The Forgotten Flesh: Confronting Western Epistemologies through Parody in Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco's The Couple in the Cage (1992)

The category of "the human" has recently undergone extensive examination in intellectual and academic circles. Especially through decolonial theory, various authors have attempted to define the current conception of the category of the human, tracing a genealogy that dates from 1492. Decolonial thinking maintains that racialization is a project of humanization or dehumanization at the service of the colonial apparatus. And yet any attempt to confront that epistemology of coloniality leaves us in an abyss of impossibility. Activists like Boaventura de Sousa Santos think that this abyss can somehow be spanned when one plays an intellectual-activist role. In this paper, I analyze Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco's "The Couple in the Cage" performance in the context of the commemoration of five hundredth anniversary of the Conquista in 1992 Spain. I argue that the parody of the two "undiscovered bodies" in the cage confronts the naturalized and unspoken Western dehumanization of nonwhite bodies by bringing the flesh of the indigenous peoples back to the center of the discussion that the colonial project has attempted to obliterate.