Indomitables: From Yeguas del Apocalipsis to Yeguada Latinoamericana

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Comunicado (‘Proclamation’, 2019) was an audiovisual performance by Cheril Linett’s project Yeguada Latinoamericana (Latin American Marehood, 2017) published during the 2019 social uprising, which demanded a new political paradigm for Chile. Comunicado mobilised the slur yegua, an insult employed to humiliate multiple minorities, and replaced the authority figures of the National Coat of Arms with yeguas in erotic proximity, as a provocation against the Chilean heteropatriarchal order. The origin of this use of the figure yegua can be traced to Yeguas del Apocalipsis (1988–93). Their performance La Refundación de la Universidad de Chile (The Re-Founding of the University of Chile, 1988) recreated the foundation of Santiago replacing Conquistadors with yeguas: queer, femme, Indigenous, impoverished, leftist identities, re-founding the nation state as the dictatorship of Pinochet was coming to an end after 17 years of authoritarianism (1973–89). This article analyses Yeguada Latinoamericana as a reanimation of Yeguas del Apocalipsis. Drawing from Donna Haraway’s analytical resource of the cyborg, a ‘myth about transgressed boundaries’ to reimagine collective resistance beyond arbitrary dualisms, I explore yegua as border stomping embodied protest that articulates disagreement within highly regulated contexts. Yeguada does not merely copy but rather elaborates on Yeguas’ approach, reimagining yegua by adopting the mare’s physicality and establishing a distance from the human form to further dispute the limits to freedom. I argue that like Yeguas once did, Yeguada disobeys binaries of gender and between humans and non-human animals thus evoking Haraway’s ‘tentacular thinking’. Performance art enriches repertoires of protest, which return at key moments to make power uncomfortable.