The freaks of colonial imagination : contemporary cultural interventions for nineteenth century queer and racialized bodies

Contemporary cultural interventions contest systemic racism and corporate extractivism, in Mexico, Chile, and Brazil by repurposing nineteenth century tactics of subjugation, creating new individual and group histories. Theatrical activist movements deconstruct the traditional stage space, as artists and advocates enact performative protest in urban and natural settings. In this project, I illustrate how European aesthetic ideals were imported to Mexico, Chile, and Brazil in the nineteenth century, while bodies and racial imaginations were exported to Europe as objects marketed for public pleasure. This exchange constructed Latin American colonial national identities on the basis of exclusion. Separating the human from the non-human, colonial actors determined who has the right to claim history. I identify this process of post-Columbian importation of ideas, exportation of resources, and trafficking of humans as a cornerstone of nineteenth century nation building in Latin America, since the act of collapsing entire groups categorically while robbing them of name and land creates a cultural disconnect where new systems take hold. Each chapter follows a past-to-present timeline, as the nineteenth century cooptation of bodies and resources sets the stage for contemporary cultural interventions that repurpose colonial traumas. In Chapter 1, Julia Pastrana (1834-1860) is captured as a child and displayed as a freak throughout the Americas and in Europe until her untimely death at a young age. European men passing through Sinaloa saw dollar signs at the sight of Pastrana’s crossing of gendered aesthetic norms, since she was described to have “…a thick masculine beard and a hairy forehead” (Bondeson 223). Lechedevirgen Trimegisto performs the aesthetics of savagery, satirizing the force of caricature in establishing social expectations for entire groups of individuals. In Chapter 2, the visibility of performative protest contests extinction myths that inform Chilean national identity, proclaiming total Selk’nam annihilation. I draw a historical line from dictatorial Chilean rule (1973-1989) to contemporary water struggles, uncovering the ways that water was used as torture during the military occupation and is presently used to dispossess Indigenous peoples that rely on the element as a way of life. Present-day original groups and art collectives like Delight Lab enact movements of performative protest that have produced real results in staving off multinational corporate extractivism. In Chapter 3, European travelers to Brazil create a staggering amount of archival material grouping Black Brazilian women into minimizing categories that persist today. This tactic obscured individuality and marketed exotic Brazil to a European public, hungry to consume the body of the other, and implanting European ideals across the Americas. Contemporary Black Brazilian artists reclaim their right to historicize themselves, reconstructing personal ancestry while building a communal archive that etches over narratives told about them but not for them. The goal of this dissertation is to show how contemporary performative artivism (Criola) can and is disrupting the ongoing propagation of identitary fallacies by reclaiming and retelling histories, demanding the right to queer, Indigenous, and Black futures.