El Che de los Gays and Hija de Perra: Utopian queer performances in Postdictatorship Chile

Abstract

Valle underscores the political potential of performance as a practice of resistance and subversion that may offer both a critique of the present and utopian alternatives for the future. In a study of the public interventions of two queer activists who challenge heteronormativity, Valle maps the trajectory of bodies that have been marginalized in neoliberal postdictatorship Chile. She demonstrates how two performances, El Che de los Gays [The Che of the Gays] and Hija de Perra [Daughter of a Bitch], question established gender roles to reveal the possibility of other worlds and, more concretely, to (re)articulate political imaginations and thereby produce different cultural memories.