A Creative Turn to the Body: Feminist Dissonance and Erotic Autonomy in Central American Art

An emergence of performance art in postwar Central America facilitated a critical approach to gender, sexuality, and desire beyond the right-/left-wing rhetoric of decades prior. Through embodied acts, artists expose the coloniality of gender and unravel how heteropatriarchal culture and misogyny are embedded in the multiple structures of violence and policing that target women and nonheteronormative and gender nonconforming people in Central America. Themes in art include feminicide and impunity, interpersonal violence, neoliberalism, rape of body and lands, anti-Indigenous and anti-Black racism, Western canons of beauty and body image, and homophobia and transphobia. Exposing these intersectional oppressive systems illuminates the context of displacement and migration for thousands of women and nonbinary or nonheteronormative people seeking asylum. These artists expand the parameters of a feminist aesthetics from decades earlier with a feminist visual disobedience centered on embodied agency that is both antipatriarchal and anti-colonial.