Living Polleras in the Altiplano: Alternative Ontology in Shaping Agency, Sexuality and Aesthetics

• In Event: Desde polleras, humor, prisiones, exilios y sitios arqueológicos: reimaginando espacios de resistencia desde la Academia

Abstract

This project explores how Quechua women negotiate power relations through the wearing of polleras –the long, full skirt that is marked as “Indian” in the Andes. I hypothesize that polleras are one means through which women affirm their identity, exert sexual agency, reject Western norms of feminine beauty, and most profoundly, disrupt the human/nonhuman binary embedded in western ontologies. With some notable exceptions, existing scholarship presents Indigenous women with limited capacities to shape their own sexual practices and identities, and by extension, analyzes polleras only as objects of clothing. Through an ethnographic analysis of the voices and daily practices of Quechua people, combined with “auto-ethnographic” reflection on my own experience of wearing polleras, this project will explore the role polleras play—not as clothing objects but as embodied expressions of identity—in Quechua women’s quotidian life. This study will contribute to three areas of inquiry—sexuality, aesthetics and agency— opening each to nonhuman-centered perspectives on social process and meaning-making.

Author

• Angela Tapia