“Un Violador en Tu Camino”: LasTesis’s Art, Activism, and Action

Cami Wallace

Dr. Andrea Siqueira

INTL-I 400 International Studies Capstone Seminar

May 2, 2021

Abstract

As the Chilean government is not meeting citizens’ needs and is in fact blocking them from the institutions meant to care for them, members of civil society find new ways to assert their rights and demand a more just, and necessary, society. In this case, it is through the interdisciplinary feminist collective of artists, activists, and simply people that is LasTesis, a group that created and unintentionally sparked the global anthem “Un Violador en Tu Camino” that denounces the patriarchal state and its fellow branches. Understanding that the institutions and systems will not save them, this group works to revert oppressive norms, explores the redefinitions of justice, and demands its potentialities through culturally significant and symbolic strategies. They put their bodies on display, carrying out a type of feminist therapy and challenging public consciousness by resisting the patriarchal inscription of guilt, especially in situations of sexual assault. Through disseminating these demands and their dissent through performance, they created a transversal complaint against the global problem of sexual violence.

Introduction

While an increase in subway fares triggered Chilean social turmoil in October 2019, discontent had been “warming up” for decades after neoliberal policies implemented post-dictatorship in the 1990s created massive inequalities. These policies caused an uneven distribution of wealth as documented in 2017 where the “richest 1% of the Chilean population concentrated almost 27% of the net wealth of the country.”[1] Therefore, October 2019 marked the boiling point, where citizens took to the streets to participate in civil disobedience as reaction and resistance to the state’s indifference, looting businesses, vandalizing buildings, and damaging infrastructure. In turn, President Sebastián Piñera responded with a state of emergency, deploying military forces and enforcing curfews.[2]

Under the proclamation to restore public order, the president, the military, and law enforcement reminded Chilean people of the dark and violent past of the dictatorship from 1973 to 1990, revealing its lingering legacy through the government’s use of force in 2019. After the authoritarian regime’s end in 1990, the new government did not make many—if any—changes to the police force, where government officials during the democratic transition did not hold violators accountable nor did they re-imagine the duties of the police. No changes have been made since then, meaning that since officers are often not charged with offenses of excessive force, the public’s trust in the justice system diminishes and increases the public’s belief of immunity and impunity for members of the government.[3] Therefore, Chile’s “democratization” process did not rid the state of Pinochet’s violent nature and massive human rights violations, but instead, allowed it to continue and reshape.

During the months of unrest from October to December 2019, the police and army perpetrated a series of human rights violations, including use of force and unlawful arrests, disregarding equality and autonomy. Agents of the state used less-lethal weapons on protestors, arbitrarily detained them, and subjected them to torture and ill-treatment, including sexual violence. Police officers not only forced detained women to strip naked and squat but also sexually assaulted them.[4] The UN Commission on Human Rights published a 30-page report that documented 113 cases of torture and ill-treatment and 24 cases of sexual violence.[5]  

Responding to these injustices, the Chilean feminist collective LasTesis staged its first intervention “Un Violador en Tu Camino,” or “A Rapist in Your Path,” flooding the streets of Valparaíso, Chile on November 25, 2019, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. Performers denounced the police, judges, the president, and the state as rapists, naming the institutions of the justice system as perpetrators of violence, and directly challenged victim blaming culture and overarching forms of patriarchal oppression. They were all women, putting their bodies on display, ready for the public discourse and debate that would ensue, especially during a time of state violence and in a state with a violent past.

The four founders, Dafne Valdés, Paula Cometa, Sibila Sotomayor, and Lea Cáceres, formed LasTesis in 2018 and premiered their work in 2019 as they were motivated to insert a feminist perspective into the public through artistic/activist means. In 2018, two global feminist movements were developing: #MeToo movement and #NiUnaMenos (“not one [woman] less.)” Understanding the intersection and convergence of art and politics, LasTesis creates feminist dialogues as their work ranges from visual art installations to meetings of sharing domestic violence resources. They strongly believe in horizontal organizing, rejecting hierarchical, patriarchal order. Instead, LasTesis seeks to build collective solidarity, ensuring that women’s rights are not considered secondary. As these four women make their identities public, they themselves and their bodies become another form of protest under a state that heavily polices and criminalizes dissent.

With the group’s name that translates to “TheTheses,” these women translate the theoretical through various artistic means. In performances, members and participants are the embodiment of theories—the corporeal senses that move ideas forward in a form of cultural deconstruction. Their bodies become not only expressive art forms, but also agents of resistance. In the first intervention “Un Violador en Tu Camino,” or “A Rapist in Your Path,” LasTesis created a visual, embodied language by using dance as their invitation to political awareness and change. By combining the culturally significant genre of dance and the popular regional response to protest, these women broke tradition while using tradition to respond to and defy their oppressors.

The question then is: How does the Chilean feminist collective LasTesis use performance as a means to effect social change? First, I unpack what it means to be a body, specifically a gendered body, detailing the ways in which bodies are codified by greater sociopolitical and sociocultural forces. Next, I work to examine the aesthetics and symbols of the performance within its context, outlining the ways that LasTesis operates and positions itself within Latin America, especially in Chile. This will reveal the power held within and distributed by the performers as they talk back against the oppressive, patriarchal state in a targeted, culturally significant way. I then address the group’s involvement in greater social movements, connecting their various tactics of using their bodies as resistance and feminist anger to international movements and strategies.

Literature Review

Bodies and Power

Since Michel Foucault published his influential work that advanced understandings of power and sexuality, many theorists have engaged in exploring the body: its importance for the self, its impact on identity, and its manifestation of political, social, and cultural norms. While the literature surrounding the body is vast, feminist scholars have focused on certain aspects, such as how the female body is both the “object of processes of domination and control as well as the site of women’s subversive practices and struggles for self-determination and empowerment.”[6] The discourse around women as objects to dominate and control often pertains to rape culture, which works to communicate how the individual act of rape and other forms of sexual violence move beyond personal instances and represent a broader cultural phenomenon. As understood through the feminist proclamation of “the personal is political,” Foucault explains that rape is “enforc[ing] a systematic, sexualized control of women,”[7] meaning that bigger dynamics are at play rather than acts of violence inflicted by one person onto another. Joanna Burke expounds upon this idea, sharing that it is a form of social performance with a ritualized process, emphasizing the ways in which sexual violence is embedded in societal fabric.[8]

This understanding of sexual violence as reinforced by greater powers helps to unpack the expectations involved between gendered bodies. Philosopher Ann Cahill examines the ways that patriarchal society prescribes the label of pre-victim to women’s bodies and prepares women to expect harm against their bodies, especially if they do not properly contain and restrict themselves.[9] However, it is not only that women’s bodies are coded as pre-victim, but they are also guilty pre-victim. Furthering this point, Cahill describes,

“The truth inscribed on the woman’s body is not that, biologically, all men are potential rapists. It is rather that, biologically, all women are potential rape victims...this bodily inscription may take place without the actual articulation of the concept of ‘rape’ or the actual experience of sexual assault. Girls especially may know that their bodies are inherently dangerous without being clear as to the precise nature of the danger they present.”[10]

The responsibility is fully placed on women to constantly police their own bodies in the possibility that they might be harmed, and if they are harmed, they—not their perpetrator—are responsible. These standards are enforced on every woman, not just the victims and survivors of assault. Additionally, by moving expectations and arbitrary situations, a culture of blame and shame ensures that women will always be in the wrong.

However, in “Lived Body vs. Gender: Reflections on Social Structure and Subjectivity,” Iris Young expands upon Toril Moi’s essay that pushes to move away from the narrow construct of gender to the existentialist phenomenology of the lived body. The idea of the lived body, or the “unified idea of a physical body acting and experiencing in a specific sociocultural context,” is the “body-in-situation,” which explores the materialities of one’s body and its relation to a given moment or place.[11] Rejecting essentialist assumptions that the body has fixed meaning, the “body-in-situation” emphasizes that the ways in which the lived body exists depends on multiple factors of identity. Separating the individual from their specific body, Young points to focusing on the constructed meanings and assigned abilities and capabilities as set by outside, broader, larger sociocultural context as each body holds different emotions, lived experiences, and internalized expectations. Beyond the individual variations, social structures further the complexity of the body-in-situation as “the way a person is positioned in structures is as much a function of how other people treat him or her within various institutional settings as of the attitude a person takes to himself or herself.”[12]

Nonetheless, as Kathy Davis does note, bodies are “places of women’s subversive practices and struggles for self-determination and empowerment.”[13] While many theorists discuss agency, María Lugones dismisses its prioritized use as it relies on the Western perspective that “presupposes ready-made hierarchical worlds of sense in which individuals form intentions, make choices, and carry out actions in the ready-made terms of those worlds,” none of which offer true liberation.[14] Lugones explains that true choice cannot be made by those who are marginalized as any decision was inherently limited and constricted. Instead, she states that it is through exploring an “active subjectivity that makes transformation conceivable.”[15] By viewing and understanding the subject as “multiplicitous,” one can recognize the ways in which they can be both resisting and oppressed: “at once terrorized and resistant; at once paralyzed in stasis and brooding her own liberation.”[16] One is not rendered completely powerless, but also is not truly empowered. As Lugones interprets Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s work in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, the Chicana experience is complex as “her meaning, the control of meaning, the scope and tenor of her possibilities are ahead of her and within an ancient history of violent struggle.”[17]

Public Space and Performance

In order to grasp the essence and power of LasTesis’s storming of the streets and other public spaces, it is necessary to understand the basics of geography. As geographers Jennifer Wolch and Michael Dear explain,

“Human existence is thus expressed through specific histories and geographies. The task of social theory is to unravel the interaction of time and space in the structuring of people’s lives and the production of human landscapes.”[18]

Landscapes evoke emotions, contain social cues, control behaviors, and hold culturally specific rituals and ways of living. However, because of the interaction of time and space, places and their meanings are continuously reproducing themselves, constructed yet unfolding and reimagining.

Cities throughout Latin America inherently hold legacies of colonialism, class divides, and gendered politics as the making of place drastically changed during colonization.[19] Then, in the late 1800s the Industrial Revolution exploded along with the Western/neocolonial push to “modernize.” As non-Western countries were pressured to move life from the countryside to the city, the ways in which people occupied spaces changed as well as the expectations of who, what, and how, inherently creating understandings of public vs. private life. In true colonial fashion and expectations, men were encouraged to find work in these urban spaces for employment and embody “civility” while women were expected to stay in the home, the countryside, the “natural.”[20] Therefore, the underlying assumptions and designs of cities became centered around masculinity, where women’s mere presence signals disruption and contamination.[21] Present-day globalization has furthered these gendered understandings as capitalism prioritizes and emphasizes masculine traits, which fills the cityscape with male bodies and in turn, reinforces these expectations because of their (over)presence and visibility.[22]

With the knowledge of places holding meanings and spatial agreements, the street can also be interpreted as a form of stage with its own specific sets of conditions, strengths, and parameters. Richard Schechner’s foundational work examines the forms stages can take as well as performances and theatrics in their varying degrees, and reminds that as public space is public, both citizens and state actors engage in creating messages and significance.[23] The government and its extensions can use these streets as a stage to demonstrate the violence they can and will perpetrate as the actions they take in public are a form of show for the public to become aware of the power they have and the citizens do not.[24] Citizens also create their own forms of values and relations as they manipulate the space and its trajectory depending on their agenda.

Schechner also reminds that the “boundaries between ‘art’ and ‘life’ are blurry and permeable.”[25] While Victor Turner originally believed that performances are always situated in context and cannot be separated from the place in which they were born,[26] Esiaba Irobi proves that those with an African and African Diasporic episteme were forced to and continue to transcend these fixed understandings of place and bodily held meanings. The body remains central to understanding, but the levels of and pathways through are different. Dance becomes an avenue for “‘rememorying,’” a “primary medium for coding the perception of our outer and inner worlds, our transcendent worlds, our spiritual history, and the memory of that complex history.”[27] Through Carnival, he unpacks and reveals the layers of signification, where it is a performance used to “defy, mock, reject, interrogate, and deconstruct”[28] as well as one that facilitates “self-redefinition,”[29] a “communal therapy” where “society rewires the threads of human relationship.”[30] Therefore, performances produce and circulate power in two ways: (1) by and through the mere movement of the dancer that elicits a response in the viewer and (2) by the ways in which the dance or expression carries embodied identities, meanings, and signifiers. As Irobi shares, “most non-Western cultures express themselves through kinesthetic, proxemic, sonic, calligraphic, iconographic, olfactory, linguistic, tactile, and other literacies.”[31] Scholars from the past that rely on “texts” to interpret failed to recognize other and varied forms of expression and importance, missing entire perceptions, actions, and realizations of cultures around the world.

Diana Taylor expands upon Irobi’s work, saying that “bodies make their own claims in ways that cannot be adequately understood by looking primarily at linguistic paradigms” and describing that “political bodies are amplified bodies—expanded by the mission, emotion, and aspirations that animate them.”[32] As political bodies use performances, they inherently challenge power dynamics, especially when they are in “the realm of the potentially chaotic, anarchist, and revolutionary” that “disturbs the order of things and produces new life.”[33] Further, performances are more than dances or bodies moving. Instead, “they are actions, interventions in the world,” ones with “consequences, even if they do not always have the power or efficacy the artist wishes.”[34] With her work focusing on performance in Argentina, Taylor has also located the intersections of trauma and performance, where she parallels trauma to Richard Schechner’s definition of performance as “twice behaved behavior” because they both are mutually reinforcing, continuously entangled with each other at the collective and individual level.[35] Taylor explains that trauma itself is intrinsically performative, where it is not processed in a linear fashion, but “viscerally, through bodily symptoms, reenactments, and repeats,” which lends itself perfectly to bodily performances for political action.[36]

Methodologies

My research is primarily qualitative with historical, comparative, and content analyses. While these are heavily dependent on my own interpretations, I hope to combat any personal shortcomings like missing deeply cultural signals by relying on LasTesis’s own words via social media, interviews, and other published works.

First, I unpack what it means to be a body, specifically a gendered one, and detail how bodies are codified by greater sociopolitical forces. While I extensively address the idea of bodies in my literature review, I understand the importance of focusing on the intricacies of a Chilean female-identifying or -passing body. I use secondary sources to conduct a brief historical analysis of Chile and its gendered politics, using ethnographic research by scholars and other works that dissect embodied memory and legacies of Chile’s authoritarian regime.

Then, I examine the aesthetics and symbols of LasTesis’s performance within its context in order to understand how the performers talk back to the oppressive, patriarchal state in a targeted, culturally significant way. This section relies heavily on content analysis as I analyze the lyrics of their performance and identify symbolic movements. I unpack the meanings and power of a Chilean female, guilty pre-victim body in the public space through demonstrating the ways in which the performance is grounded in feminist theory and practice as well as provide a historical account of Chilean policing.

After, I connect LasTesis to past and present social movements—regional, feminist, and global—in order to recognize the network and constellations of activism. By doing this, it becomes clear how LasTesis circulates power through different partnerships, borrowing and redefining previous strategies, as well as promotes understandings of the global struggle of sexual violence. Since I did not have the opportunity to stay in Chile because of the social unrest or Argentina because of the pandemic, my Western perspective and lack of intimate cultural knowledge may hinder me from a complete analysis.

Case Study

Body and Public Place in Chilean Context

As many feminist theorists identify, the body must be historicized in order to be understood in its past and present. The Chilean female-codified body holds deep memories of the authoritarian regime from 1973 to 1990. When Pinochet was taking over, the regime enforced a “re-foundation” of the nation in order to establish itself and its power through “new institutions, new territories, and new men and women.”[37] During this period, members of the regime produced contradictory ideas of women, where they were celebrated as (yet reduced to) “providers and protectors of life” as well as punished for any form of “sexual deviance.”[38] While the state carried out these punishments with the weapon of sexual torture, it removed responsibility from its actions as it framed these sexual behaviors or reproductive issues as individual failures of individual woman.[39] Additionally, the dictatorship normalized the government’s power to use whatever means necessary to “form a social consensus (and) to legally impose models of social cohesion.”[40] Through this systematic and societal construction, violence was embedded not only within personal bodies, but also the social body as Chilean women were removed from their ability to control their reproductive health and subjected to state-sanctioned violence.[41] These state politics trickled down into intimate partner relationships, where sexual violence became seen as an “individual practice” and thus, “accepted as a ‘natural’ part of the gender relations between a woman and her partner.”[42] Further, it has been normalized for partners to punish their female significant other if and when they are “out of order.”[43]

Moving back to the public space, Pinochet quickly reversed any progress women made during Allende’s time, where women expressed their grievances with the government and demanded their rights be met in the public sphere as well as held leadership positions and even wore pants.[44] As Pinochet’s regime reduced women to instruments of the state to produce children for the nation, they were forced back into their homes to support their role of mother, adding to the notion of urban spaces as masculine and strengthening it through the state’s aggressive and militarized presence.[45] Additionally under the dictatorship, the ways every Chilean person interacted with the landscape and city changed as they “had to be careful when forming any social relationships” and “had to restrict any practices that might be viewed as suspicious,” “avoid[ing] places that were dangerous due to their proximity to detention centres or police stations.”[46] Law enforcement agencies followed the same justification of sexual violence that encourages whatever means necessary to impose social cohesion. The secret police forces would cite the national code of arms, “By force or reason” (Por la Fuerza o la Razón), to defend its violent actions as well as the official name of the armed forces, the “Armed and Ordered Forces,” implied and allowed the army to “bring about internal order, whoever the enemy might be.”[47]

LasTesis’s “Un Violador en Tu Camino”

LasTesis uses “interventions,” when they run into the street, unplanned to the eyes of the passersby. Explained by Schechner’s discussion of different performances, certain street performances disrupt the mundane through an “eruption,” where the performers interrupt the passersby’s routines and create a collective focus. A modern rendition, the flash mob, acts the same way and as a “soft terrorism, using guerrilla tactics” that communicate a “succinct message, as it is retained because of its difference with the habitual.”[48] Additionally, the audience during these eruptions is unique as it can be both intentional and accidental, each inspiring different emotions and actions. Flash mobs also allow spectators to become performers as no professional technical expertise is needed to participate.[49] Further, Diana Taylor explains that just “like trauma, these performances suddenly disrupt the apparent calm.”[50] Even if spectators do not join into the flash mob-like performance, they nonetheless become a witness, which is “live participation” due to the “act of transfer that takes place” as the listener “‘comes to be a participant and a co-owner of the traumatic event.’”[51] Therefore, through this process, the space as well as the audience is injected with new life.

Turning to LasTesis’s performance “Un Violador en Tu Camino,” women take the streets, standing still as speakers blare a beat with militant resonance in the background.[52] Then, unseen by the audience, a participant blows a police whistle, which signals performers to start marching. They begin the lyrics of “A Rapist in Your Path,” and within the first few seconds with the first two words, the subject is clear: The patriarchy.

As performers swing their arms from side to side in perfect unison, they shout, “The patriarchy is our judge / That imprisons us at birth,” instantly identifying the uneven power dynamics of the male gaze as well as noting the immediate constrictions of the female-codified body. Continuing with the societal prescriptions on the female-codified body, they chant: “And our punishment / Is the violence you don’t see.” As the first line furthers the notion that women must face repercussions by simply being female, the second answers what the consequences for being a woman are. It is the (in)visibility of gender-based violence, of domestic violence, and of the forever trauma that survivors of assault must always carry. While these harms are unable to ignore for survivors, they are “unseen” by the public.  

They repeat: “Patriarchy is our judge / That imprisons us at birth / And our punishment,” but with one difference. This time, the punishment: “Is the violence you can see.” After this, the performers list the violence that women suffer. They share: “It’s femicide,” the recent articulation of the killing of women because they are women. Throughout Latin America, 12 women are killed a day because of their gender,[53] and where in Chile during the first half of 2019, there were 24 femicides and 53 attempted,[54] and by the end of the year, at least 46 women were killed.[55] After this nod to this regional and global issue of violence against women, performers break from moving from side-to-side and swinging their arms to placing their hands behind their head, squatting up and down: the very positioning that cops force while arresting them. They continue: “Impunity for my killer,” as they repeat the movement from before. As stated previously, throughout Latin America, 12 women are killed a day, where “98% of these killings go unprosecuted.”[56] Even in Chile in 2004, an average of one charge of police violence occurred every day, where about 93 percent of these cases were dismissed or stayed, and “only 3.2 percent of the charges have resulted in a formal conviction against a Carabinero.”[57] Therefore, public trust in the justice systems remains low, a residual effect of the past regime. In 2004, only 37 percent of citizens claimed to have confidence in the police force and 32 percent reported not having faith in the judicial system.[58] LasTesis continues, touching on cultural memory, “It’s our disappearances,” tapping into the traumatizing past of The Dirty War and los desaparecidos, where the regime killed or made over 3000 people “disappear” over the 16 years it was in power.[59] Then, they place their hands behind their head again, squatting up and down. “It’s rape,” they shout, pointing to the invasive, bodily violation so many individuals are forced to experience. They repeat the movement another time.

Then, without lifting their feet from the ground, performers begin to march in place and move their arms up and down as their chant grows louder and they pick up their tempo: “And it was not my fault, nor where I was, nor how I dressed.” After they repeat this three times, they return to their slower rhythm and shout: “And the rapist was you” as they point their left arm in front of themselves. “And the rapist is you,” they state as they point in front of themselves again. They chant: “It’s the cops” as they point behind themselves at the police station. “It’s the judges,” pointing in front of them. And as they say, “It’s the system,” they raise their arms, circling around their heads. Finally, “It’s the president,” they yell as they make an “X” with their forearms above their heads.

After this stanza, participants pump their closed fist as they scream two times, “The oppressive state is a macho rapist. The oppressive state is a macho rapist.” For the reminder, they repeat: “And the rapist was you” as they extend their arms, pointing. Saying, again, “And the rapist was you,” extending their arm yet again. Again: “And the rapist was you” as they extend their arms, pointing. Again: “And the rapist was you” as they extend their arms, pointing.

“Un Violador en Tu Camino”: Of Patriarchy and Sexualized Bodies

LasTesis’s “Un Violador en Tu Camino” circulates feminist discourse within the public space, creating new meanings within the streets and city and shifts public consciousness through their consistent use of repetition. As “authoritarian regimes prevent the circulation of information,” these feminists defy the embedded ethos from the past with their democratic movements and inspire new “channels of flow.”[60] The performers switch the blame from themselves to the true perpetrators: individual assaulters, law enforcement officials, members in and the system and the system itself as well as the leader of the state. As they wear their “nighttime,” “going out” clothing to prove their points further, it is evident that they are aware of the common responses to their assault, popular excuses, and casual dismissals, such as that they were “asking for it” depending on where they were or what they wore. To this commentary, they respond with the powerful proclamation and immediate shutdown, “It’s not my fault / nor where I was / nor what I wore.” Here, they rewrite society’s guilty pre-victim prescription as they continually remind who holds the responsibility: “The rapist is you.”

During these interventions, LasTesis and fellow participants act as a counterpublic articulating a form of poetics. As social theorist Michael Warner describes, “anything that addresses a public is meant to undergo circulation.”[61] It is a poetics because the new information and meanings they are sharing is hoped to be “transformative, not replicative merely,”[62] and “characterize[s] the world in which it attempts to circulate, projecting for that world a concrete and livable shape, and attempting to realize that world through address.”[63] These women do not call upon the state or public to make material legal changes nor do they simply make commentary on social issues. Instead, they repeat and repeat and repeat that it is not their fault and it will never be, instilling in the societal fabric the truth and creating a new world through that address.

Part of their address is their resistance represented with and through their bodies. By flooding the public space, they render their bodies socially visible and reclaim their bodies by identifying the true offenders. Borrowing from their neighboring country of Argentina, Chilean women “poner el cuerpo.” As Barbara Sutton shares, the phrase encapsulates much more than its literal translation of “to put the body.” Instead, she explains,

“Poner el cuerpo overlaps somewhat with ‘to put the body on the line’ and to ‘give the body,’ but it transcends both notions. With respect to political agency, poner el cuerpo means not just to talk, think, or desire but to be really present and involved; to put the whole (embodied) being into action, to be committed to a social cause, and to assume the bodily risks, work, and demands of such a commitment.”[64]

Poner el cuerpo demands that participants are willing to act with each other in a radical form of togetherness, asserting their strength and commitment to social justice with their physical and visible presence.[65] However, it is not simply one individual body on the line, but a collective group of bodies through a “process that sprouts solidarity and valuable knowledge.”[66] Additionally, Sutton describes that poner el cuerpo means “the opposite of remaining uninvolved, remaining indifferent, or running away,” and instead, is “confronting what is problematic, difficult, or scary with the whole, embodied self.”[67]

In addition to directly confronting overarching patriarchal oppression, LasTesis’s “El Violador en Tu Camino” performance connects the “personal is political” as women can further understand and challenge their own personal sufferings of violence. By publicly proclaiming and switching the narrative around sexual assault, individuals engage in a form of feminist therapy, where they regain their own power and reconnect themselves to their bodies. With the repetition of “It’s not my fault / nor where I was / nor what I wore,” performers heal themselves in the process of recalling their trauma, reminding themselves—and each other—that it is never their fault. Public disclosure generally reduces feelings of shame, which only further reduces when it is done as part of a collective. The group creates a safe space for those sharing as well as an opportunity to connect with fellow survivors, whether survivors of general patriarchal violence or more intimate attacks.[68] Additionally, survivors find and realize new forms of agency and develop strategies for resistance as these performances allow them to engage in political action.[69] Therefore, the performance in turn becomes a rite of passage, moving the performers from “victim” to “survivor.”[70]

“Un Violador en Tu Camino”: Of Patriarchy and State Violence

From its title to its powerful lyrics to bodily movements, the performance nods to and ironically comments on past indoctrinations and remaining oppressive systems. As they insert themselves in a dominant fashion into the public space, performers challenge the past regime’s pressure for women to hold a “‘proper,’ gender-specific appearance,” so that they would not be mistaken as communist, leftist, or other forms of deviation from the norm, and thus, be subject to violence and torture.[71] Instead they oppose this “good woman” production and presentation with their set and sturdy positioning. Borrowing the sound and tempo from the heavily masculine and militarized authoritarian regime, LasTesis and their anthem brings collective and painful cultural memories back to the public consciousness. No individual can escape the heavy sound of the disciplined rhythm as it booms through speakers and fills the space. Here, the group engages in a form of co-optation, where it utilizes the tool of the oppressor against the oppressor.

The streets hold the power of the past along with the residues of its emotionally-shared and situated practices. Within these interventions, a form of symbolic co-presence exists, where the citizen participatory democracy and freedom of the public space contrasts with the very much visible and heavy occupancy of the police, which “represent the force of those who sustain the status quo and can harm the bodies of those who transgress.”[72] The uniformed officers remind Chileans of the direct and violent contact with citizens and situates the officers as extensions, symbols, and perpetrators of the state and its goals of repressing dissent. In addition to the police’s symbolic legacy, the branch continues the hierarchical, centralized, and militaristic structure of the past regime—the very structure that LasTesis rejects.

“Un Violador en tu Camino” is a direct response to and reminder of the propaganda under Pinochet’s dictatorship, in which during the 1980s, the state used the slogan “un amigo en tu camino,” or “a friend on your path,” to promote positive portrayals of the police and establish trust with the public.[73] Later in the song, demonstrators reference the authoritarian legacy again by reciting part of the Carabineros’s anthem, “Sleep calmly, innocent girl / without fear of bandits / for over your sweet dreams / your police lover watches.”[74] While the rest of the chant is filled with paternalistic notions, this specific section reveals law enforcement’s institutionalized overattentiveness, even infantilization, of female-codified bodies and promotes and naturalizes the romanticization of the police’s voyeuristic nature. In a form of symbolic protest and reversal, the women shout this stanza as they place their hands behind their heads and crouch, demonstrating the procedure they must follow when ordered by law enforcement. It is the same position in which many police officers sexually assaulted the women who attended the riots.

During their chanting of these lines, performers use a form of mocking tone and deploy a “disruptive, raucous spirit” of relajo.[75] As Emily Klein cites Mexican philosopher Jorge Portilla, relajo is a “negation of required conduct” that “constitutes a subjective positioning of dissent vis-à-vis the dominant values of the social whole.”[76] Through this mood, the women connect with each other and with the public as relajo “loosens the reins of social order and allows spectators to step back from the normal rules and structures of daily life.”[77] While their traumas are heavy and real, they are able to use their stage as a chance to interrupt mainstream consciousness and illuminate the contradictions of the police.

In LasTesis’s first rendition on November 25, 2019, participants wore black blindfolds, signaling the police brutality during the recent protests. From mid-October to early December, the Chilean Ophthalmology Institute reported that around 350 individuals were victims of the state as they suffered injuries related to ocular trauma.[78] Throughout the months of unrest, police fired rubber bullets that broke the internationally accepted proportions of rubber to lead, hitting protestors and passersby and causing severe eye injury or blindness, other bodily harm, and/or death. The Chilean Ophthalmological Society and the Chilean Medical Association described the event as a “visual health emergency never seen before in the country,” once again bringing the country’s dark past back to public consciousness and emphasizing the rise in state violence.[79] However, this time and incident proved that it was not simply repeating past politics, but instead, was unafraid to perform a new type of violence. Therefore, when participants in this type of flash mob perform, they insert themselves into the political imagination and discussion, demanding to be seen and refusing to be rendered invisible yet again.

Connections to Social Movements

Since LasTesis’s feminist proclamation moved from circulating power in the streets of Valparaiso and Santiago to 52 different countries, it is clear that the call against the patriarchy and its oppression is transversal and international. As Diana Taylor states: “Performance is world-making. We need to understand it.”[80] Lynne Phillips and Sally Cole further Taylor’s point citing Anna Tsing, describing this “another world” as a “‘collaborative object’ that ‘draws groups into common projects at the same time that [it] allows them to maintain separate agendas.’”[81] Movements catch—even with their differences, and sometimes especially because of their differences—because a “charismatic idea—or a matter of concern...brings people together.”[82] While feminism is “pragmatic,” the ways in which it is articulated, understood, and demanded depends on the context of the place and time.[83] Therefore, LasTesis’s action did not form outside of a cannon. Instead, it has been influenced and inspired by various feminist and Latin American social movements through strategies and connections.

Within the regional context of the Southern Cone of Latin America, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Brazil are all countries that suffer the traumas of authoritarian regimes and their own versions of “los desaparecidos,” or the process in which members of the regime captured anyone assumed of dissent and thus, seen as an enemy to be further subjected to torture and execution.[84] As the Argentine dictatorship refused to acknowledge its violence and its reality, mothers and grandmothers gathered in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires in 1977, demanding truth and justice as well as searching for and grieving their “lost” loved ones.[85] These mothers, known as las Madres y las abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, marched weekly around the square, actively storing within the cultural memory that these atrocities were continuously occurring and fighting the state’s reduction of them as “crazy.” They wore photos of their children, memorializing them, and “using loudspeakers, they continued to bring charges, naming their children and naming those responsible for abducting them.”[86] Through these performances, as well as the other forms of justice initiatives and awareness, las Madres and las Abuelas have forced the violence to be seen, understood, and remembered, and they continue marching today. Similarly, their presence, and thus, its disruption, “announces the women’s distance from power,” but it also “claims [their] own authority by marking popular city locales as citizen-designated spaces for shared public remembering.”[87] As they were female bodies as well as mothers, these women “contradicted previous cultural ideas about how activists looked (mostly young and male), especially because the state propaganda depicted activists as dangerous criminals,” and further changed the landscape, face, and politics of democracy and resistance.[88]

Additionally in Argentina, other groups like H.I.J.O.S.-Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia, contra el Olvido y el Silencio, “Children for Identity and Justice, against Forgetting and Silence,” use guerilla performances tactics known as escraches, or acts of public shaming.[89] Like las Madres and las Abuelas, these participants render the violence visible, identifying the people who are responsible as well as the places they live or perpetrated different forms violence, painting the repressor’s name outside the buildings and holding massive photos of the “disappeared” among a variety of artivist actions.[90] The H.I.J.O.S use “acts of testimonial transfer” in order to understand collective and cultural memory as well as agency within them,[91] and as Diana Taylor perfectfly articulates: “By emphasizing the public, rather than private, repercussions of traumatic violence and loss, social actors turn personal pain into an engine for cultural change.”[92]

Using similar guerilla techniques but with a feminist agenda, Guerrilla Girls began their work of “feminist assault” in the United States in 1985.[93] Like President Sebastián Piñera with LasTesis, President Ronald Reagan identified the Guerilla Girls as “state terrorists” due to their unabashedly bold tactics and strategically splintered approach.[94] While their focus was on the representation and inclusion of women and female artists within the art world and museum spaces, they varied their methods like plastering posters around the city and performing street theater of “public service ‘actions’” in gorilla drag.[95] They continue to publish under the names of deceased female artists, and always cover their faces with the gorilla masks so that people “focus on the issues rather than their personalities.”[96] Within all of their work, these women use the “art of complaining”[97] through their “humor, stealth, anonymity, in-your-face confrontation.”[98] While LasTesis borrows their edgy anger and public performance, LasTesis refuses to fall into the trap that the Guerrilla Girls did, where they often accepted current structures and institutions, rarely critiquing the problematic history attributed to them and instead, pushed for inclusion in inherently uneven spaces rather than the dismantling of them.[99]

In the more present and with the topic of sexual assault, two Canadian women founded the SlutWalk in 2011 after one of the leaders of the police said that “‘women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.”[100] After the SlutWalk went public, organizers in other countries created their own SlutWalks, sharing the global frustration of rape myths, victim blaming, and overarching patriarchal violence.[101] During the day of the march, demonstrators used their bodies as message boards, literally rewriting the patriarchal prescription inscribed on their corporeal selves.[102] They were in public, “using their body as testimony, evidence ‘My body is not an insult.’”[103]

Most closely related to LasTesis is their connection to and collaboration with Pussy Riot, a Russian feminist performance group. In 2012, the five women of the collective and punk band wore bright dresses, tights, and ski masks as they stormed a church to perform, singing and denouncing the anti-woman and anti-LGBTQ+ politics of Russia’s leaders as well as their relationships to the Orthodox Church that continue to influence their daily lives.[104] They did not even finish before they were arrested and further “found guilty on charges of ‘hooliganism motivated by religious hatred’ and received two-year prison sentences in distant, all-female Russian labor camps.”[105] Pussy Riot’s performance then became subject to domestic and international debate, where ultimately, their bodies “thematized and made increasingly visible to contemporary Russians and their observers around the world … the spectacular violence of sovereign power.”[106] Russian leaders’ quick response to contain feminist refusal and dissent through criminalization and imprisonment represented the ways that these female bodies became “objects of violence” as well “sites of its vital resistance.”[107]

Pussy Riot and LasTesis serve as examples of the stakes associated with and real consequences of using bodies as art and activism. However, they continue to defy patriarchal violence and in May 2020 even worked together to create a video manifesto against police violence, professing their anger and inspiring solidarity. After LasTesis recites their anger and grievances while they call for revolution, Pussy Riot member and Teatro Lúcido director Wendy Moira shares, “LasTesis and Pussy Riot call on the compañeras, the comrades … “compañero” is someone whose lips tremble with rage in the face of injustice committed anywhere on earth. It is to this rage that we appeal.”[108] As members of the feminist groups comment on publicly known violent situations of women killed in their relationships, police officers raping women, or state torture throughout the region of Latin America, they create global understandings of not only the injustices of these acts of violence, but also connect them to the perpetrators, making the causes and violators clear. While they talk of heavy traumas, they are not devoid of hope as they call for a better future: “Let’s resist.”[109]

Conclusion

Through their replicated sound, heavily planted feet, and overwhelming populated and strong presence, the performers disrupt normative notions of feminine embodiment through warrior subjectivity, challenging gender norms of femininity and incorporating the feminist perspective in patriarchal and masculine politics. Instead of postulating a theory or theories, these women engage with regionally meaningful discourses and dissenters, especially feminist icons, pushing their work into the mainstream. They become a part of the history of dissenters like las Madres y Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, Guerilla Girls, and Pussy Riot. As it is in public, every person becomes an audience member, unable to refuse to acknowledge their proclamations, defend their ignorance, and excuse their traditional mindsets. Instead, they are forced to be affected by testimonies of assault, reminders of the past regime’s violent legacy, and the patriarchal presence in everyday politics.

While “Un Violador en Tu Camino” started outside of the police station in Valparaíso, Chile, its standing as a global feminist anthem proves the power within its recited lyrics and choreographed dance. Through the duality of merging and adjusting the tradition of dance, LasTesis created a localized yet global form of resistance, which helps to empower survivors of assault and victims of the patriarchy beyond the national context, denouncing the patriarchal and oppressive state that claims to “protect” them. Combining interdisciplinary perspectives and forms, LasTesis seamlessly articulates the multiplicities of oppression through art protest. They injected new meanings into spaces through a form of feminist counterpublic by interrupting the state’s militarized nature and landscapes to demand justice that attacks the same dynamics and structure that supports the state’s power. Individuals and the people are inherently changed in the process.

There is much potential for research around LasTesis. It holds the ability to analyze the growing demand for police abolition, which has been largely published in the United States consciousness, but nonetheless called for by multiple groups throughout Latin America. Not only is it necessary to include Latin America within this discourse, it is incredibly timely as Chile is reworking its Constitution, where new possibilities for (re)defining justice emerge. Another potential area to investigate would be documenting the testimonials of fellow participants and survivors in order to understand the uniqueness of this public disclosure as a form of feminist therapy, especially as it not only includes victims of assault, but also victims of the patriarchy. Finally, connecting LasTesis to previous anarcha-feminist thought and the power and openings of this understanding of power and circulation must be explored, connecting them to fellow feminist collectives and interventions and the potentials for the future.

Acknowledgements

Endless thanks to Dr. Andrea Siqueira, for giving every thought of mine possibility, direction, and meaning and Dr. Anya Peterson Royce, for not only being fundamental in the world of anthropology, but also in giving my life guidance, inspiring me years ago and embodying how I want to be in life: gentle, but fierce.

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[1] Caroca Soto, et al. “Anatomy of the 2019 Chilean Social Unrest,” pp. 3.

[2] Caroca Soto, et al. “Anatomy of the 2019 Chilean Social Unrest,” pp. 3.

[3] Fensom, “Judicial Reform.”

[4] “Chile: Police Reforms Needed.”

[5] “UN Human Rights Office Report.”

[6] Davis, Embodied Practices, pp. 7.

[7] Cahill, “Foucault,” pp.  45.

[8] Bourke, Rape, pp. 6.

[9] Cahill, “Foucault,” pp. 55.

[10] Cahill, “Foucault,” pp. 56-7.

[11] Young, On Female Body Experience, pp. 16.

[12] Ibid., pp. 21-22.

[13] Davis, Embodied Practices, pp. 7.

[14] Lugones, “From Within Germinative Stasis,” pp. 86.

[15] Ibid., pp. 86.

[16] Ibid., pp. 90.

[17] Ibid., pp. 90.

[18] Wolch and Dear, The Power of Geography, pp. vi.

[19] Rosenthal, “Spectacle, Fear, and Protest,” pp. 55.

[20] However, expectations for women depended on the politics of their standing(s) in categories of race, ethnicity, and class as well as location within Latin America. For a more thorough investigation into these differences, look to Peter Wade’s Race and Ethnicity in Latin America and William E. French and Katherine Elaine Bliss’s Gender, Sexuality, and Power in Latin America Since Independence.

[21] Rosenthal, “Spectacle, Fear, and Protest,” pp. 58.

[22] Marchand, “Challenging Globalisation,” pp. 149.

[23] Schechner, Performance Theory.

[24] Ibid., pp. 165.

[25] Ibid., pp. 165.

[26] Turner and Schechner, The Anthropology of Performance.

[27] Irobi, “What They Came With,” pp. 899-900.

[28] Irobi, “What They Came With,” pp. 902.

[29] Ibid., pp. 904.

[30] Ibid., pp. 909.

[31] Ibid., pp. 910.

[32] Taylor, Performance, pp. 129.

[33] Ibid., pp. 131.

[34] Taylor, Performance, pp. 169.

[35] Taylor, “Trauma and Performance,” pp. 1675.

[36] Ibid., pp. 1675.

[37] Moenne, “Embodying Memory,” pp. 158.

[38] Ibid., pp. 158.
[39] Moenne, “Embodying Memory,” pp. 158.

[40] Ibid., pp. 160.

[41] Ibid., pp. 160.

[42] Ibid., pp. 154.

[43] Ibid., pp. 154.

[44] Ibid., pp. 152.

[45] Rosenthal, “Spectacle, Fear, and Protest,” pp. 60.

[46] Moenne, “Embodying Memory,” pp. 154.

[47] Scarpaci and Frazier, “State Terror,” pp. 6.

[48] Gore, “Flash Mob,” pp. 130.

[49] Ibid., pp. 130.

[50] Taylor, “Trauma and Performance,” pp. 1676.

[51] Taylor, “Trauma and Performance,” pp. 1676.

[52] “Performance colectivo Las Tesis “Un violador en tu camino,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB7r6hdo3W4&t=46s.

[53] Lopez, “Factbox.”

[54] Molina, “Domestic Violence.”

[55] Lopez, “Factbox.”

[56] Ibid.

[57] Fensom, “Judicial Reform,” pp. 11.

[58] Ibid., pp. 8-9.

[59] Bickford, “Archival Imperative,” pp. 1103.

[60] Tsing, “The Global Situation,” pp. 337.

[61] Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” pp. 63.

[62] Ibid., pp. 88.

[63] Ibid., pp. 81.

[64] Sutton, “Poner El Cuerpo,” pp. 130.

[65] Ibid., pp. 143.

[66] Ibid., pp. 143.

[67] Ibid., pp. 148.

[68] Infusino, “From Survivor to Advocate,” pp. 15.

[69] Ibid., pp. 15.

[70] Ibid., pp. 16.

[71] Sutton, “Poner El Cuerpo,” pp. 137.

[72] Sutton, “Poner El Cuerpo,” pp. 148.

[73] Jenkins, Henry. “Choreographed Resistance.”

[74] “Himno.”

[75] Klein, “Spectacular Citizenships,” pp. 103.

[76] Klein, “Spectacular Citizenships,” pp. 103.

[77] Ibid., pp. 106.

[78] “UN Human Rights Office Report,” 13.

[79] Ibid, pp. 13.

[80] Taylor, Performance, pp. 208.

[81] Phillips and Cole, “Feminist Flows, Feminist Fault Lines,” pp. 192.

[82] Ibid., pp. 192.

[83] Ibid., pp. 185.

[84] Dulitzky, “The Latin-American Flavor of Enforced Disappearances,” pp. 432.

[85] Burchianti, “Building Bridges of Memory,” pp. 134.

[86] Taylor, “You are Here,” pp. 155.

[87] Klein, “Spectacular Citizenships,” pp. 108.

[88] Sutton, “Poner El Cuerpo,” pp. 150.

[89] Taylor, “You Are Here,” pp. 151.

[90] Taylor, “You Are Here,” pp. 151.

[91] Ibid., pp. 152.

[92] Taylor, “You Are Here,” pp. 154.

[93] Withers, “The Guerrilla Girls,” pp. 285.

[94] Ibid., pp. 285.

[95] Ibid., pp. 285.

[96] Brand, “Feminist Art Epistemologies,” pp. 175.

[97] Kahlo and Kollwitz, “Transgressive Techniques,” pp. 203.

[98] Brand, “Feminist Art Epistemologies,” pp. 175.

[99] Withers, “The Guerrilla Girls,” pp. 289.

[100] Nguyen, “From SlutWalks to SuicideGirls,” pp. 159.

[101] Ibid., pp. 159.

[102] Ibid., pp. 159.

[103] Ibid., pp. 159.

[104] Bernstein, “An Inadvertent Sacrifice,” pp. 220.

[105] Ibid., pp. 221.

[106] Bernstein, “An Inadvertent Sacrifice,” pp. 222.

[107] Ibid., pp. 226.

[108] Pussy Riot, “MANIFESTO AGAINST POLICE VIOLENCE / PUSSY RIOT x LASTESIS,” 6:05.

[109] Ibid., 7:37.