Chola Contravisual Contemporary Peruvian feminist narratives of re-existence and liminality

This Research Paper has two main purposes: firstly, to locate Chola Contravisual feminist collective in the context of feminism in Peru and secondly, to explore the contemporary Peruvian feminist narratives from Chola Contravisual autonomous collective thoroughly. The paper is epistemologically and methodologically informed by approaches derived from the-ories of the margins: decolonial theory and decolonial feminist approaches, these theories are based in modern-colonial spiral logics. Within these logics, modernity understands the world from a Western epistemology, ontology and axiology; creating binaries and neglecting other ways of knowing, thinking or doing; and, coloniality is a logic of erasure and rejection of those other worlds and knowledges that do not belong to a modern conception of the world and human beings. Initially, these theories are combined with feminist autoethno-graphic approaches, while the author is attentive to the impossibility of objective social sci-entific research or strong objectivity (Harding 2005). Moreover, to navigate Chola Contravisual narratives, this research made use of sensing-thinking practices (Leyva 2018a), storytelling (Motta 2016) and it finally created an ‘otherwise’ methodological approach attentive to the author’s positionality and the other practices-knowledges learnt in collaborative work with the collective’s members, as well as in the exploration of their audiovisual work. Similarly, six online encounters were held with Peruvian feminists belonging to different streams: NGOs, advocacy and public policy, academia and other contemporary feminist collectives; for the purpose of setting the context relaying on primary and secondary data. Two main findings emerged from this research: firstly, the contemporary plurality of Peruvian femi-nisms existing in Peru discloses a response to counter a modern-colonial Peruvian state that keeps maintaining social hierarchies and marginalisation (inherited from colonial times) over Peruvians, especially women and sexualised bodies; secondly, Chola Contravisual transgresses the coloniality of gender (intricated oppressions related with gender, sexuality, race and class) by enfleshing feminist ‘otherwise narratives’ of re-existence and liminality. Re-existence means the possibility to engage with art in order to defy subaltern subjectivities and modern-colonial binaries that locates their existences as inferior and the possibility of social transfor-mation (Alban 2009). Meanwhile, liminality refers to the way the collective’s members lo-cated themselves beyond the confines of the modern understanding of the being, the body and the sexuality in binary terms, they treasure their ancestrality and reject to become modern selves nor to be considered the non-beings of modernity (Anzaldúa 2009, Motta 2018a); they inhabit an ‘in-betweenness’ identity that is disclosed in their audio-visual work and cultural projects. This identity is the starting point for a decolonial project, and the other knowledge-practices interweaved throughout this research.