As an event for the Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) 50 Years celebration, Mariana Ortega came to the University of Connecticut to present her talk on “Ambiguity, Aesthesis and Resistance: A Lugonesian Approach.” Ortega is a professor of philosophy and WGSS at Pennsylvania State University.
Her work dives into theories proposed by women of color, usually Latina feminism. For her presentation on Friday, March 22, Ortega brought up the work of Maria Lugones. Lgones was a feminist philosopher from Argentina who lived from 1944 to 2020. Ortega specifically cited Lugones’ book “Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions.”
Her presentation aimed to “highlight the key role of the aesthetic or the perceptual in Lugones’ view of trespassing,” and to “introduce the notion of aesthetic trespassing in connection to the perception of artwork,” Ortega stated.
To kick off the presentation, Ortega displayed a photograph of a sculpture titled “Cama,” or “Bed” in English. It was created by Feliza Bursztyn in 1974 and shows something being covered by a large, red cloth. The sculpture was accompanied by music, and the motor underneath the cloth would create a vibrating motion to the art piece. The Hammer Museum website displays an image of the sculpture and describes it as “the suggestive movements of the beds alluded to the sexual and the forbidden, suggesting intertwined couples in motion. ‘Las camas’ presented a tragicomic portrait of Colombia, and the works caused an uproar when they were first exhibited.”
Ortega used “Cama” to describe Lugones’ point because it forced her to question herself. “What lies underneath? What’s being made visible with its very invisibility?” Ortega asked. She connected the underlying message of “Cama” with Lugones’ notion that resistance comes in more forms than just revolution. Ortega described Lugones’ idea of active subjectivity, a minimal form of resistance by an oppressed group. Ortega gave examples of someone taking pens from their workplace or selling fake Gucci bags as a side hustle. While not an overt act against the system, active subjectivity is, in a way, sticking it to the system.
To explore this idea, Ortega described how active subjectivity is highly attenuated or weakened yet turns the relation away from the individual to the larger group. Essentially, it turns the “I” into a “We” idea. Ortega explained it as a streetwalker, “walking the maps of oppression and responding to it rather than openly acting against it.”
Lugones’ idea differs from that of other philosophers or theorists in that it highlights the agency of those who seemingly do not engage in a revolution against their oppressors.
Desirae Sin, Staff Writer
Ortega suggested that these streetwalkers operate through the idea of duplicitous perception, which she defines in two ways. The first would be through double perception, which is a “high degree of uncertainty. Treads in the fragility of sense — disrupts or breaks normative, prescribed sense,” Ortega described. The second is the devious definition of being the “trickster or fool. Animate themselves in ambiguous ways, resisting animating even caricatures of themselves.”
The first definition relates to the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, another feminist scholar that Lugones was inspired by. In Anzaldúa’s book “Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza,” she describes ambiguity as “turning ambivalence into something else.” She highlights the role of ambiguity in the context of resistance as choosing between options as well as moments of “intimate terrorism,” despair, fear and creative and existential blocks, according to Ortega.
Ortega also calls the actions of the streetwalker trespassing and shows that resistance is dependent on the general perceptual capabilities of active subjectivity. These “aesthetic moments of specifically creative, artistic endeavors or practices that open possibilities of trespassing or enact it” open the door to other forms of resistance, Ortega commented.
To end the presentation, Ortega spoke about perception and Anzaldúa’s idea that the deepening of perception comes from the “Coatlicue” state. Ortega detailed this state as being frozen in a paralytic state of fear. It’s from this paralysis that people can deepen their understanding of the world. “I read her as saying ‘learn to see, to sense, to touch, we’ve forgotten how,’” Ortega said. “We’ve been trained to see the world in very specific ways.”
All of these theorists’ work harkens back to a movement for anticolonialism and viewing it through a feminist lens. Seeing artwork as an act of resistance is important for understanding the fight against oppression. Ortega brought the discussion back to “Cama” and how it made her feel. “I cannot stop looking at that silky red drape, asking me to touch it,” Ortega said. “What do I experience? Intimacy. The cloth becomes bloody red skin. This dress we wear every day, it dresses the invisible.”