The Forgotten Flesh: Confronting Western Epistemologies through Parody in Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco's The Couple in the Cage (1992)

Introduction

Celia Martínez-Sáez's article examines Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco's performance piece, The Couple in the Cage (1992).
The article analyzes the performance within the context of the 500th anniversary of the Conquista of the Americas.
The performance challenges Western epistemologies and the dehumanization of non-white bodies through parody.

The Contemporary Impact of Colonialism

Examples of modern-day violence and inequities demonstrate the continued existence of modes of being (sub)human.
Mexico has the highest number of diabetes-related deaths in Latin America, disproportionately affecting indigenous and rural populations due to Coca-Cola addiction.
The Guaraní population fights against the expropriation of their lands.
Amnesty International has warned of the murders of indigenous populations in Colombia.
These examples highlight the ongoing consequences of the colonial apparatus and racial project impacting non-white/non-Western bodies.

Decolonial Theory and the Construction of the Human

Decolonial theory examines the construction of the category of "human" dating back to 1492.
Sylvia Wynter describes "Man" as overrepresented as the generic human, with subjugated "Human Others" (Indians and Negroes).
Racialization is a project of humanization or dehumanization in service of the colonial apparatus.
Anibal Quijano's concept of "coloniality of power" examines how structures formed during the Conquista established economic, sexual, racial, and epistemological domination that persists today.

Confronting Western Epistemologies

Dismantling a supposed "natural" order of things, particularly deconstructing Western epistemologies, is necessary to fight the colonial order.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos suggests bridging the abyss of impossibility by playing an intellectual-activist role, communicating the unsayable to create new possibilities.
Performance art is presented as a potentiality, allowing rehearsal and reenactment of different ways of existing and challenging the preponderance of writing in Western epistemologies.
Performance functions as an alternative way of transmitting social knowledge and memory through the body.

The Couple in the Cage: A Performance Analysis

The performance The Couple in the Cage by Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco was part of the Guatinaui World Tour in 1992.
It took place in locations with long-lasting traditions of exoticizing the racial "Other".
The artists lived in a golden cage dressed as "undiscovered Amerindians" from a fictitious tribe called Guatinaui.
Coco Fusco and Paula Heredia produced a video of the performance, creating a "double staging".
The artists performed in institutionalized places of history (museums, plazas) to symbolize a countermemory, linking racism in ethnographic paradigms with exoticizing rhetoric of multiculturalism.
Critics often interpret the performance as an act of "reverse ethnography".
Diane Taylor sees danger in reversing the epistemology of studying the "Other," potentially reproducing hierarchies.
The author argues to go beyond a simple reversion and contends that the parody confronts the naturalized Western dehumanization of nonwhite bodies.
The spectators' incredulity symbolizes the impossibility of returning to an undiscovered past.

The Conquista All Over Again?

In 1992 Spain commemorated the 500th anniversary of the Conquista with monuments, films, and simulated voyages.
These commemorations reinforce the principle of nonhomogeneity and the separation of "true" protagonists from secondary, subhuman individuals.
The performance of The Couple in the Cage breaks with the Western epistemology of memory that relies on linear narratives perpetuating a specific version of the past.
Joseph Roach proposes the term "circum-Atlantic world" to emphasize the centrality of diasporic and genocidal histories in the creation of modernity.
Roach changes the concept of discovery to a category of invention.
The performance reinscribes the past through the staging of an impossible return, acknowledging the massacre and animalization of human beings.

Audience Reactions and Misjudgments

Audience comments reveal the internalized role of the nonhomogeneity principle, constructing an "us" versus racially different "others".
A child's comment about cannibalism reflects the survival of Western imagination's animalization of nonwhite races.
Adults struggle to understand the criticism of colonialism, revealing an internalization of the colonizer role.
Attempts to dismiss the performance as a joke neglect the reinscription of history and infantilize the performers.

Interruption of Habit and Contextual Collisions

Doris Sommer's concept of "interruption of habit" is essential to understanding how the performance inserts itself in different contexts, causing necessary confusion.
The performance imitates commemorative ceremonies, incorporates the ethnographic tradition of exhibiting bodies, and gestures toward a continuation of practices symbolizing hidden memory.

Flesh as Revolution

Audience members' comments about the performers' whiteness exemplify the colonial mindset's need to know the racial Other.
Homi Bhabha explains the fetishism of the colonial fantasy, where the colonizer's gaze erases the differences of the colonized subject.

Opacity and Black Feminist Thought

The Guatinauis' inability to speak Spanish, invented language, and intermingling of primitive clothing with modern habits unsettle the spectator.
The provoked confusion can be understood as a way of being opaque to protect against the Western epistemology of knowing and discovering.
Saidiya Hartman emphasizes opacity in the context of the black female body, which is often considered transparent and accessible to Western knowledge.
Ambivalence functions as an escape from compulsory transparent constructions.
Indigenous and black bodies have been read in terms of hypervisibility and invisibility.
The performance critiques the ethnographic tradition of body display.

Objecthood and Performance

Uri McMillan explores the concept of "body as an object" in performance art to subvert cultural norms and explore social issues.
Objectifying the artists through parody within an ethnographic tradition allows for an origination of an opaque space.

Latina Writers and the Flesh

Latina writers locate the flesh as the center of the Latina experience.
Cherríe Moraga suggests that theory in the flesh fuses physical realities to create a politic born out of necessity.
Anita [Max Wolf] Valeria asserts that life is a continuous whole from flesh to spirit.
Norma Alarcón contemplates the reevaluation of "flesh" as a reinscription of Chicanas as real agents in history.

Reincarnating the Flesh

The author ties the performance's display of prisoned bodies to previous conceptions of flesh in black and Latina feminist thought.
The transformative process of the body into an object gives agency to these bodies and reinscribes the wounded flesh.
By reincarnating the flesh into hypervisibility and opacity through parody, the performance disrupts narrative coherence and epic linearity.

Parody and Ambivalence

Parody offers a perspective on the present and the past, allowing artists to speak to a discourse from within it without being recuperated by it.
Parody leaves room for ambivalence and can serve as a critique indirectly.
The Couple in the Cage offers articulations of the past with the present through parody.

Conclusions

Performance has the power to intervene in narratives of (de)humanizing processes since 1492.
The performance acts as a countercelebration of the colonial project, inserting itself in the tradition of exhibiting Amerindians and Afro-descendent human beings.
The performance opens the door for reinscribing (de)humanizing practices by bringing the concept of the flesh back into commemorative ceremonies.
The parody of the "undiscovered Amerindians" reflects the impossibility of going back to an epistemologically "undiscovered" past but disrupts linear narratives.
The parodic elements unsettle the audience and construct an opacity that denies the audience the possibility to discover the two indigenous subjects.
The use of the body to publicly embody these issues confronts long-established traditions.
The body offers opportunities to confront the present, dialoguing with the past and opening new paths.

Notes

The attire was a mixture of stereotypical exotic and primitive clothing juxtaposed with Western elements. (feathers, a leopard mask, painted faces).
One of the commemorative movies states that “the most exciting part of the adventure is the tale that has never been told” exemplifying the concept of “transparency” characteristic of the ontology of coloniality explained above.

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