How can contemporary queer art challenge violently-imposed colonial models of gendered personhood? What futures become imaginable if we look to Indigenous ideas of embodiment that refuse not just rigid divisions between male and female, but also fixed boundaries between humans and animals, and between social and cosmological structures? These are some of the questions GWSS major Fiona Rivera explores in her newly published article.
Rivera’s article, “Queer Animality and Andean Cosmology: Dismantling Spanish Colonialism through Contemporary Peruvian Artistry,” builds on her Mellon Grant-funded research. The article examines how contemporary Peruvian artist Javi Vargas engages the Andean “third-gender spiritual figure of the quariwarmi” to challenge colonial frameworks of racialized masculinity and femininity. Rivera combines a close analysis of three of Vargas’ art pieces with an historical account of quariwarmi social identity and its cosmological relationship to chuquichinchay, a deity “expressed through a representation of a jaguar as the patron of third-gender individuals.”
“Queer Animality and Andean Cosmology” is featured in the Spring 2025 volume of Intarsia, a student-led, peer-reviewed, open-access journal of undergraduate queer and feminist scholarship. You can read it now on Intarsia's website!
Congratulations, Fiona, on contributing this important scholarship to the field of queer and feminist studies!