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"Land Defense and Counterfactual Mourning”

In response to the sustained violence faced by Indigenous land defenders in Mexico, aesthetic modes of mourning and resistance have tended toward the revenant depiction of land defenders as heroic martyrs. This elegiac response is understandable, even necessary, given attempts by extractive interests to delegitimize land defenders. Yet in this talk, I examine how land defense has also been generatively represented through more irreverent, ludic aesthetic modes that present land defenders not only as heroes but also as desiring and rageful feminist subjects. To do so, I focus on queer performance artist Naomi Rincón Gallardo’s Trilogía de cuevas, a performance series about feminist land defense in Oaxaca and Zacatecas. Through raucous songs and sensual dance, Rincón Gallardo foregrounds the importance of female pleasure in land defense and in the task of imagining of a world organized by desires other than profit. This work illustrates the rise of subjunctive aesthetic modes in response to environmental crisis and violence, modes that seek to go beyond what is and to imagine what could be or what should be.