The Virality of Transfeminism in the Art of Pedro Lemebel
Channel: Jon Jubal
Date: 2022-03-24

Virality is a product of tremendously accelerated socio-politico-economic and enviro-ecological alterations, which have materialized due to the lightning speed of techno-scientific innovation since the early nineteenth century.  Virality is also about the virulence of metaphors and how their transgressive spread jumps through imagined borders of identity, and notions of essence and immunity. Viral events such as the phenomenon of zoonosis (interspecies transmission of virions), which includes Covid-19 and HIV/AIDS, increasingly disrupts the epistemologies of precariat Latin American communities confronting the financial dislocation of quarantines. Viral bodies are not only those infected with biological virions, but viral bodies also disseminate blasphemous, transgressive, and invasive ideas that intrepidly contaminate other bodies. As Boaventura de Sousa Santos affirms in La cruel pedagogía del virus (2020), we need new strategies of contamination that will enter citizen’s lives “por la puerta trasera” to overcome pandemics, natural disasters, financial collapse, the triumphant resurgent flow of authoritarian exceptionalism, and the technical circumvallation of power that now edges the world toward catastrophe. I propose using viral bodies as a novel critical approach—drawing from the fields of transfeminism, contagion theory, and virality—to infect and disrupt power’s transvestized mechanisms of expediency urging bodies into precariat ways of being. This presentation examines the zigzagging intersectional viral bodies in Pedro Lemebel’s Loco afán (1996) and the film Lemebel (2019) by Johana Reposi, which confront the hegemony of the quadrangular power infrastructure—the coloniality of patriarchal neoliberal capitalism—which willfully neglects the value of the environment, human life and rights, and democracy.