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OLGA RODRIGUEZ-ULLOA & ALEX CHASIN
June 27-28, 2017

Forms of Resistance (Literally!)

Boxed in by the forms you fill out every day? Sick of being classified, categorized, tracked, stamped, approved, declined, billed, charged, and otherwise administered? Your social security number doesn’t quite define or express you, or you don’t have one? Not reducible to a sex or race, to a height or weight? Time for re-form! Bring your frustration, your underrepresentation, your creativity, your excess, your rebellious temptation – it’s time to subvert, pervert, and invert the bureaucratic limits and controls. Bring your messy selves, color outside of the lines, turn small spaces into the fertile ground of narrative, of open-ended exploration, of refusal and resistance. It’s time to engage in reform – to answer back – to speak truth to power – all over the walls.

Photography by Stephanie Orentas 

Prof. Rodríguez-Ulloa specializes in contemporary Latin American culture and Literatures, with emphasis on the Andean region. Her book project Sadistic Cholas: Sex and Violence in Peru explores the political resignification of the racial slur chola as it is now deployed by queer trans-feminist performers, authors, and collectives. In the manuscript, the sadistic chola is theorized as a volatile symbolic figure embodying multiple feminine-gendered subjectivities that advance systemic critiques through an aesthetics of anger as connected to politics and sexualities. Their appropriation of the word chola develops a language to contest the longue durée of racialization and exploitation of women in the Andean context.

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