The Kiss and the Hunger Strike: Engendering Rebellion to Dictatorship

In 1975, the legend goes, a drag queen named Barbarella kissed the dictator Hugo Banzer on the lips during the entrada parade for the festival of Gran Poder. Outraged at the affront to his masculinity, Banzer barred drag queens from performing in the festival as women, inadvertently opening up space for cis-women to dance as the character of china moreno ever since. This mythical origin story for how the China Morena lost her drag obscures a longer contest over the gentrification and nationalization of a rebellious neighborhood street festival into a state-sanctioned celebration of Bolivian cultural patrimony. Two years later, a group of mothers and children from the Siglo XX mineworker union Committee of Housewives staged a hunger strike in the offices of the Archbishop of La Paz that undermined the dictator’s status as national patriarch. These women articulated a connection between human rights and civil democracy that won wide support across classes and political ideologies, forcing Banzer to call long-postponed elections and restore civil rights to the political opposition. In this paper, I will look at the gendered resistance to dictatorship that emerged at a moment of extreme repression of traditional and guerrilla sectors of the left between 1974 and 1978. At a time when the Bolivian government was closing universities, outlawing political parties, assassinating union leaders, and massacring peasants, I argue that women and gender rebels destabilized the very foundations of the government by publicly questioning Banzer’s ability to deliver Peace, Order, and Work and restore normalcy after a failed revolution. In so doing, they helped create a culture of unruly rebellion that proved more durable than any political party and formed the basis of more inclusive social movements in the following decades.