Illness is a Body that Feels:
A Crippled Look at Pedro Lemebel and João Pedro Rodrigues

Javier Acevedo Nieto (Universidad de Salamanca)

“What you are left with in the end, as a weapon, is the body, an assaulted, beaten body. That is what the political body is, the torn body”. This statement by the Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel in the documentary Lemebel (Joanna Reposi Garibaldi, 2019) sums up an aesthetic and political project centered on reconciliation with one’s own body: a territorialization of the queer subject. Lemebel’s performances and writings made up a type of bastard writing with which the artist always claimed a vital experience from the margins, a biopolitical subject whose writing and enunciating position was situated on the border of those who do not look straight, as Anzaldúa (1987) affirmed. In this sense, the films of Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues join a current of queer artists who have problematized the idea of desire, reflections on the body, and the representation of sexual experience in the audiovisual field.

The video essay traces some constants of the Chilean writer’s work from Reposi Garibaldi’s documentary: illness as a construct of identity and the use of performance as a vehicle to propose a political imaginary that charged both against the dictatorship and against the ostracism towards the LGTBIQ+ collective promoted by a certain sector of the Chilean left. As Sontag (1996) asserted, illnesses, in addition to physical or mental pathologies, take the form of socio-discursive schemes that carry specific and historical cultural values and meanings. This idea of pathology is not only present in Lemebel’s work, but Rodrigues himself uses different illnesses (physical and mental pathologies) in order to represent queer subjects in a permanent identity crisis that finds its palliative in a way of understanding illness (as was the case with the Chilean artist’s work) as a sign of identity of its own outside the conventions of the cis-hetero world.

Can illness be a meeting point for tracing a genealogy of queer artists? The video essay attempts to answer this question by connecting fragments of the Chilean writer’s work with fragments of the Portuguese director’s filmography in a non-linear analysis that employs the irony of both artists. The aim is to show the importance of the body and the need for illness in both authors in order to insinuate an idea of the queer subject as an individual who occupies a space for difference (Torras Francés, 2021).

Therefore, the video aims to reflect the connection between the idea of illness in the work of Lemebel and Rodrigues based on specific themes in their works: sex, artistic pastiche, irony, and the relevance of the soundscape. The conception of the video has been inspired by texts such as Silvestri (2017) or Flores (2008) that show a dissident attitude against certain forms of writing and analysis in the academy while at the same time propose critical practices based on an “oblique point of view” (Wittig, 2006). The piece does not aim to offer a narrative analysis or a dissection of formal or thematic elements, but to construct a series of free associations that show different ways of seeing and understanding illness: from the potential of the crippled body (McRuer, 2006) to the one-eyed gaze (Roig, 1995) and re-visioning (Rich, 1983), queer theory has underpinned the theoretical approach.

Furthermore, the piece is part of an investigation focused on the representation and reception of the queer experience online. The images of Pedro Lemebel and João Pedro Rodrigues are confronted in a work of “libido decorticandi” (Aumont, 1990) in which small scenes are used to construct a free piece that is traversed by new ways of consuming images on the internet such as framing (Rodríguez Serrano, 2015) or the use of glitch filters that break with the image format. The restructuring of social relations in queer technological circuits (Cowan and Rault, 2018) comes at a time when cyberspace has lost its disruptive and novel character. As Chun (2016) notes, new media in the 1990s proposed new queer ways of mediating sexuality, politics, and identity. Today, the frenetic pace of technological innovation has led to a situation where every new medium is, at the same time, an update of a past medium (Chun, 2016). For this reason, the audiovisual essay is based on the current trend of queer virtuality (Atay, 2017), which studies the creation of artistic pieces on social networks by the collective based on experimental techniques such as glitch art (Menkman, 2011; Betancourt, 2016) or datamoshing (Betancourt, 2022). In this way, the aim is to connect the work of two key authors through the creative reconciliation between illness and queer body. To this end, a creative editing process has been added that, through the aesthetics of old media (the use of VHS filters, chromatic aberrations, analogue signals, and its own effects), aims to transmit the idea that the glitch or computer error is a virtual continuation of these forms of representing pathology and the queer subject that increasingly has a place in the way young audiences look at the work of artists such as Pedro Lemebel or João Pedro Rodrigues.

Bibliography

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• Flores, V. (2008). Entre secretos y silencios. La ignorancia como política de conocimiento y práctica de (hetero) normalización. Trabajo Social UNAM, 18.
• Lemebel, P. (2018). Manifiesto Hablo por mi diferencia. Ediciones PapelNegr0.
• Lemebel, P. (2019). No tengo amigos, tengo amores: extractos de entrevistas a Pedro Lemebel. Alquimia Ediciones.
• Menkman, R. (2011). The glitch moment (um) (Vol. 4). Institute of Network Cultures.
• Mcruer, R. (2006). Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. NYU Press.
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• Silvestri, L. (2017). Games of Crohn: diarios de una internación. Queen Ludd.
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Filmography

• Pedro Rodrigues, J., Guerra da Mata, J.R. (Directores). (2012). A Última Vez Que Vi Macau [Película]. Epicentre Films, Blackmaria.
• Pedro Rodrigues, J., Guerra da Mata, J.R. (Directores). (2011). Alvorada Vermelha [Película]. Blackmaria.
• Pedro Rodrigues, J., Guerra da Mata, J.R. (Directores). (2007). Mahjong [Película]. China, China.
• Pedro Rodrigues, J. (Director). (2022). Fogo Fátuo [Película]. House on Fire, Filmes Fantasma, Terratreme Filmes.
• Pedro Rodrigues, J., Guerra da Mata, J.R. (Directores). (2013). Mahjong [Película]. Curtas-Metragens.
• Pedro Rodrigues, J. (Director). (2009). Morrer Como Um Homem [Película]. Rosa Filmes.
• Pedro Rodrigues, J. (Director). (2013). O Corpo de Afonso [Película]. Blackmaria.
• Pedro Rodrigues, J. (Director). (2005). Odete [Película]. Rosa Filmes.
• Pedro Rodrigues, J. (Director). (2013). O Fantasma [Película]. Rosa Filmes.
• Pedro Rodrigues, J. (Director). (2016). O Ornitólogo [Película]. Blackmaria.
• Reposi Garibaldi, J. (Directora). (2019). Lemebel [Película]. Solita Producciones.