Gore Aesthetics: Chilean Necroliberalism And Travesti Resistance

Abstract

This article develops a concept I call “gore aesthetics” by focusing on the regulatory and productive capacity of sexual obscenity and gore in contemporary performance art to diagnose shifts in neoliberalism’s perceptual regimes. To do so, I centre the artistic practice and legacy of Chilean performance artist and underground, travesti punk monstrosity Hija de Perra or Daughter of a Bitch (1980–2014) to consider how her performance art, sexually obscene gore aesthetic, and legacy highlight the intensification of what Sayak Valencia theorizes as “necroliberalism”. As neoliberalism’s “b-side” (Valencia 2010), necroliberalism represents a form of governance and power organised by heightened modes of extractive violence against racialised, poor, queer, femme, trans, and travesti subjects in the Global South that produces value through death. Reading Hija de Perra’s work, the extractive circumstances surrounding her untimely death from HIV/AIDS complications and the post mortem performances that ensued through sexual obscenity and gore, I argue that gore aesthetics ultimately foreground necroliberalism’s intensification and operate as a travesti strategy of resistance to the extractive violence this form of power and governance occasions. At the same time, I consider gore’s limitations when state actors co-opt gore aesthetics, as occurred during the Chilean estallido (2019) when police intentionally maimed protestors.