"We rode and time stood still"

Temporality and politics in the Yeguas of the Apocalypse

Abstract

This text proposes a reading strategy for Refundación de la Universidad de Chile, an intervention carried out under the dictatorship by the Yeguas del Apocalipsis, the Chilean duo formed by Pedro Lemebel and Francisco Casas, relating it to the first public demonstration carried out by homosexuals and transvestites in the Plaza de Armas in Santiago de Chile during the Popular Unity in April 1973. The text addresses the relationship between these two milestones, in order to question how sexual politics based on the demand for rights leaves in the shadows other forms of grouping and other ways of doing politics. The counter-productivization of injury and the crossovers between sexuality, animality and shame (understood as a social and subjective situation of abjection) are some of the reading keys to draw connections between these two episodes. By focusing on the relationship between time, images and sex-gender dissidence, this text aims to think about the anachronistic counter-rhythms that disrupt chronological temporality and question the legitimized definitions of political action as the heritage of organic homosexual movements.