"The Survivor in Drag: Gesture in Gigi Otálvaro-Hormillosa’s Cosmic Blood (2002)"

• In Event: Enduring Impossibility: Queer/Trans Survival in Latin/x America

Abstract

What are the limits of decolonial feminist theory as a tool by which to study imperial models of gender? How do performance artists use physical gestures to disrupt the immaterial conditions of geographic expansion in this moment of late-stage U.S. empire? In exploring these questions, I turn to contemporary artist Gigi Otálvaro-Hormillosa’s multimedia performance Cosmic Blood (2002) to investigate a model of gender-nonconformity that defies material conceptions of “being.” This model is that of the spectral survivor: the Native Californian survivor who never existed, except as a ghost, due to the eliminations of Spanish and U.S. settler colonial genocide. Neither the actual woman raped and killed during the Conquest of California nor she who survived these attacks, this haunting figuration–this ghost of the murdered woman–instantiates a historical subject who can only subsist on Native territory in immaterial form. In grappling with the impossibility of historicizing this understudied type of survivor who, forcibly confined to the otherworld, is–unsurprisingly–imperceptible in California’s state archives, I turn to Otálvaro’s alternative archive. I show that Otálvaro conjures the traces of the spectral survivor with the animist medium of gesture, especially in a sex scene in which this ghost asserts gender-queer presence through the movements of a drag performer. Through a series of erotics, then, Otálvaro allows the spectral survivor to transcend the injury of coerced material absence, if only for a moment. With the fleshly materiality of gesture, this artist allows viewers to sense a survivor who the material world cannot accommodate, unsettling a model of gender that has created the conditions of empire’s geographic possibility.

Author

• Emilia Sawada, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign