‘…Towards A Personal Will To Continue Being “Other”’: Ana Mendieta's Abject Performances

Abstract

This article focuses on Cuban exile artist Ana Mendieta's early 1970s performances, which are often relegated to a cursory status in her oeuvre and sometimes dismissed as inconsequential juvenilia. Instead, I argue that these mark the beginning of Mendieta's elaborate and complex engagement with racialized and gendered difference through the unsettling aesthetic force of her abject performances. I decenter focus on her well-known Silueta Series (1973–1980) by linking her early performances to the curatorial work bookending her more-recognized earthwork, offering a frame by which to revise critical interpretations of these. By focusing on abjection as a politicized aesthetic strategy I situate Mendieta squarely within a genealogy of women of color feminisms and queer of color critique, an epistemological project that enlivens the political import of Mendieta's avant-gardism. Ultimately, her recourse to the abject brings into focus analogous and shared relations to dominance by minoritized subjects beyond Cuban or even Latino particularity, allowing us to think expansively about Mendieta's contributions specifically to the field of Latino Studies.