Performing Dissent in the Streets of Globalisation: The Right to the City

Περίληψη

My interest in this essay lies with practices that appear to embody or to enact claims to the right of the global-urban fabric by protesting different facets of neoliberal capitalism’s violence and its counterparts: patriarchy, colonialism, ecological destruction. The main example I will be looking at is the activist performance Un Violador en tu Camino (A Rapist in your Path) by Chilean collective LASTESIS that was first performed in Valparaiso (2019) and was subsequently repeated in many cities around the globe. As neoliberal urbanisation strengthens inequalities and proliferates experiences of precarity, this performance creates spaces for female bodies and femininities; spaces where particular kinds of violence might be resisted. I propose a reading of this performance framed by Wendy Brown’s call for a re-invigoration of radical politics away from “Left Melancholy” which inhabits spaces “not in hopefulness but in its marginality and failure” (Brown, 1999, p. 26). In this context I ask: how might the performance intervention launched by LASTESIS rehearse a renewed right to urban life and in so doing show us a way out of Left Melancholy? What kinds of geographies and ecologies do such dissenting practices produce and inhabit?