Coco Fusco, Colonial Spectacle, and the Gendered Machine of Empire

This chapter analyzes select works of the interdisciplinary performance work of Coco Fusco, whose practice interrogates the politics of representation, the legacies of colonial ethnography, and the militarization of the body. Drawing on the theories of Homi Bhabha, Walter Mignolo, Aníbal Quijano, Roger Bartra, Judith Butler, and José Esteban Muñoz, the chapter situates Fusco's performances as acts of epistemic disobedience that destabilize the structures authorizing racial, gendered, and geopolitical difference. Beginning with her landmark collaboration with Guillermo Gómez-Peña, The Couple in the Cage (1992–1993) the analysis traces her transition from satirical ethnographic display to works confronting militarized authority, including A Room of One's Own (2006–2008), Operation Atropos (2006), Bare Life Study #1 (2005), and A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (2008). The chapter examines Fusco's hybrid methodology, blending lecture, theatrical role play, and installation, as a means of producing a “double address” to both specialized art audiences and the broader public. By inhabiting and subverting roles of ethnographic subject, military authority, and academic lecturer, Fusco implicates audiences in systems of power while opening critical space for reimagining them. Her work exemplifies a decolonial aesthetic that foregrounds the body as a site of knowledge, resistance, and transformation.