PAREDES, JULIETA. The neocolonial queer.

The global trajectories of queerness: re-

thinking same-sex politics in the Global South. Boston: Brill Rhodopsin, vol. 30, 2015, pp.
229-240.
What is queer?
 [229] the author starts defining the phenomenon of postmodernity because of the
“left’s disenchantment and neoliberalism’s existential dissatisfaction”. As political
movement, had developed “just superficially the criticisms that social and anti-
systemic movements have brought up in their struggle for justice, freedom, love and
pleasure, among other things.” Furthermore, the feminism locked in the postmodernity
perspective is not exempt of critics.
One of those critics is the fact that the most analyzes of postmodernity “have long been
making [by feminists that are not necessarily engaged with this point of view], presented as
something new and seemingly revolutionary, critiques such as the over-coming of gender. For
this purpose supposedly new subjects have been created: that which is called trans, that which
actually transits from one to the other pole of the heteronormative binary, from female to
masculine and male to feminine, in addition, [230] to female transsexuals, female transvestites
and drag artists. What is new about that? Are these role exchanges of any use in fighting
violence against women and lesbians, who are impoverished by the system?”
Colonialism and communitarian feminism
 The concept of colonial penetration as a reference to the colonial’s territorial invasion
and the violation of female bodies.
“Colonial penetration: two concept words, combining the notion of penetration as the act of
introducing one element into another, and colonial as the invasion and further domination of
the territory of others. Since words are auditory forms that take position facing the discursive
hegemonies of power, we can say that colonial penetration evokes coital penetration as an
image of the violence of colonial invasion.”
“We don’t mean that all coital penetration or penetration in general is necessarily violent,
rather what we mean is that colonization had a violent and phallocentric charge over our
bodies and our history, and this violence has a high proportion of sexual violence, in terms of
the imposition of mandatory heterosexuality, the condemnation of desire by the moral norms
of the Catholic Church and the rape of our great-great-grandmothers.”
 Paredes points to the fact that the notion of colonial penetration is not discussed or
considered in political analysis – in fact, we cannot merely observe this topic in the
studies of decolonization: why? Then, if this factor were considered as an analysis
variable, would imply questioning the heterosexuality.
“Colonialism and the colonial, as noted above, are derived from their meaning as the invasion
of a power in a foreign territory through evident or subtle violence. The object of colonialism,
besides enjoying the usufruct of the products of the colonized territories, is to invade and
colonize the bodies of the colonized, women and men, to take their ajayus, their spirits, to
alienate and occupy them until achieving the internalization of the invaders in the territories
of the body, their subjectivity and their identity concepts.”
Colonial invasion then, not only penetrated territories of what is currently called Bolivia, but
also extended to the bodies of the women and men who lived in this Pachamama (aymara and
Quechua: world mother).
 The process of blanquiamento [231]: which means “the internalization of the colonial
invaders in the bodies and spirits (ajayus) produces, as constituting one of the most
significant achievements of colonialism”.
Our lesbian feminist bodies and gender
 The term of warmipacha, considered, in Aymara communities, the time and the space
that refers only to women.
 The concept of gender, according to Paredes:

[232] “Gender is not only a descriptive category, it is also a performative category, it

is a political category of denunciation and indignation, of the oppressive existence in
which our women’s bodies live. The de-politicization of gender is a result of the
economic and political needs of neoliberal patriarchy, namely to dilute the anti-
dictatorial political accumulation of Latin American feminists, and to reduce the
political category of gender to a merely role-descriptive concept imposed by society.”

“The mere description of roles does not suffice to denounce the hierarchical relation of
privilege and power established between them, not by virtue of the roles alone, but
also because the discrimination of women was originally on the grounds of nothing
else other than their being women. That is to say that no matter what men do, they will
always be better valued, it doesn’t matter if they come into the kitchen, if they cry, if
they are academics, trans or tailors, they are worth more than female cooks, weepy
women, female academics, trans or seamstresses.”
We make theory from our female bodies
What it means to be women? How our bodies and what we do with them reflect in our
behaviors?
“Our female bodies are so marked, so assimilated, so knocked over, that all those years of
struggle, theories and social practices can give us hints but not certainties in this construction
of ourselves that feminists are engaged in.”
“[...] what is really happening is that arrogant patriarchy once again shamelessly denies our
bodies, the history of our bodies, sexualities and women’s corporeal natures? They deny our
bodies under the pretext of new theories and new identities.”
“In no way are we talking about essentialisms, biologisms or naturalisms: when we say
“woman” we are using the term as a political category of revealing the oppressive relation
between bodies. To name our collective practice as women is indispensable.”
[233] “We do not tell stories or give testimonies; we name what we do, and that, to us, is
theorizing, there is no practice without theory, but there are theories without practice. We are
the mouth expressing the thoughts that move our bodies towards their desires, pleasures and
utopias.”
Dressing up for rebellion
“As opposed to those who choose European and North American fashion to rethink their
bodies in terms of so-called queer perfomativities, I refashion my lesbian body in my
grandmother’s clothes. I am a lesbian chola1 when I want to. I take distance; we distance
ourselves from those current performative fashions, which are accomplices of the patriarchal
system recycling itself. Both politically and historically, we link our rebellion to that of those
bodies who dressed and appeared in public in the midst of a racist and lesbophobic society.”
We risk the body
“And evidently present in my body is the soil fertilized by my rebellious grandmothers,
anarchists, crazy indigenous Aymara women who denounced both the Spanish man and the
patriarchal Aymara brother, who joined in holy alliance with the Spanish, taking away the
lands cultivated by the women who inhabited this part of the planet.”
“Finally, the patriarchal system insists on regulating and controlling our lives, in order for us
to live with the phallus in our bodies, that colonial, neoliberal, capitalist, lesbophobic and
earth-predator phallus. [...] Our bodies and our freedom demand a process of change, which is
not simply a reform, but a process of revolutionary changes. [234] For it to be revolutionary,
one of our tasks is to denounce and contest heteronormativity.”