Figure 1. Video still from LASTESIS’s performance of “Un Violador en tu Camino.” Plaza Sotomayor, Valparaíso, Chile, 11 November 2019.

Of course, the cracks were showing. Trump’s own admission of sexual assault as normative—the famous “grab them by the pussy” had horrified many. But this attitude was largely a reaction to one particular monster—a veritable villain—rather than recognition of systemic heteropatriarchy. Attempts to protest this misogyny included a women’s march in January 2017, where participants wore the now infamous “pussyhats,” which attempted to subvert Trump’s sexual and sexist violence, by placing a symbol of the vulva on millions of heads. This movement has been rightfully critiqued for its lack of symbolic and ideological inclusion of non-white women and women without vulvas; but one might also consider how the confused symbolism of this crisis moment alerted us to the rupture of liberal feminism’s inability to cope with what many non-white women and sexual dissidents already knew: we were not safe. The pussyhats were the result of this half-realization. 

In retrospect, how these hats were made seem more important than how they looked. Knitting is an often feminized craft labor. Many women made their own hats, others made them for others, and some might have made money, but much of this labor was uncompensated. To be clear, we are not suggesting that this knitting was exploitative—but that this practice dug deep into feminized labor and symbolism. This movement shares a theoretical bent with many feminist protests in the Americas that use symbols of domesticity, maternity, and cis-femininity as a strategic mode to protest the actions of the state, even when the participants were well aware of the limitations of the strategy (Taylor 1997).

LASTESIS may have put an end to all of that. What was so compelling about LASTESIS for us, in our different subject positions—Latin American queer man and cis female Latina parent a generation older—was how “Un Violador” embodied a queer feminist critique of the state and completely rejected maternity and maternal futurity as the basis for said critique. Instead, it asked people to put on their party clothes and dance (LASTESIS 2023).

LASTESIS also teaches us about how past historical violence persists. Through its corporeal movement, LASTESIS’s critique of the state exposed how Latin American coloniality is enmeshed in liberal statehood’s architecture—both actual and metaphorical. One example is the gesture to the state in the song, in which the participants raise their arms and trace a circle in the air. The ordinariness of this gesture is undone when one realizes this gesture instantiates the fact that the state is all around us, and within us, infiltrating all of our relationships. Contrasting with the pointing forward fingers that accompany eras/eres tú (you were), the circling gesture points to the ubiquity of state power. In a Latin American context, this gesture also makes visible the architecture of the plaza mayor (main plaza) in many cities in which governmental buildings converge on a square or rectangular plaza (Weihmüller et al. 2021; Low 2000). These plazas were, in many cases, built over previously existing indigenous population centers, effectively colonizing said spaces. That the first Santiago protest was performed on a state women’s day, when politicians infiltrate these plazas with announcements and sophomoric platitudes, made “Un Violador” all the more successful in pointing out the false promises and bad faith of the state apparatus. Unlike many plaza protests, “Un Violador” did not ask for policy change. Instead, it acted as a super-denuncia that made the state the problem rather than the solution. What keeps these women and sexual dissidents safe is each other.

Less evident in the performance than the published essay is how LASTESIS calls out maternal feeling as a coercive force rather than as the basis for solidarity against the state, the latter having had a long history in Latin American protest movements of the last 50 years, including Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo (The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo). Rather than covering themselves and gesturing to their feminine virtue, LASTESIS creates queer feminist solidarity by refusing sartorial conservatism, wearing nighttime party clothes, black, bright or glittery, in the day. They express their desire to be truly free despite their reproductive history or status. Their commentary on the right to abortion goes beyond the “difficult choice” rhetoric of U.S. feminism. The dancers want something else. They want to call out the ideological basis of heteropatriarchy in sexual reproduction and the act of mothering itself. Alongside the green bandanas associated with the right to abortion, that many dancers wore while dancing, particularly in Mexico and Argentina, LASTESIS exposed the vulnerable and ugly feelings that come from being abandoned by mothers struggling with capitalism and heteropatriarchy and forced maternity (2023). In short, motherhood is fraught. It is not the ideological good object it is held up to be in feminist performances that seek state recognition and policy change. Thus, motherhood is not and cannot be the basis for transfeminist solidarity. Instead, sexual dissidence from heteropatriarchy is their (our) home, especially when we admit that heteronormative homes are not safe. 

We know this all too well after domestic violence escalated during COVID-19 lockdowns. Undocumented women were especially vulnerable in the neofascist state; being safe together in public was not an option. The re-inscription of domestic simplicity was for some women a death sentence. For others, gathering in the plaza holds the same fate. Things are becoming less safe almost everywhere at the time of writing this essay. Threats to reproductive rights and trans rights in the U.S. suggest an end to what was always a false American exceptionalism about “rights,” in the first place.

The state is not so much “failing” as it is succeeding at its ultimate goal: control, particularly control of the non-white and non-macho. As Segato writes, “the state gives you with one hand what it has already taken away with the other” (2022:69). While it introduces the notion of women’s rights and human rights in general, it installs and teaches the precepts of individualism, the logics of economic exploitation and extraction, the endemic racism it functions under, and the normalization of heteropatriarchal violence in the public and private. 

What LASTESIS offers is a way to recognize that the state is not a friend in our path; that rape has nothing to do with sexual desire; and that heteropatriarchal protection does not keep us safe.

ENDNOTES

1. Performed on 29 November 2019 in Plaza Sotomayor, Valparaíso, Chile. Referred throughout the essay as “Un Violador.”

2. The full bibliography is too extensive to list here, but see, for example: Hiner et al. (2022); López Ricoy (2021); Martin and Shaw (2021); Pérez-Arredondo and Cárdenas-Neira (2022); Serafini (2020); Weihmüller et al. (2021).

3. See https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Un-Violador-En-Tu-Camino-map_fig3_358748363 for a map of all performances of the anthem.