new trans-lations

Russell Christie leads a collective reading session on the work of philosopher, drag queen, and activist Giuseppe Campuzano.

 

More than a decade ago the Peruvian philosopher and drag queen Giuseppe Campuzano (Lima, 1969) created the ephemeral project called Museo Travesti del Perú (Transvestite Museum of Peru). Founded in 2004, the museum was an attempt at a queer counter-reading and promiscuous intersectional thinking of history, one that collected objects, images, texts and documents, press clippings, and appropriated artworks in order to propose actions, stagings, and publications that would fracture the heterosexual spatio-temporality and the dominant models of production of bodies.

 

The project, halfway between performance and historical research, proposed a critical revision of the so-called “history of Peru” from the strategic perspective of a fictional figure he called the “androgynous indigenous / mestizo transvestite.” Campuzano, and indeed all the museum’s operations, demonstrated a profound distrust of the apparent transparency of images that lay claim to social representation, instead deploying the transvestite strategic gesture as the possibility of betraying their meanings and subverting their uses in the public sphere. There is no other truth in these signs than the processes of transformation and dis-identification through which one body can become another. No other reality exists than their frauds and displacements. A new, more fabulous and joyous truth emerges from this very artifice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Russell Christie is a novelist, essayist and cultural commentator with Nottingham’s Shady Cow Collective. In the 1980s, he was a member of the National Lesbian and Gay Youth Movement and subsequently was an active gay rights campaigner with Queer Nation and Outrage. He lived a counter-cultural lifestyle in San Francisco and New York in the 1990s and is now a member of the Radical Faeries of Albion, enjoying dancing, drag and drumming every full moon. His travel journalism has appeared in Gay Times and The Pink Paper and his first novel, The Queer Diary of Mordred Vienna, was published in 2015.