LASTESIS on embodying collective dialogue

A performance of A Rapist in your path in 2019. Photo courtesy LASTESIS.

Opinion • LASTESIS • June 13, 2025 • Leer en castellano

LASTESIS is a trans-inclusive feminist collective made up of organizers and performers from Valparaíso, Chile, best known for their performance A rapist in your path. At the end of May, collective members planned to travel to San Francisco for the annual meeting of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), which took place under the banner: “Bodies on the line in Latinx America.” One of the collective members couldn’t travel because she hit the wall that the Trump administration is building: her visa was canceled. Another comrade managed to attend, but only after immigration authorities subjected her to an aggressive interrogation upon her arrival in California. Collective members Daffne Valdés Vargas, who was present, and Sibila Sotomayor Van Rysseghem, who was online, read the following text during a panel at LASA in San Francisco, which also included Rita Segato and Verónica Gago. Ideas are alive, as our compañeras say, and they can transcend walls and borders. —Eds.

Ideas are alive. The bodies of those who think them, who act upon them and who push them forward bring them alive. Ideas are contagious. They’re alive in dialogue with bodies driven by other ideas. Ideas are alive in bodies brought together as one, in a collective, taking action in public space, set in motion by everyday urgencies. Sometimes these ideas are not even big ideas. They may reflect a minor concern, a doubt, a small certainty, but sometimes a tiny flame spreads slowly and ultimately burns everything in its path. 

As a collective, we treasure the small certainties that we’ve acquired by living and embodying the blaze of trans-inclusive feminist performance action. We embrace a streetwise, almost spontaneous, rebellious spirit that pays no heed to hierarchies and mobilizes out of rage. 

Here, in our little troves of fiction and non-fiction, we share some of the methodologies of anti-patriarchal, anti-colonial, anti-capitalist and anti-neoliberal resistance that we’ve learned and taught each other in practice through the momentum of bodies in action.

Ideas in collective movement

One small certainty, which may seem redundant but that we’d like to mention is that collective dialogue plays a crucial role. We can think of a collective as consisting of two people or a thousand. It can be ephemeral, appearing and disappearing as needed. And of course collective dialogue can occur at a distance, between disciplines, and in various formats. Dialogue can also take place without permission.

One example of this is when we borrowed Rita Segato's ideas about the rape mandate—which, we understand, pushes cis men to prove their virility to their peers by exercising sexual violence against women and dissidents. Segato unknowingly prompted us to engage the subject deeply. We made a somewhat disrespectful dialogue of it by transforming her ideas into song and dance in a collective, collaborative experience. Those ideas and experiences now live within us, taking root, blending and mixing with other ideas and experiences that have accumulated in our bodies, continuing to move and engage in dialogue and collective action with other people and ideas.

We also borrowed Verónica Gago's call to change everything through feminist power. This power has moved thousands, millions, in the global south, who in turn disrupted how politics takes place in the global north. It is in this power and in these collective, collaborative strategies that our distinctive power connects us to other territories. This time it’s the north's turn to learn from the south. 

These embodied, accumulated experiences are performative in the sense that they are individually and collectively transformative, even though may not always spur action on a large societal scale. They are not always widespread, visible or public. 

There is a lot of talk about the impending “defeat” of the feminist and dissident movement. We know that this is inaccurate, but we also aren’t interested in being trite and overly optimistic. We seek to understand that the spaces and scenes of our struggles are as diverse as those who participate in them.

Not everything is ostentatious. We prefer to leave epics to “heroes,” who are far removed from us. Historically we have organized on the margins, rebelling against hegemonies. It is in the micro-political sphere that the performative power of trans-inclusive feminism continues to mobilize, often pushing to the point of exhaustion. 

And it is exhausting. It’s tiring to insist, to push our demands and condemn injustices with sweat on our brows. The ideas that motivate us and allow us to navigate the obstacles that we encounter live in each of us. These ideas have learned to coexist in opposition to each other: we are at once part of an oppressed territory and fitted with tools of resistance. This tension is not new. It’s something we have understood for a long time and our experience traveling to this event highlighted it once again.

A performance of Rélampago by two members of LASTESIS. Photo © Diego Álvarez.

Bodies under threat

Our ideas about what we wanted to convey at this meeting changed after we traveled to the United States. To be at this conference today, we had to face more state violence. We’re here to express ideas that reveal our traumas and wounds as well as our joyful commitment to the power of trans-inclusive feminism.

One of our members is still at home in Valparaíso, Chile. The day before her flight, authorities in the United States told her that they had revoked her visa. Another is physically present, but only after immigration authorities interrogated her exhaustively, recording our history as friends, creators and activists. Once again, the body is excluded and detained, and what it is or isn’t permitted to act upon is conditioned.

We will hold onto this experience as a collective because it speaks volumes about the political climate of terror that the state perpetuates. For us, it is not only a personal attack, but also one on the collective. And we know that we are privileged when compared to the thousands, if not millions, that immigration authorities violently persecute in this country and at its borders.

This happens in a context in which the fascist threat is no longer imminent, but actually existing here in the north for some time now, as well as having arrived in the south. We watch this unfold with profound fear, sadness and despair, but also with a deep anger at the fascist violence that targets the most vulnerable, including women and [sexual and gender] dissidents, among many others.

We are in danger today. Our bodies are under threat. 

We face persecution not only by politicians and laws, but also from civilians who believe that they can attack us with impunity. They target women, migrants, trans people, racialized people, transfeminist activists, queer activists, activists against genocide and for a free Palestine. As Rita told us the other day, you cannot talk about feminism in the global south without raising the genocide in Palestine. Activists, human rights defenders and environmental defenders have been persecuted and forcibly disappeared. We still don’t know what happened to Julia Chuñil and her dog Cholito.

In the trenches

Resist violence: we have embraced and practiced this slogan for years, throughout student and feminist uprisings, in moments of hope and despair. Today we resist fascism in the only way we can: through collective and collaborative action, through the transformative power of street performance, on the stage, in everyday life and in intimate and micro-political spaces.

This is our terrain of struggle. Our bodies unite collectively in a common battle for an idea. We seek access to abortion and laws that protect gender identity. We call for a revolution that will end the patriarchal, colonial and neoliberal system, burn everything down and create a new way of inhabiting the world. 

There is no doubt that our impulse is utopian, but our struggle takes place over the short, medium and long term. And the need for change is so profound and extensive. We would rather throw the dice than fold.