Monstrous Embodiments

This chapter explores monstrous drag practices in Buenos Aires, Argentina, as a challenge to normative gender, identity, and humanity. Using theories from Susan Stryker, Donna Haraway, and Mabel Moraña, it highlights how artists like Lila Llunez and Orkgotik use grotesque and hybrid aesthetics to disrupt heterocisnormative violence. This essay examines how these contemporary drag artists reimagine monstrosity as a positive characterization and a desirable locus of identity. Through the figures of the freak and the cyborg, these performances question fixed categories and propose alternative modes of being. Employing recycled materials, prosthetics, and non-human elements, monstrous drag reimagines bodies as sites of multiplicity and transformation. These practices create zones of disobedience within hostile social contexts, affirming deviation and abjection as generative forces. Ultimately, the chapter situates monstrous drag within a queer artistic lineage that disrupts dominant discourses and envisions new ways of existing and relating beyond human limits.