The Political is Personal. Intersectionality and Feminist Activism in Natalia Iguiñiz’s “Energia Social/Fuerza Vital”

• In Event: The Politics of Memory Art in Peru Today

Abstract

The horror of rape that indigenous peasant women narrated in their testimonios in the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s public hearings (2002), added to the continued impunity of these crimes, condensed what women signify for patriarchy, in times of both war and peace (Boesten, 2010). However, it was the systematic use of the female peasant body as a battlefield, that revealed the intersectionality of Peruvian patriarchal power relations (Crenshaw, 1989), where the political is personal (and not only the other way around). Natalia Iguiñiz’s treatment of the political as personal in works on political violence such as “Chunniqwasi (periodo 1980-2000)” (2005) and “Mi cuerpo no es el campo de batalla” (2004) is suggestive of an inversion of the classical feminist slogan that would guide her later work on motherhood, such as “Acción cotidiana en el centro laboral” (2008), “Mi mundo plop” (2012), and “Madre e hija” (2015). Based on Iguiñiz’s recent retrospective of her work in Lima, “Energía social/Fuerza vital (1994-2018)”, my presentation will explore the ways in which the Truth Commission’s work contributed to laying the first blocks of a collective women’s memory in Peru, which later fed into feminist art and activism, as demonstrated in protest marches under the slogan #NiUnaMenos (Not One Less).

Author

• Francesca A Denegri, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú