gender, Sexuality & Theatricality in Latina/o America. Edited by Diana Taylor and Juan Villegas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994. In the introduction, Taylor points at the complexity and contradictions of using the terms Latina/o and Latin American, as they are themselves contested sites of signification. One cannot think "that Latino/as occupy any one positionality (be it in terms of ideology, class, gender or sexual preference, or race) or that they occupy it in any one way." (6) Taylor is investing on the politics of community —as opposed to identity— with the concept of cultural competence at core as a notion that would enable to speak across divides. The position as Latin Americans can be thought then not as an e...