Disobedient anonymity and the politics of protesting violence against women

Abstract

This article accounts for a particular kind of politicised anonymity, namely ‘disobedient anonymity’, that operates as a liberatory response to the longue durée of gender violence. We examine the street performance Un violador en tu camino created by the Chilean feminist theatre collective LASTESIS, to show how disobedient anonymity is an embodied and collective disruption of colonial subjectification and state-sanctioned gender violence. Building on the insights of the Argentinian decolonial feminist scholar Rita Segato's analysis of high-intensity patriarchy as well as discussions of perverse anonymity in critical phenomenology, we examine how disobedient anonymity operates in Un violador as an embodied practice that makes possible a decolonising, feminist liberatory public. We argue that through the deployment of disobedient anonymity, Un violador re-territorialises and re-temporalises colonial fields of sens. In doing so, it institutes a new form of political subjectivity that upends colonial logics.