La internacional cuir. Transfeminism, sexual micropolitics and guerrilla video

15 november, 2011 - 19 november, 2011
Place
Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Organized by
Museo Reina Sofía with the collaboration of Off Limits
Curatorship
Beatriz Preciado
Frau Diamanda. Tr@nsversiva Post Andina Revolucionaria, 2011. Fotografía de César Delgado Wixan
Frau Diamanda. Tr@nsversiva Post Andina Revolucionaria, 2011. Fotografía de César Delgado Wixan

The queer/cuir variation appearing in the title invokes two types of displacement. It refers, on the one hand, to the geopolitical inflection towards the south and away from the peripheries, in counterpoint to colonial epistemology and Anglo-American historiography. In addition, it suggests a passage from what is known as “feminist art” to a multiplicity of sexual guerrilla and gender dissidence practices, which question the techniques used in the production of sexual difference and by institutions of cultural reproduction.

If resistance to institutional violence and criticism of the norm had been the main strategies used in the 1980s and 90s in response to the "normalization" process of homosexuality and to the AIDS crisis, the early years of the new century are a time of political paradigm change in those who believe in the need for utopia as a space in which to invent practices of subjectivisation and social production.

The works shown here mark the passage from criticism of the sex-gender system towards an unfolding of art as a space for the invention of techniques for the production of subjectivity and for social reproduction. Propitiating an unexpected rereading of Felix Guattari and Donna Haraway, these practices seem to announce the spilling over of the relational towards a queer/cuirpolitical ecology that questions and transforms the Left's political project. In contrast to the universalising, virile dream of the Workers International and the neoliberal promise of mercantile multiculturalism and its politics of sexual identity, a network of dissident practices is taking shape, an International of somatopolitical workers who question both gender/sexual identity and racial/national identity, thereby inventing a new way to imagine the sphere of the political.