You Will Never Be a Weye, a challenge to hegemonic identities.

Abstract

This article shows how Sebastián Calfuqueo questions some hegemonic identities in a performative video called “You Will Never Be a Weye”. In this work as in others, this artist raises the ethnic and gender identity conflict in a continuous search, based on his personal experience of discrimination within different fields. In order to reflect on the hegemonic identities of ethnicity and gender, Calfuqueo resorts to the history of the Mapuche people, which records the existence of machi weyes who were exterminated for being considered sodomites, effeminate and perverted according to colonial chronicles. The description and analysis of this work is based on Panofsky's model (1995) updated by Agustín-Lacruz (2004). The interpretative analysis of the work allows us to fully understand what this work expresses. The main conclusion is that the artist resorts to the elements that both cultures offer - the original and the western - resulting in a novel syncretism that leads to new forms of expression.