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Article published In:
Transnational discourses of peripheral sexualities in the Hispanic world
Edited by Michael J. Horswell and Nuria Godón
[Journal of Language and Sexuality 5:2] 2016
► pp. 222–249

“The museum, cross-dressed as a museum”

Neo-Baroque language and peripheral activist aesthetics in El museo travesti del Perú

| Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, USA
This article explicates the discursive strategies deployed by the curator of the Museo travesti de Perú (2008), philosopher, activist, and artist Giuseppe Campuzano (1969–2013), to explore theoretical intersections of national identity and globalization(s) and to appreciate a testimonial, Neo-Baroque, peripheral aesthetic that challenges and “decolonizes” the cultural history of peripheral genders and sexualities in Latin American countries like Peru. Through an analysis of the museum’s visual codes in its works of art and a discursive interpretation of the narratives framing those pieces, this essay demonstrates how the Museo travesti is an exaltation of difference and a critical agent for a citizenship of inclusion — a testimonial agent that activates and circulates works of art in order to not only promote knowledge of reality, but to transform that reality through effects of decolonization from the national periphery.
Keywords: decolonization, travesti, Severo Sarduy, Giuseppe Campuzano, Neo-Baroque, Latin America, Peru, testimonio, peripheral sexuality, museum, transgender, critical discourse analysis
Published online: 29 September 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.5.2.05hor
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