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Abstract
This piece explores the visual art and performance of Wynnie Mynerva (1992–), interpreting their aesthetic use of violence and sadism. My reading of Wynnie’s work articulates cholanness in relation to Blackness, unearthing the colonial etymology of “cholo.” I argue that the body of chola women is at very center of the “abigarrado cholo sex,” a sexual/reproductive system of extraction of labor and pleasure. Wynnie’s visual experimentation toys with castration and revenge, and with the non-generative pleasures of anal sex and anti-natalism. To think through the contemporary uses of chola, I use the work of Black feminist scholars in the US and the Caribbean, establishing hemispheric connections with Latin American feminist scholars and activists.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 The full quote is: “Al hijo de negro y de india, o de negro y de negra dicen mulato y mulata. A los hijos de éstos llaman cholo; es vocablo de la isla de Barlovento; quiere decir perro, no de los castizos, sino de los muy bellacos y gozcones; y loa españoles lo usan de él por infamia y vituperio” ([1609] 1976, 266).
2 “How Does a Woman Poet Fuck: On Chola Feminisms” included in the collective volume Gender, Sexuality, and Performance in Latin America and the Caribbean, co-edited by Katherine Zien and Brenda Werth (forthcoming in 2024 by the University of Michigan Press).
3 A bibliography that can be dated from the 1980s onward focuses mainly on the cholo as the migrant par excellence, distinguishing him as the mixture of Indigenous ethnicity and criollo culture.
4 For a reading of the dangers of foreclosing Black feminisms in a decolonial Latinamericanist agenda consult Semalawit D. Terrefe’s (Citation2020) critique of María Lugones.
5 My argument about the chola’s silence has to do with the plasticity of her figure. She has been represented in multiple and contradictory ways throughout Peruvian history and culture, written by male writers of various racial backgrounds.
6 Their first exhibit “El otro sexo” at the gallery of Euroidiomas, a center for teaching European languages (English, Portuguese, French, and German), was censored under the claim that it was detrimental for students and children to look at ultrarealistic renditions of sexual organs.
7 cholotube.com is perhaps the main example of a porn site that capitalizes on the local racial category of cholo while at the same time negating the fact that cholas are the main protagonists of the videos.
8 In the several descriptions of poverty in the Huarochirí Manuscript [1598?] they refer to being an orphan, like in the case of the demigod Pariacaca.
9 This gesture can be interpreted as a way of controlling the violence produced by racialization, the chaos of poverty and dispossession, which is comparable to Tiffany Lethabo King’s reading of Kamau Brathwaite’s poetic definition of the Caribbean as an old woman sweeping sand (2019, introduction).
10 Here we also need to contemplate the effective collaboration empleadas can establish with, for example, employers who have sustained a feminist reflection on the asymmetries of domestic labour. Silva Santisteban is one of the few writers that has painstakingly defined her positionality and exposed the familial racism in order to take her criticism further.
11 Wynnie’s performance was one of the finalist projects in the well-known and highly-disputed competition “Passport for an Artist”, held every year by the French Alliance of Peru. This institution promotes French language and francophone culture since its creation in 1883 in the context of French imperial expansionism and with the explicit mission of operating in the colonies. The paternalistic charity alluded to in the title, the giving of a “passport” to a young Peruvian artist, is paired with the chauvinistic tones of a prize that grants the winner a French visa and plane ticket to Paris.
12 The monologue “Abuse usted de las cholas” (“Come and abuse the chola”) included in the play La dudad de los Reyes (1990) by Hernando Cortés offers a compilation of stereotypes about domestic workers. Voiced by a chola, the piece encompasses racist satire and melodrama that nonetheless enables a critique of criollo whiteness.
13 Referencing Freud’s Oedipus complex, María Galindo and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (Gago Citation2010) have elaborated on the “complejo del Aguayo” (complex of the aguayo). The Aguayo, the piece of cloth used by Indigenous women to carry babies, is the symbol of interracial/interclass motherhood that exhibits a deeper liaison precisely because it is traversed by the violence of racism. Although not elaborated in these terms, a similar affect occurs in José María Arguedas’s literature and biography. By centering love and empathy these forms of intimacy articulate different racial pedagogies that can hold a feminist political potency.
14 They developed the procedure of inviting couples and friends to the atelier, which resulted in sex before, during, and after painting.
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Olga Rodríguez-Ulloa
Olga Rodríguez-Ulloa is an Assistant Professor at the Department of American Studies and Latino Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her current book project, Sadistic Cholas: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Peru and Its Diaspora, explores the political resignification of the racial slur chola as it is now deployed by queer trans- feminist performers, authors, and collectives who advance a transfeminist critique with their aesthetic use of violence in sex and politics. The book uses a hemispheric critical framework that incorporates Black, Latinx, and Indigenous studies.