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Astrid Hadad: the cyborg goddess.

Queer performance and the
decolonization of the gendered self
Paola Arboleda-Ríos
Published online: 18 Dec 2014.
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To cite this article: Paola Arboleda-Ríos (2014) Astrid Hadad: the cyborg goddess. Queer
performance and the decolonization of the gendered self, Postcolonial Studies, 17:2, 189-206, DOI:
10.1080/13688790.2014.966893
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Postcolonial Studies, 2014, Vol. 17, No. 2, 189–206
Astrid Hadad: the cyborg goddess. Queer

performance and the decolonization of
the gendered self
PAOLA ARBOLEDA-RÍOS
Decolonizing gender is necessarily a praxical task. It is to enact a critique of

racialized, colonial, and capitalist heterosexualist gender oppression as a lived
transformation of the social.1
To be queer is not who you are, it’s what you do, it’s your relation to dominant
power, and your relation to marginality, as a place of empowerment.2
The theorizing efforts of the group Modernidad-Colonialidad (Modernity-

Coloniality) intend to address three key issues particularly, although not
exclusively, within the Latin American context: the coloniality of power, the
coloniality of knowledge, and the coloniality of the self. According to Nelson
Maldonado-Torres, the coloniality of the self refers to ‘the violation of the sense
of human otherness, to the point where the alter-ego transforms itself into a
sub-alter’,3 and in the words of María Marta Quintana, it ‘must address
the experiences of colonized and subaltern subjects’.4 However, within the
theoretical work of the authors associated with this collective, not all the
experiences of subaltern subjects have gathered the same amount of critical
interest. If the study of women has a somewhat marginal position, even
considering the remarkable contributions of authors like María Lugones and
Chela Sandoval, the ways in which lesbian, homosexual, bisexual, transgender
and/or queer subjects confront interlocking systems of oppression have been
consistently disregarded.
This article will explore the ways in which artists like Mexican performer
Astrid Hadad (b. 1957) deal with issues related to coloniality, race, gender
oppression, and social inequality. Deconstructing Mexico’s most emblematic
musical genre, rancheras, Hadad’s shows challenge the triad of coloniality
(power, knowledge, and the self) while, at the same time, demonstrate art’s
potential for decolonizing the heteronormative discourses of the ‘foundational
fictions’5 that built, and still sustain, the imagined structure of most Latin
American nations. Through these performances and through the queering of art,
gender, and the self, Hadad demands not only the right to exist as a queer artist,
but also, most importantly, the right to become a ‘social agent’,6 something that
has been banned historically for sexual and/or gender dissidents.
© 2014 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2014.966893
Image 1.
Astrid Hadad’s Heavy Nopal aesthetics.
The queerest vision: political cabaret. Performing

resistance—decolonizing power
[Queer] represents, among other things, an aggressive impulse of generalization; it
rejects a minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political interest-representation in
favour of a more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal … For both academics
and activists ‘queer’ gets a critical edge by defining itself against the normal rather
than the heterosexual, and normal includes normal business in the academy.7
When addressing the coloniality of power, most Latin American postcolonial

critics (Lugones, Quijano, Mignolo, Castro-Gómez) go back to outlining the story
of the ‘civilizing’ project of the Western world; in other words, the advent of
190
ASTRID HADAD
modernity. They agree that its genesis can be traced to Descartes’ ideas,
particularly the dualistic notions he used to understand and organize the world;
i.e. the opposition between reason and nature, body and spirit, god and men. As
noted by Lander, ‘the modernizing project formulated by the philosophers of the
Enlightenment since the eighteenth century, was cemented on the development of
an objective science, a universal moral and law and art autonomous and regulated
by their own logics’.8 This new way of thinking coincided with the imperialistic
expansion of European powers and the colonization of vast and remote territories
of the world (Africa, Asia, America) that were inhabited by ‘creatures’ that
differed in many aspects—skin colour, culture, social systems and values, etc—
from Europeans and who immediately were deemed as inferior.

From this point forward any ‘civilizatory’ effort attempted anywhere around the
globe would necessarily require emulating European ideas, ways of being and
Image 2.
Astrid Hadad as a Mexican version of the Hindu goddess Kali.
191
thought. The history of the world became an organized grand narrative9 and,
most importantly, people from the occupied regions emerged as the non-white,
non-European, not privileged, and almost not human ‘Others’. They were
identified as beings that were dependent, and incapable of governing themselves
because of their natural traits: women, the proletariat and the colonized.10 The
coloniality of power is defined then as ‘the tension between the exotization of the
other and the normalization of the western way of life’.11 However, as critics have
noted, every continent and every culture encountered very different forms of
colonization. In spite of these differences, some of the consequences, as well as
some of the experiences of resistance, share commonalities that allow Latin
American academics and activists to have productive conversations with

theoretical and empirical accounts from different continents.
Santiago Castro-Gómez argues that,
creating the identity of the modern citizen in Latin America meant generating a
contrast from which that identity could be measured and asserted. The construction of
the imaginary of ‘civilization’ demanded necessarily the production of its counter-
part: the imaginary of the ‘barbarian’ which is, those who are below: women, Indian,
poor and the helpless.12
Colonization in Latin America generated the erasure of indigenous knowledge,

and the downplay of native traditions, turning the ones that survived into mere
‘curiosities’. As Quijano asserts, the dualistic thinking that generated this process
of a-culturation (desculturación) not only erased indigenous knowledge and
cultures but also affected sexual and gender relations. From this perspective, the
place of women, especially women of inferior races, became stereotyped as also
did those of races who were considered even lower in rank and closer to nature,
like those of black slaves.13 Centuries after Latin American nation-states tried to
construct themselves under the postulates of modernity, the legacy of colonization
persists and has mutated, as Mohanty states, into global capitalism and neoliberal
policies which ‘writes its script, especially in the bodies and lives of women and
girls from the third world’.14 This is why in the context of challenging the
coloniality of power, Astrid Hadad’s body and her artistic offer emerge as a
monstrous embodiment of all that was feared by the colonizing enterprise: a
woman of colour, a hybrid, a sexual dissident, a political nonconformist and a
defender of Mexican indigenous tradition.
Hadad was born in Chetumal, a small Mexican town on the east coast of the
Yucatán Península. As one of the middle children, of 11, in a family of Catholic
and very conservative Lebanese immigrants, Hadad’s life has been nurtured by
profound and unsettling, although productive, contradictions. In an interview, she
noted that her restricting upbringing where ‘the women were expected to know
their place and their duties’ made her a ‘mischief-maker’ and motivated her
decision to escape her authoritarian parents, first to study music in Veracruz and
then theatre in Mexico’s capital city.15 She received a Bachelor of Arts in Political
Sciences and another degree from the Theatre Centre of the Universidad
Autónoma de México (UNAM), one of the most prominent in that country.
192
ASTRID HADAD
After graduating, Hadad was part of the cast of Donna Giovanni (1984), an
adaptation of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, with a completely female, cross-
dressed cast, which successfully toured Latin America and Europe. Jesusa
Rodríguez directed it, with the participation of Liliana Felipe, Regina Orozco
and other artists who became pioneers of the feminist, humorous, queer cabaret
theatre in Mexico and Latin America. One of the key contradictions of Hadad’s
career took place when she decided to become a solo artist. In spite of the success
of Donna Giovanni and her participation in telenovelas and films, Hadad had to
leave Mexico in order to be taken seriously as an artist in her own country. She
admits, ‘I had to export myself to be imported into Mexico’.16 With the help of
funds collected by some of her closest friends Hadad went to Europe where she
started to be internationally recognized. In Germany she had the opportunity to
study techniques that later became the philosophical foundation of her original
creations, particularly Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre. Differing from traditional
stage performance that tries to create an illusion of reality, Brecht proposed a
distinct kind of art, one that encourages a conscious relationship between the
spectator and the work of art by reducing the hypnotic effect that the
‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ or the ‘integrated work of art’ might create. In other words,
in the epic theatre the public must be aware of the strategies used on the stage
(sound, acting, and the general production of the play), otherwise they would be
reduced to a state of ‘idiocy’.17 Following Brecht’s arguments, Hadad created an
unlikely concoction of German political theatre, Mexican carpa-cabaret18 (tent-
theatre), and the most nationalistic, emblematic and male-dominated of Latin
American music genres, rancheras.19
The length of Hadad’s career makes it impossible to include and/or analyse the
complexity of all her productions. She has been active for more than three
decades; her first solo show was Nostalgia arrabalera in 1986, but the one that
is most remembered by her fans and became an expression that defines her
aesthetics20 was Heavy Nopal, from the early 1990s. A mix between heavy-metal
and nopal, a native cactus from Mexico, the title of the show is a play on words
that makes reference to the hybrid character of Hadad’s performances.
According to Homi Bhabha, perhaps the most important proponent of the use
of the term hybridity for describing cultural processes, texts and, of course,
identities that subvert the narratives of colonial domination, hybrid subjects
reclaim space, voice and participation, constructing counter-narratives that
denounce and condemn their exclusion from discourse and representation.21
That is exactly what happens within this heavy nopalera style, where the most
unlikely genres, aesthetics and symbols collide—including: filmic intertextuality
(especially references to 1940s divas), outrageous costumes which merge extra-
‘feminine’ and masculine elements (spurs, bustiers, heavy make-up and mous-
taches), Mexican pre-columbine iconography (Aztec and Mayan) and nationalistic
emblems (charro hats and china poblana22 dress)—to create a hybrid subject. All
these tricks and tools produce an excess of femininity that make some people
believe Hadad is actually a man in drag. This outrageous female-to-female
impersonation has the characteristics of the aesthetic style and/or sensibility
identified as camp: ‘incongruity, theatricality and humor’.23 Authors like
Newton, Fusco24 and Robertson25 have theorized camp as a form of political26
193
Image 3.
Astrid Hadad’s costume transformation in front of the public. Breaking the hypnotic
illusion of the integrated work of art.
engagement—even for women, we must remember that camp used to be

considered exclusively masculine—that positions its performer in the sphere of
the queer. And it is precisely through self-parody, one of the key features of camp,
that Hadad’s body transforms itself, simultaneously, into stage, performer, cabaret
diva, gender and political activist. Heavy nopalera camp aesthetics bends the
limits of all the musical, theatrical genres, genders and discourses involved in this
queer bodily-performance. From rancheras and boleros Hadad has expanded her
repertoire to other musical genres from Latin America and the Caribbean like
salsa, son, merengue, cumbia, Colombian carrilera and Argentinean tango.
Sometimes she transforms the lyrics of traditional songs, sometimes she creates
new lyrics with her group Los Tarzanes; she calls herself a ‘descompositora’
194
ASTRID HADAD
(an un-composer). In the context of the ‘Methodologies of the Oppressed’, or the

‘set of processes, procedures, and technologies for decolonizing the imagination’,
theorized by Chela Sandoval, the Mexican cabaretera uses all the skills,
‘semiotics, deconstruction, meta-ideologizing, democratics and differential con-
sciousness’, proposed by Sandoval as necessary for decolonizing globalization in
the twenty-first century. Perhaps the most visible strategy used by Hadad is the
one Sandoval named ‘meta-ideologizing’ or ‘the operation of appropriating
dominant ideological forms and using them whole in order to transform their
meanings into a new, imposed and revolutionary concept’.27 In one of her latest
shows, entitled Noche Mística (Mystic Night), her own body becomes her stage,
as it usually does, in order to create a new narrative of colonization and a different

understanding of an emblematic, and probably one of the most despised females
Image 4.
Astrid Hadad, La Maldición de la Malinche (Malinche’s Curse).
195
in Mexican history, who was made a symbol of national treachery and betrayal by
patriarchal historiography: La Malinche.
While Hadad sings La Maldición de la Malinche (Malinche’s Curse, see
Image 4) by Mexican composer Gabino Palomares (1950) she holds an impressive
artefact on her head, which sustains more than 20 skulls. Her china poblana skirt is
turned into a pyramid that also holds 15 skulls. She looks extremely uncomfortable
carrying the weight of the dead on her head, which might be just what she looked
for, interpreting lyrics that talk about the colonization of the Americas and about
Doña Marina, a Mexica woman who was interpreter and lover of Hernán Cortés
and became, probably unjustly, the symbol of the Indian who was seduced, and
gave in to the invaders. However, her role during the conquest has been revised
and lately vindicated because of her intelligence, ability and power:
From the sea they saw them arrive/ my feathered brothers/ They were bearded men/
from the prophecy expected/ the voice of the monarch was heard/ that the god had
arrived/ and we open the door for them/ for fear of the unknown …/ Because the
gods do not eat/ nor do they enjoy the stolen/ and when we realized/ everything was
over/ and in that mistake we gave up the greatness of the past/ and in that mistake we
stayed three hundred years slaves.28
As these lyrics demonstrate, Hadad’s shows cannot be considered light entertain-

ment. Strongly influenced by artists who were also perceived as transgressors in
their time, like Mexican singer Lucha Reyes29 (1906–1944), Hadad appropriates
musical genres that have been traditionally ‘male-dominated’ and creates a
spectacle that, unlike conventional cabaret theatre, does not have men’s pleasure
as one of its main concerns. Hadad’s shows have, in fact, the opposite effect. They
are designed to trigger women’s acknowledgement of the endless possibilities of
their pleasure. For example, one of the jokes that has become a trademark in her
presentations states: ‘I just want to remind you: there are not ugly women, but bad
make-up and there are not frigid women but bad tongues’. Hadad’s productions
combine ironic commentaries focused on anti-imperialism, women’s rights to
sexuality and pleasure, humour, satire of corrupt political practices, neoliberal
doctrines, gender violence and Catholicism. La Multimamada, which literally
translates ‘the one suckled multiple times’, is one of the central characters of the
show Goddesses. This is the way she described it to the audience during a
performance in Bilbao, in the Spanish Basque Country:
We all women are the multimamadas because, although we have come a long way,
we are still having trouble getting the same space as men and in fact, in Mexico we
say that Mexico is a multimamada, because our politicians suckle and suckle from
her, and she keeps giving and giving with exuberance.
The multimamada is, according to Hadad, a recurrent allegory of Mexican reality,

its political corruption and Catholic hypocrisy. These kinds of commentaries have
made the shows and her author, director and performer, dangerous for the
institutions that work to preserve the structures of patriarchal society in Mexico.
196
ASTRID HADAD
Image 5.
Astrid Hadad, from the show ¡Oh Diosas!
As Roselyn Constantino comments, early in her career Hadad rejected all forms
of commercial support.30 This independence has proven to be costly, as the artist
has been banned from representing her country internationally on many
occasions. For instance, during the presidency of Ernesto Zedillo, Hadad was
initially forbidden to represent Mexico at the Hanover Fair in Germany, because
according to the delegate from the Mexican government, Hadad’s ‘rollos
políticos’ (political issues) portrayed a negative image of Mexico. Due to the
197
close connections between the Catholic Church and politics in her country, and
Hadad’s unapologetic criticism of these two dominant powers (her irreverent use
of religious iconography, especially the worshipped Virgen de Guadalupe and the
Sacred Heart, is a constant image in her costumes), her television appearances
have been censored and branded as immoral and sinful. This reaction against the
church, one of Mexico’s most traditional powers, creates what José Esteban
Muñoz in his book Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of
Politics describes as ‘disidentification’, a ‘performative mode of tactical recog-
nition that various minoritarian subjects employ in an effort to resist the
oppressive and normalizing discourse of dominant ideology’. Moreover, perfor-
mances permeated by queerness, where gender, racial and class borders are
challenged, according to Muñoz, allow disidentification to replace and resist ‘the
interpellating call of ideology that fixes a subject within the state power
apparatus’. For Muñoz the study of queer latino performers like Cuban-American
Carmelita Tropicana, opens up possibilities for revaluating identity.31 In a similar
way, Hadad’s work is an invitation to re-think what it means to be Mexican. That
is why, continuing the introductory monologue for La Multimamada, Hadad
comments to the same audience in Bilbao, an audience whom she also mocks
during the show and becomes co-conspirator with in her project of national and
gendered re-signification:
This dress has 365 pieces, one for each day of the year. They were handmade by a
Mexican bishop who banned my show saying that I was dangerous, I said to him:
‘dangerous? Me, me, but I’m an illustrated cabaret pleasure-giving girl?’ and then I
started thinking and said, of course, of course, I’m dangerous because I do not belong
to the brotherhood of paedophiles some priests and bishops belong to, right? But I do
not want you to be anxious; that only happens in the third world, or in Mexico. Here
in the first world, these things do not happen.32
As recently as 2011, a recording she made for Televisa, the world’s largest
Spanish language broadcaster, was vetoed with the excuse that she had appeared
before on one of the competitor stations.33 In spite of this, Hadad’s success and
recognition nationally and internationally only keep augmenting, and, as
mentioned before, she thrives when confronting rejection or when facing
contradictions. Her own sexuality is a matter of calculated uncertainty. According
to Laura Gutiérrez, even though she does not make reference to her own
lesbianism during her performances, ‘Hadad represents a full embrace of
ambiguity, which is an integral part of the queer modus vivendi’.34 The presence
of queer elements in her shows is related more to reclaiming female sexuality,
desire and pleasure than to talking about her own sexual preferences.35
In the next section we will focus on two pieces that, like La multimamada, were
part of two recent shows: ¡Oh Diosas! and Divinas Pecadoras. Both titles are puns
that remind us that Hadad’s verbal agility and wittiness are some of the aesthetic
strategies that make her a queer-queen of camp; a performer who, as noted by
Judith Butler, by imitating and exaggerating the characteristics of her own gender,
reveals the ‘inner truth of gender as a fabrication’.36¡Oh Diosas!, which literally
translates as ‘Oh Goddesses!’, has a double meaning if read together: ‘odiosas’
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ASTRID HADAD
signifies ‘hateful women’. Divinas Pecadoras can be interpreted either as ‘divine

sinners’ or ‘heavenly sinners’. These shows are completely dedicated to honouring
women from very different cultures, from the Hindu goddess Kali, to Mexican
iconic female figures like Malinche, la Santa Muerte (The Holy Death) and Frida
Kahlo, which Hadad considers her ‘goddesses’. In these performances and through
the use of prosthetic limbs and extensions, horns, breasts, arms, heads, skeletons,
ironic lyrics and satirical commentaries, Hadad’s body gives life to mythical
women, half-human, half-animal, artefact and/or deity, and her feminist discourse
mutates into an apparently impossible episteme, a figure of gendered decolonial
resistance: a cyborg-goddess.
The cyborg goddess: a decolonizing episteme (decolonizing knowledge)

My style is syncretic, aesthetic, pathetic, and diuretic, which demonstrates, without
shame, the attitudes of machismo, masochism, nihilism, and ‘I-could-give-a-damn’
inherent in all cultures.37
The disjointing of body and mind was one of the main consequences of modernity
and its fixation with a dualistic understanding of human existence and natural
phenomena. This detachment situated human consciousness in a non-material
place, almost external to any physical reality, left the body without meaning and
created an ontological fissure between reason and world that has not been
completely overcome.38 Similarly, as mentioned above, one of the most pervasive
consequences of colonialism was the erasure of the knowledge that belonged to
individuals from social and racial classes considered lower: peasants, indigenous
people, the disabled and women. In Latin America that knowledge was even
considered an obstacle to the development of the colonial nation-states.
In the words of Walter Mignolo, the control of what knowledge was appropriate
and which one should be eradicated is a kind of ‘epistemological prison’ that still
characterizes Latin American thought. According to this critic, it resembles ‘the
epistemology of modernity [which] presupposes a subject characterized for his
masculinity, his whiteness, and his European background’.39 In what follows we
will analyse performances in which a half-Mexican, half-Lebanese woman uses her
body as the main instrument to communicate with an audience and to talk openly
about female sexuality, indigenous traditions and, cynically, against neoliberal
politics, capitalism and American imperialism. The recognition of the power of
female experiences through a corporeal practice helps Hadad to break away from
the epistemological prison postulated by Mignolo and becomes a clear example of
how knowledge can be reclaimed and decolonized by a subaltern subject.
A cyborg: a female body that knows and can speak

During one of her shows, in one of the few short breaks between songs when the
artist disappears from the spectators’ view, Hadad leaves the stage for a few
seconds. She then comes back dressed in a different costume; only this time it
does not resemble the different versions of the china poblana skirt she used before
during the show. She approaches the middle of the podium without facing the
199
public while a slow piano and flute tune is complemented by soft sounds from
nature, birds, owls, and maybe even some water. She turns back slowly and the
viewers are able to see that she is wearing a hat with arrows on the top, and that
she also has horns that protrude from her chest. However, Hadad keeps her arms
closed, so the public still cannot see what is on the front side of the colourful tunic
she embraces. As the song progresses, her transformation develops as well, until a
moment where she stops singing and starts to open her arms very slowly; all this
anticipation makes the viewer think that what she has been trying to hide and
what she is about to uncover has to be truly important. Finally, the spectators are
able to see that what she was hiding on her chest is indeed a powerful image, an
image that recreates one of Frida Kahlo’s most recognized paintings, El venado
herido (The wounded deer; 1946), in which Kahlo represents herself as half-
woman, half-wounded-bleeding-deer. The Mexican painter is the ‘goddess’ this
section of the show honours. After the song ends, Hadad expresses her admiration
for Kahlo and explains about her costume:
The Wounded deer is one of the symbols of Diana the Huntress and was Frida Kahlo’s
favourite song and when she paints the deer each one of the arrows meant each one of
her physical pains because she was a woman who suffered greatly physically, and
emotionally as well, because the horns are like the ones put on her by Diego Rivera. I
make this tribute to her because to me she is like a semi-goddess because, despite all
she suffered, she was a very cheerful woman, enjoyed life thoroughly and fucked
every passerby she found in front of her, no matter if it was a man, woman, palm or
chimera. And so, I make this tribute, because of her joyfulness and her marketing
skills, and with this we make sure that we get hired everywhere, of course.40
Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera (and their passionate relationship) are probably the
most admired and celebrated couple of Mexican plastic artists. Hadad pays
homage to Kahlo, celebrating her talent, her bravery, her strength, and her sexual
fluidity. Although she also admires Rivera and has recreated some of his paintings
before (the song Soy Virgencita, ‘I am a little virgin’, is probably the most
recognized), she makes a remark criticizing the famous and multiple infidelities of
the muralist. Hadad explains that the ‘horns’ Frida represented in her self-portrait,
as well as the arrows that are hurting the deer to the point of making her bleed,
stand for the pain that the treason of her lover caused to Kahlo. This is a
commentary that, with more than a moralistic intention, may speak to a society,
like the Mexicans and most Latin Americans, where male sexual promiscuity and
infidelity seem to be condoned, but the pursuit of women’s pleasure, even within
the marital institution, remains taboo.
Part-woman, part-animal, part-mythological and part-real, Hadad’s complex
interpretation of El venadito brings forward the idea of the cyborg postulated by
Donna Haraway in her now classic essay, the ‘Cyborg Manifesto’. In this text
Haraway criticized essentialist approaches to feminism and proposed the concept
of the cyborg as a new kind of hybrid being with the potential for liberating
humans from the dualities of Western thought that have worked to oppress
different populations throughout history, especially women, people of colour and
the economically dispossessed.
200
ASTRID HADAD
Image 6.
Astrid Hadad, El venadito (The little deer). Half-woman, half-animal. A cyborg and a goddess.
According to Haraway, ‘A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of

machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction’;
it is also a being in a post-gender world and ‘is resolutely committed to partiality,
irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without
innocence.’ The first form of the cyborg transgression that Haraway studies is
precisely the mythical relationship between human and animal. In her own words:
A cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are
not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently
partial identities and contradictory standpoints … Single vision produces worse
illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters.41
Cyborg unities are then monstrous and illegitimate and, according to Haraway,
this is the strongest form of resistance against hegemonic powers, one that creates
itself by accepting contradictions that emerge from such vast opposition and
conflicts that their merging might appear hideously monstrous. María Lugones
also understands ‘the dichotomous hierarchy between the human and the non-
human as the central dichotomy of colonial modernity’.42 However, it is not
necessary to be human-animal or human-machine in order to become a cyborg,
and be dangerous for patriarchal, hegemonic systems, and this can also be proven
in Hadad’s performance.
201
One of the most important cyborg tools acknowledged by Haraway is writing and
story-telling, especially ‘re-telling stories that reverse and displace the hierarchical
dualisms of naturalized identities. In retelling origin stories, cyborg authors subvert
the central myths of origin of Western culture.’43 Hadad’s rescue of indigenous
Mexican traditions is an answer to the cultural colonialism that (as Lugones has
mentioned) imposed the idea of a lineal, clean and organized history. In the case of
Latin America, the ‘true civilization’ brought by the Spanish conquistadors from its
origins ‘in the Middle East to Mesopotamia, passing by classic Greece … and until
imperial Rome and later, the metropolitan capitals of Europe and the United
States’,44 exterminated or tried to exterminate the millennial history of the
Mesoamerican people. Hadad takes this context into her shows as a way of rejecting
the historiographic imperialism and decolonizes knowledge by repossessing the
symbols and iconography of the indigenous Mexican culture. As has been argued,
one of the most important strategies used by Astrid Hadad is re-appropriating
nationalistic, religious and gender myths; she destroys them and reconstructs them
with queer, feminist and ‘perverse’ nuances and then performs them, re-telling the
history of Mexico, its colonization and its reality. Hadad even creates new hybrid
versions of goddesses from around the world. To illustrate this last argument, take
her performance from the show ¡Oh Diosas!, El punto G, or ‘The G Spot’.
El punto G is perhaps one of the most interesting original interpretations in
Hadad’s show because we are faced, for the first time during the performance,
only with the artist, her voice, her ideas and a ‘regular’ dress. In other words, the
subversive potential of the song’s content and interpretation is not diminished by
the absence of horns, multiple breasts, arms, heads and all the artifices used
during the rest of the presentation. In this part of her show Hadad chose to use
nothing else but a tight-fitting, pink dress, and her sensual movements; she plays
with her long black hair and a shawl of the same colour, while she dances softly
and sings about women’s lack of sexual fulfilment. Although the lyrics are
extremely humorous, what the first part of the song criticizes is one of the more
pervasive ways women have been deprived of a basic sense of self: their access to
an open, self-determined and fulfilled sexuality. The first verse of the song says:
In a night of drinking and madness, with bitterness, I saw her leave, the cruel girl
threw me in the snout, her arguments of orgy and bacchanal: ‘you have little
experience in love, you lack science, go back to your bedroom, don’t you see I am a
woman, you don’t give me pleasure, I feel nothing, find another love’.45
In ‘The G Spot’ Hadad reclaims women’s right to enjoy sexuality, something that
historically has been forbidden and even deemed as dangerous. The second and
last segment of this song deals with another form of coercion over women;
namely, physical violence: ‘I did not find the G-spot, do not even know where I
left it and she teases he, he, he … Mad with jealousy I pulled hair from her head,
dragged her crying, but everything was useless because she met a sailor that knew
how to read.’46 Hadad’s performances, but particularly ¡Oh Diosas!, underscore
one of María Lugones’ key arguments, that ‘gender itself is a colonial
introduction, a violent introduction consistently and contemporarily used to
destroy peoples, cosmologies, and communities as the building ground of the
202
ASTRID HADAD
“civilized” West’.47 It is precisely this kind of widespread violence against

women, one of the foundational fictions of Western patriarchal societies, that
artists like Astrid Hadad expose as prevalent but unacceptable.
It should also be noted that these last two songs are sung to a woman. El venadito
(The little deer) sings to her love, and although he is supposed to be male, within
the context of Hadad’s performance it can be read as a move towards an
ungendered form of cabaret. In El punto G (‘The G Spot’) we are also sure the
singer is telling the story of a frustrated female companion, but we cannot be
certain if Hadad is assuming a transgendered position. The conclusion can be,
however, that the gender identification in this context is truly irrelevant. In ‘The G
Spot’, without the need of more artifices than her voice and ideas, and either as a
goddess or as a ‘regular woman’ in search of her own pleasure, Hadad’s body
becomes a signifying episteme that challenges notions of gender ‘normality’. In
contrast with the Mexican performer, Haraway does not embrace the ‘divine’ and
closes her article stating that she ‘would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’. We risk
stating, then, that Astrid Hadad demonstrates that even this opposition is not as
productive as the possibility of being both a goddess and a cyborg. It is not
necessary to oppose science and technology to the human and the animal, or the
cyborg to the goddess, to resist colonization and actively engage in the construction
of the meaning of the own-self; in other words, agency, especially for women. It is
possible to subvert Western discourses through inclusive and productive contra-
dictions, like the cyborg-goddesses that Astrid Hadad articulates creatively in her
performances. Hadad herself is a walking, breathing, contradiction. She is,
simultaneously, Mexican and Lebanese, Catholic and blasphemous, internationally
famous and an outsider from mainstream Mexican artistic circuits. She is also an
advocate of women’s rights to sexuality that never talks about her own orientation.
This is one of the ways in which Hadad demonstrates that it is possible to be, at the
same time, Goddess and cyborg and that, maybe, what we need to learn from her as
a strategy from decolonizing the self is to stop rejecting parts of ourselves, even
those that were brought to be by colonization.
Inclusive contradictions and the decolonization of the self: final remarks

I express the myriad contradictions that we are, all the variations on character and
personality, moods and moments that define us and in which we exist. If there is a
contradiction between the words of the song I sing and what happens on stage, it is
because we are that contradiction.48
Since 1996 some of the most recognized Latin American theorists who created the
collective Modernidad/Colonialidad (Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, Santiago
Castro-Gómez, Aníbal Quijano, Arturo Escobar, María Lugones, Ramón Grosfo-
guel and Nelson Maldonado-Torres to name a few) have opposed the idea that
with the end of the colonial administrations and the formation of the national
states, we finally live in a decolonial world.49 According to these authors, Latin
America is a subcontinent that suffers a double colonization: first, the power of
the economic and cultural centres of the West, the United States and Europe; and,
second, within Latin American nations, the ‘internal’ colonization which
203
perpetuates patriarchal institutions and a class system that manifests itself

especially in the oppression of women, and the abuse of native communities,
afro-descendant communities, sexual dissidents and the poverty-stricken.
The decolonization project of the collective Modernidad/Colonialidad suggests
carrying out a ‘direct confrontation with the hierarchies of race, gender and sexuality
that were created or strengthened by European modernity in the process of conquest
and slavery of unnumbered pueblos of the planet’.50 Astrid Hadad and other
postmodern cabaret artists like Jesusa Rodríguez, Liliana Felipe and Regina Orozco
demonstrate the crucial value of contradictions and embody what a cyborg-goddess
represents: the possibility of connecting local histories of oppression and coloniza-
tion with global and transnational explorations, collaborations and resistance, in this
case, a biologically female body, as signifying episteme. Astrid Hadad’s hybridity, a
mix between nationalities, cultures and her sexual ambiguity, challenges the image
of the ‘proper’ Mexican woman. She is not a ‘virgen’ but a ‘tequilera’ (a tequila
drinker), a racy hyper-feminine subject who laughs at nationalistic discourses of
Mexican national identity and denounces capitalistic imperialism.
Finally, Hadad’s work demonstrates the productivity of ‘inclusive contra-
dictions’; that is why in this essay queer theory, cyborg feminism and theories of
decolonization from Latin American, Chicana and postcolonial authors from
around the world have merged. It is time to deal with these paradoxes and, in the
words of Chela Sandoval, stop ‘academic apartheid’ and find the productive
nature of ambiguity, because, as Hadad makes clear in her performances, we are
as marked by the dynamics of colonization and oppression as we are by the
resistance we create in order to fight them back.
Notes on Contributor
Paola Arboleda-Ríos is Graduate Advisor in the Department of Hispanic Studies of the University of Houston.
She holds a degree in Communication from Pontificia Universidad Bolivariana (Medellín, Colombia), a Master’s
degree in Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada), and a
PhD in Latin American Literature from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Florida
(USA). Her research work deals with queer and gender theories, art and audiovisual production. Recent
publications include: ‘From National Allegory to Autobiography: Un-Pleasure and Other Family Pathologies in
Two Films by Lucrecia Martel’ (in Latin American Cinemas: Local Views and Transnational Connections, edited
by Nayibe Barrios, 2011); and ‘¿Ser o estar “queer” en Latinoamérica? El devenir emancipador in Lemebel,
Perlongher y Arenas’ (Revista Iconos, 2011).
Notes
1
Maria Lugones, ‘Toward a Decolonial Feminism’, Hypatia 25(4), 2010, p 746.
2
Jill Dolan, ‘Introduction. Building a Theatrical Vernacular: Responsibility, Community, Ambivalence, and
Queer Theater’, in Alisa Solomon and Framji Minwalla (eds), The Queerest Art: Essays on Lesbian and Gay
Theater, New York: New York University Press, 2002, p 5.
3
Nelson Maldonado-Torres, ‘Sobre la colonialidad del ser: contribuciones al desarrollo de un concepto’, in
Santiago Castro-Gómez and Ramón Grosfoguel (eds), El giro decolonial. Reflexiones para una diversidad
epistémica más allá del capitalismo global, Bogotá: Siglo del Hombre Editores, 2007, p 150.
4
María Marta Quintana, ‘Colonialidad del ser, delimitaciones conceptuales’, CECIES, Portal de Pensamiento
Latinoamericano y Alternativo, 2009. ISSN: 1852-3625, http://www.cecies.org/articulo.asp?id=226
5
Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1991.
204
ASTRID HADAD
6
Enrique Dussel, ‘Sobre el sujeto y la intersubjetividad: el agente histórico como actor en los movimientos
sociales’, Segunda Época 84, 1999.
7
Michael Warner, ‘Introduction’, in Michael Warner (ed), Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social
Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, p xxvi.
8
‘El proyecto de modernidad formulado por los filósofos del iluminismo en el siglo XVIII se basaba en el
desarrollo de una ciencia objetiva, una moral universal, y una ley y un arte autónomos y regulados por lógicas
propias.’ Edgardo Lander, ‘Ciencias sociales: saberes coloniales y eurocéntricos’, in Edgardo Lander (comp),
La colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Perspectivas latinoamericanas, Buenos Aires,
CLACSO, 1993, p 6.
9
Lander, ‘Ciencias sociales: saberes colonials y eurocéntricos’, p 6.
10
‘Comenzando con Descartes […] los hombres ilustrados […] al intentar superar la lógica excluyente de la
sociedad medieval, crearon argumentos para negar la autonomía a “otros” en base a esta distinción entre lo
público, con seres autónomos iguales en derechos, y lo privado, con seres dependientes que por sus
características naturales eran presuntamente incapaces de gobernarse a sí mismos: mujeres, proletarios, y los
“otros” colonizados.’ Liliana Suarez Návaz, ‘Colonialismo, gobernabilidad y feminismos poscoloniales’, in
Liliana Suárez Návaz and Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo (eds), Descolonizando el feminismo: teorías y
prácticas desde los márgenes, Madrid: Cátedra, 2008, p 37.
11
Suarez Návaz, ‘Colonialismo, gobernabilidad y feminismos poscoloniales’, p 32.
12
‘Crear la identidad del ciudadano moderno en América Latina implicaba generar un contraluz a partir del cual
esa identidad pudiera medirse y afirmarse como tal. La construcción del imaginario de la “civilización” exigía
necesariamente la producción de su contraparte: el imaginario de la “barbarie” o sea los de abajo: mujeres,
indios, pobres, devalidos.’ Santiago Castro-Gómez, ‘Ciencias sociales: violencia epistémica y el problema de
la “invención” del otro’, in Lander, La colonialidad del saber, p 91.
13
Aníbal Quijano, ‘Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina’, in Lander, La colonialidad del
saber, p 135.
14
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist
Struggles’, in Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, London: Duke
University Press, 2003, p 514.
15
Astrid Hadad, Forum Barcelona, 25 August 2004.
16
Hadad, Forum Barcelona.
17
Bertolt Brecht, ‘Brecht on Theatre’, in The Development of an Aesthetic, New York:Hill and Wang, 1964,
p 38.
18
Teatro de carpa or tent theatre is one of the marginal and itinerant versions of high theatre (opera, ballet, etc)
in Mexico. Unlike the also low-ranked revistas, teatro de carpa had an important political component. Both
became popular during the decades that followed the Mexican Revolution, 1910–1920 until the 1960s; it was
used to spread news and as an instrument that helped construct national identity by the national government.
It has been re-appropriated since the mid-1980s by new performers, like Jesusa Rodríguez, Regina Orozco,
Tito Vasconcelos and Astrid Hadad. Gastón Alzate, ‘Expandiendo los límites del teatro: una entrevista con
Astrid Hadad’, Latin American Theatre Review 30(2), 1997, pp 153–163.
19
Peter J García, ‘Ranchera’, in Cordelia Chávez Candelaria (ed), Encyclopedia of Latino Popular Culture,
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004, p 665.
20
Laura Gutiérrez, Performing Mexicanidad: Vendidas y Cabareteras on the Transnational Stage, Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2010, p 74.
21
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, New York: Routledge, 1994.
22
The china poblana skirt is long and wide, usually colourful, part of the traditional Mexican peasant dress and
another one of Hadad’s costume trademarks.
23
Esther Newton, Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1979, p 105.
24
Coco Fusco, English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas, New York: New Press, 1995.
25
Pamela Robertson, Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna, Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1996.
26
Other authors, like Susan Sontag, deny the political value of camp. According to Sontag, camp is
‘disengaged, depoliticized or at least apolitical’. Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp’, in Fabio Cleto (ed), Camp,
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999, p 55.
27
Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, p 19.
28
‘Del mar los vieron llegar/ mis hermanos emplumados/ eran los hombres barbados/ de la profecía esperada/ se
oyó la voz del monarca/ de que el dios había llegado./ y les abrimos la puerta/ por temor a lo ignorado/ …
Porque los dioses ni comen/ ni gozan con lo robado/ y cuando nos dimos cuenta/ ya todo estaba acabado./ y
en ese error entregamos/ la grandeza del pasado/ y en ese error nos quedamos/ trescientos años esclavos.’
205
29
Lucha Reyes was the first female singer who during the 1920s and 1930s performed rancheras with a strong
voice and an attitude that transgressed gender norms. Her personal life was also controversial due to her
alcoholism and rumours of her bisexuality.
30
Roselyn Constantino, ‘Politics and Culture in a Diva’s Diversion: The Body of Astrid Hadad in Performance’,
in Diana Taylor and Roselyn Constantino (eds), Holy Terrors: Latin American Women Perform, Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2003, p 179.
31
José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999, pp 97, 78, 121.
32
My emphasis. ‘Debo decirles que ésta canción está dedicada a la diosa más Antigua que es la “multimamada”
y bueno las multimamadas somos todas las mujeres porque, a pesar de que hemos progresado bastante, nos
sigue costando trabajo tener el mismo espacio que los hombres y de hecho, en México nosotros decimos que
la República Mexicana es una multimamada, porque la chupan y la chupan nuestros políticos y ella sigue
dando y dando con exuberancia […] Y quiero decirles que éste traje que ven, es una copia exacta de una
iglesia Mexicana, […] tiene 365 piezas, una por cada día del año, hechas a mano por un Obispo mexicano,
que prohibió mi espectáculo diciendo que yo era peligrosa, le dije “¿peligrosa yo, yo que soy una cabaretera
ilustrada, dadora de placer?” y después me puse a pensar y dije, “claro, claro que soy peligrosa porque no
pertenezco a la cofradía de pedófilos a la que pertenecen algunos curas y obispos, ¿verdad?”. Pero no quiero
que se inquieten, eso solo pasa en el tercer mundo, o sea en México, aquí en el primer mundo esas cosas no
suceden.’
33
Constantino, ‘Politics and Culture in a Diva’s Diversion’, p 179.
34
Gutiérrez, Performing Mexicanidad, p 20.
35
However, Mexico’s queer community has recognized her efforts for bending sexual and gender paradigms by
naming her queen of the Gay Parade in Mexico City.
36
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, New York: Routledge, 2007, p 147.
37
Hadad, quoted in Constantino, ‘Politics and Culture in a Diva’s Diversion’, p 189.
38
Lander, ‘Ciencias sociales: saberes colonials y eurocéntricos’, pp 4–5.
39
Walter D Mignolo, ‘Las humanidades y los estudios culturales: Proyectos intelectuales y exigencias
institucionales’, in Catherine E Walsh (ed), Estudios Culturales Latinoamericanos. Retos desde y sobre la
region Andina, Quito: Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, 2003, p 52.
40
‘El venadito es uno de los símbolos de Diana la cazadora y era la canción favorita de Frida Kahlo y cuando
ella pinta el venadito cada una de las flechas significaba cada uno de sus sufrimientos físicos, porque fue una
mujer que físicamente sufrió muchísimo, también emocionalmente, porque los cuernos son los que le ponía
Diego Rivera. Le hago éste homenaje porque para mí ella es como una semi-diosa porque, a pesar de todo lo
que sufrió, era una mujer muy alegre y gozaba muchísimo de la vida y se tiraba a todo el que pasaba en frente
de ella fuera hombre, mujer, palmera o quimera. Y por eso le hago éste homenaje, por gozosa y por su
habilidad para el marketing y con esto nos cercioramos de que nos van a contratar en todas partes, por
supuesto.’
41
Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth
Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York: Routledge, 1991,
pp 149–181.
42
Lugones, ‘Toward a Decolonial Feminism’, p 743.
43
Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, pp 149–181.
44
María Lugones, ‘Multiculturalismo radical y feminismos de mujeres de color’, Revista Internacional de
Filosofía Política 25, 2005, p 71.
45
‘En una noche de copas y locura, con amargura, la mire partir la cruel pebeta me arrojó en la jeta, sus
argumentos de orgía y bacanal en los amores tenés poca experiencia te falta ciencia regresa a tu bulín, no ves
que soy mujer, vos no me das placer, no siento nada, busca otro querer.’ (Pebeta is a short girl in Argentinean
slang Lunfardo; bulín is a bedroom in the same dialect.)
46
‘(Coro) No le encontré el punto G, no se ni dónde lo dejé y ella se burla je, je, je … creo que con Berta ya
bailé, no le encontré el punto G, ortografía reprobé, por eso canto yo en lunfardo, el tango del punto G. Loco
de celos le arranqué los pelos, de la cabeza, llorando la arrastré, más todo inútil fue, pues ella se encontró a un
marinero que sí sabía leer.’
47
María Lugones, ‘Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System’, Hypatia 22(1), 2007, p 186.
48
Hadad, quoted in Constantino, ‘Politics and Culture in a Diva’s Diversion’, p 97.
49
Castro-Gómez and Grosfoguel, El giro decolonial, p 13.
50
‘Llevar cabo “una confrontación directa con las jerarquías de raza, género y sexualidad, que fueron creadas o
fortalecidas por la modernidad europea, en el proceso de conquista y esclavización de un sinnúmero de
pueblos en el planeta”.’ Maldonado-Torres, ‘Sobre la colonialidad del ser’, p 161.
206

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Astrid Hadad: the cyborg goddess. Queer

Decolonizing gender is necessarily a praxical task. It is to enact a critique of

The theorizing efforts of the group Modernidad-Colonialidad (Modernity-

© 2014 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies

The queerest vision: political cabaret. Performing

When addressing the coloniality of power, most Latin American postcolonial

from Europeans and who immediately were deemed as inferior.

American academics and activists to have productive conversations with

Colonization in Latin America generated the erasure of indigenous knowledge,

engagement—even for women, we must remember that camp used to be

(an un-composer). In the context of the ‘Methodologies of the Oppressed’, or the

as it usually does, in order to create a new narrative of colonization and a different

As these lyrics demonstrate, Hadad’s shows cannot be considered light entertain-

The multimamada is, according to Hadad, a recurrent allegory of Mexican reality,

signifies ‘hateful women’. Divinas Pecadoras can be interpreted either as ‘divine

The cyborg goddess: a decolonizing episteme (decolonizing knowledge)

A cyborg: a female body that knows and can speak

According to Haraway, ‘A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of

“civilized” West’.47 It is precisely this kind of widespread violence against

Inclusive contradictions and the decolonization of the self: final remarks

perpetuates patriarchal institutions and a class system that manifests itself

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