Gore Aesthetics: Chilean Necroliberalism And Travesti Resistance

Abstract

This article develops a concept I call “gore aesthetics” by focusing on the regulatory and productive capacity of sexual obscenity and gore in contemporary performance art to diagnose shifts in neoliberalism’s perceptual regimes. To do so, I centre the artistic practice and legacy of Chilean performance artist and underground, travesti punk monstrosity Hija de Perra or Daughter of a Bitch (1980–2014) to consider how her performance art, sexually obscene gore aesthetic, and legacy highlight the intensification of what Sayak Valencia theorizes as “necroliberalism”. As neoliberalism’s “b-side” (Valencia 2010), necroliberalism represents a form of governance and power organised by heightened modes of extractive violence against racialised, poor, queer, femme, trans, and travesti subjects in the Global South that produces value through death. Reading Hija de Perra’s work, the extractive circumstances surrounding her untimely death from HIV/AIDS complications and the post mortem performances that ensued through sexual obscenity and gore, I argue that gore aesthetics ultimately foreground necroliberalism’s intensification and operate as a travesti strategy of resistance to the extractive violence this form of power and governance occasions. At the same time, I consider gore’s limitations when state actors co-opt gore aesthetics, as occurred during the Chilean estallido (2019) when police intentionally maimed protestors.

Keywords:

• estallido
• gore capitalism
• Hija de Perra
• neoliberalism
• ocular trauma
• travesti

Acknowledgements

I thank Carl Fischer, Matthew Chin, Ashley Kerr, and Erica Rand as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their critical generosity and invaluable feedback. Special thanks to Anna Castillo for her invitation to present an early version of this article as an invited talk at Vanderbilt University. My deepest gratitude to cuir and feminist photographers and filmmakers Zaida González, Daniel Aguayo Mozó, Nicole Kramm Caifal, Susana Díaz Berrios, and Efraín Robles, whose stunning images grace these pages. Finally, to the travesti and trans visual and performance artists, activists, and public intellectuals whose work continues to inspire ludic, raunchy, and disruptive sexual aesthetic forms of resistance to necroliberalism as an ever-evolving mode of governance and power.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Exceptions include Eljaiek-Rodríguez (2018) and Fischer (2019). Chilean popular press and blog publications on Hija de Perra and her work include articles by members of the Colectivo Utópica de Disidencia Sexual or CUDS and by performance persona, activist, and journalist Víctor Hugo Robles “El Che de los Gays”, among others.

2 While Valencia develops her argument through sharp analyses of narcopower’s operations in a formally democratic Mexican state, my reading of Hija de Perra’s artistic production and aesthetic legacy reconceptualises and geographically shifts Valencia’s theorisation of necroliberalism to other state formations and regions in Latin America such as the Southern Cone. In turning to Chile, we see how neoliberalism was necroliberal from its inception – dependent upon practices of bodily mutilation, disappearance, display, torture, sacrifice, and extermination for its implementation during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973–1990). Neoliberalism and necroliberalism are co-constitutive and simultaneous forms of governmentality, as Valencia suggests. At times, one form may be more prevalent or visible, coming into relief through contemporary political events or state politics, yet the other remains operational if latent.

3 I purposely use the derogatory term “infected” rather than poz – an activist and community-based signifier commonly used by folks living with HIV. As I suggest, the performance’s protest of debt through the trope of “infection” frames debt as infection. This highlights the relationship between the contraction of HIV, medical debt, and the expansion of privatised health care in Chile as intertwined with practices of neoliberal capital accumulation. Such practices are also forms of capture and control exercised by the state and private sector in the service of population management. As Lina Meruane suggests, reflecting on the emergence and circulation of HIV, the “lethal journey of the virus” aligns with “changes in the culture of capitalism” in Latin America and simultaneously illuminates how neoliberal practices “fail to fulfill the promised conditions of democratic or economic equality” (2014, 3). The extractive circumstances surrounding Hija de Perra’s death underscore this failure.

4 For additional work on gender, sexuality, and neoliberalism in Chile, see Blanco (2015).

5 See also Pierce (2020) as well as Blanco, Pecheny, and Pierce (2018).

6 On CUDS, see Gómez and Gutiérrez (2021).

7 For more on postporn, see the work of performance artists and collectives such as Diana Torres, Post-Op, and GENERATECH.

8 Pieces by Las Yeguas such as Lo que el sida se llevó (1989), Las dos Fridas (1989), and La Conquista de América (1989) as well as installation work by Leppe such as Perchero (1975) exemplify the viscerality of these artists’ sexually dissident denunciations of state violence. On these relationships in Las Yeguas’s work, see Carvajal (2023).

9 My reading of this action is based on performance documentation 58 millones de besos con SIDA directed by Susana Díaz Berrios and Efraín Robles as well as my interviews with photographer and CIMA Gallery Creative Advisor Daniel Aguayo Mozó, whose images appear throughout this article. Some form of commemoration has occurred every year since Hija de Perra’s death honouring her work and her passing. This often includes performance art, films, dance parties, and music. I specifically focus on this 2016 iteration because the performance remobilised Hija de Perra’s gore aesthetics to illuminate the Dávila Clinic’s economic extractivism and profiteering from seropositive queer, trans, and travesti subjects’ deaths.

10 In addition to directing 58 millones de besos con SIDA, documentary filmmaker Susana Díaz Berrios is the director of feature-length documentary films Supersordo: Historia y geografía de un ruido (2009), Hardcore: La revolución inconclusa (2011) (which received the SURDOCS9º prize) and Ellas no (which received honourable mention in the 11º Festival IN-EDIT in 2014). Currently she directs the series “Sonidos en Mí, mujeres en la música” (ongoing): https://cinechile.cl/persona/susana-diaz/. Filmmaker Efraín Robles has directed numerous films, including Fragmentum cinema: Sueños (2019), Evelyn Cornejo. A la siga del sol (2014), and El nuevo amanecer (2012): https://cinechile.cl/persona/efrain-robles/.

11 Nicole Kramm Caifal is a documentary photographer, filmmaker, and journalist who works at the intersection of human rights, migration, ecology, and social and political conflicts. She extensively documented the estallido and on 31 December 2019 she was shot by Chilean police officers and lost sight in one eye. She is currently producing and directing a documentary film based on these experiences titled Ojos contra el olvido and the photographic series VTO or Víctimas del trauma ocular: https://www.nicolekramm.com/vto.

12 I thank my colleague Carl Fischer for drawing this to my attention.

13 In collaboration with Trinidad Lopetegui, Harold Illanes, and Sebastián Rojas, Aguayo Mozó also produced the short film Centinela documenting the estallido from Galería CIMA’s camera located in a privileged space above Plaza de la Dignidad, Santiago’s central plaza and the locus of the massive protests. The gallery recorded over 15,000 hours of unedited, continuous footage, documenting the estallido through live video feed. Centinela is a 4 minute 40 second compilation of footage captured between 24 October and 2 November 2019, challenging hegemonic media narratives that portrayed the protestors as unruly, and it documents the force unleashed against them. Gallery CIMA’s live feed remains accessible here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4GOcOKkEefz5NamN4WyMFg.

14 Here I use “post-” not to foreclose a necessarily contingent and unfinished political process of transformation but rather to signal the seismic rupture that the estallido represents in contemporary Chilean politics. It is possible to name a “before” and “after” to 18 October 2019, even while signalling continuity.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cole Rizki

Cole Rizki is Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies and Affiliate Faculty with the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, and the Department of American Studies at the University of Virginia. His research examines the entanglements of transgender cultural production and activisms with histories of state violence and terror throughout the Americas. Rizki’s current book project examines Argentine travesti-trans politics and aesthetics to bring the study of democracy and its illiberal correlates to the forefront of trans studies. Moving across trans photographic archives of resistance, state intelligence and police archives, trans literary and cultural production, and activist practices that respond to state terror, his monograph establishes a new historical and cultural interpretation of trans politics as a response to illiberal state violence and its forms. He is invited guest editor of a special issue of NACLA: Report on the Americas on queer and trans activisms and resistance (December 2024); co-editor of “Trans Studies en las Américas,” a special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly on Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx trans studies (May 2019); and TSQ’s current Translation Section editor. His work appears in journals such as Journal of Visual Culture, TSQ, Balam, and Radical History Review among others.