Sinvergüencería: A Decolonial Aesthetic Strategy in Feminist Queer Disidentificatory Performance

PhD defence by Brenda Amaru Ibarra Olguin

Assessment Committee

Professor Anne Ring Petersen, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen (Chairperson)
Associate Professor Leticia Alvarado, American Studies and Ethnic Studies, Brown University
Associate Professor Derek Pardue, School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University

Supervisors

Associate Professor Karen Arnfred Vedel
Assistant Professor Ivan Ramos

Department

Department of Arts and Cultural Studies

Place

Building: 21, Room: 21-0-54, Karen Blixens Vej 1, 2300 Køvenhavn S

Email address to gain access to the thesis: bren.amaru@gmail.com.
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Short description of the thesis

This dissertation examines shame as a historically sedimented affective formation unevenly attached to racialized, feminine-gendered, and queer bodies under coloniality. Through analyses of works by US-based Latinx artists Alma López, Xandra Ibarra, and Laura Aguilar, it traces how shame clusters around transnational Latinidad, shaping questions of belonging and cultural legibility. It develops sinvergüencería as a decolonial aesthetic strategy that works within the taint of shame, redirecting its affective force through disidentificatory performance. Rather than overcoming shame, sinvergüencería exposes colonial formations shaping bodily visibility, propriety, and legibility, while opening embodied modes of critique, anti-assimilationist relation, and decolonial worldmaking. It approaches sinvergüencería as an aesthetic practice, an analytic, and a methodological orientation.