The
construction of queer memory and identity in Peru goes in hand with the claim
of neglected rights; “…if one is to claim that sexuality as a right over and
against a set of laws or codes that consider it criminal or dishonorable, then
the claim itself is performative. This is one way of naming that exercise of
the right precisely when there is no local law to protect that exercise.”
(Butler, 57) With these words Butler explains how one has the right to occupy a
space and reclaim the right to exercise one’s sexuality, even if this one is
codified as non-normative and as a consequence punished. In this way, the right
is then prior to our forms of relating and being intimate with one another;
gender and sexuality here are not the only performative instances –as Butler
explained in previous works- but also the right to claim the freedom to engage
in the sexualities we prefer that becomes then political.
An
important aspect of my research and interest in the final project is linked to
the ideas we have reviewed during class, specifically thinking about the
possibilities to collect queer memory and to reclaim one’s rights through
performance and theater. As part of my personal history and different levels of
my identity as a queer Peruvian, I am specifically interested in the recovery
of unofficial queer memory of the times of political violence in Peru
(1980-2001). One question posted by Butler relates to what I seek to untangle; in
a nation that does not consider one as a citizen because of their sexuality and/or
ethnicity; “what does it mean to lay claim rights when one has none?” (57)
Moreover, how can a dead body speak and reclaim its rights? An approach to
these questions is related to Taylor’s idea of the possibilities to leave a
trace with the body, both as presence and non-presence and creating an affect
that is about “past, present and future” (Taylor, 10). In performing queer
memory, the body multiplies and becomes the performers and spectators’ bodies,
as they perform a different way of knowing; performance here is “a practice and
an epistemology, a creative doing, a methodological lens, a way of transmitting
memory and identity, and a way of understanding the world.” (39) The performing
body then acts as a way to make visible what is invisible to the institutional
and normative national memory, using the poetic language of the performance
that implies that the regular normative use of language is not enough, or as
Boal would put it; where the “Oppressed are let to have their own languages,
symbols, time” (Boal, 155)
As
Peruvian national memory leaves aside non-normaive bodies, it seems urgent to
construct a counter-history that comes from a personal perspective, to speak
about memories and voices that were/are left outside of the narratives of what
constitutes a national history of trauma. Peru is a country that struggles with
“forgetting its past and repeating it” and where the institutional forces keep
working on disrupting, institutionalizing and invading versions of the past
that serve to the continuity of the conservative wing –fujimorismo- and that
neglect the rights of oppressed populations as sexual dissidents. For this
reason, numerous activists, artists and sexual dissidents are working to create
collective memory while reclaiming their rights to exist. Groups like Trenzar,
No Tengo Miedo, and Transhistorias, among others, are working to create
interventions inside and outside theaters to use testimony as a way to collect
contemporary queer memory, but also to link the current situation of LGBTIQ
people to a history of state violence that spans through the years of political
violence. These interventions then act as both rehistorization of the violent
effects and memory process of queer bodies, and as an epistemology that seeks
to educate the population on queer identities. Here, “Performances operate as
vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory and a sense of
identity through reiterated actions.” (Taylor, 25) These interventions not only
summon bodies to be visible, but also they become a way to reclaim political
power or as Butler explains; “Contestations are enacted by assemblies, strikes,
vigils, and the occupation of public spaces; on the other hand, those bodies
are the object of many of the demonstrations that take precarity as their
galvanizing condition.” (9) These interventions then open the idea of the
creation of a queer future that “includes the possibility of change, critique,
and creativity within frameworks of repetition.” (Taylor, 15) These
interventions also imply and create a sense of belonging as they make visible
identities that have been erased by state forces. As Taylor explains then, the
performance becomes an enactment of memory, a collective testimonial that makes
visible the scars left in the social body” (22).
The performances of queer activists become a queer gesture; one that documents the emotional and that reviews the past and makes us think about the possibility of a future. These interventions not only make evident the regulatory charater of sexualities and the trauma caused to non-hegemonic identities as part of the system that constitutes the nation, but also subvert the power by enunciating themselves from the space of the abject body to reclaim freedom and sexual agency. This is why the gathering, and appearance in public space becomes an important tool to recover the agency of minoritatian populations. As Butler explains, “they are exercising a plural and performative right to appear, one that asserts and instated the body in the midst of the political field, and which, in its expressive and signifying function, delivers a bodily demand for a more livable set of economic, social and political conditions no longer inflicted by induced forms of precarity” (11) The performance, the ritual and the assembly of bodies here becomes a way to belong, to occupy a space that invisibilizes the non- normative body and to activate memory. Through performance also the lost bodies that suffered violence haunt us, and these haunting is produced by the performer’s body that reclaims their rights to exist as well as to produces a way of a symbolic reparation.
Keywords: queer
memory, identity, affect.
Political
spectacle video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yS9dcsTzV4
