“‘The Audience is My Source of Hate:’ Xandra Ibarra and Fucking Whiteness,” in Sex on Stage: Writing the Body Politic, eds. Feona Attwood, Alison J Carr and Lynn Sally (Bloomsbury, 2025).
In this chapter I look at a confrontational model of explicit body performance which is embodied by the works of performance artist, Xandra Ibarra.
As a native Texan who grew up on the border as a brown-skinned femme woman, the politics of the border were already being played out on her body.
Over the course of ten years Ibarra created over one-hundred of these short burlesque pieces which she titled Spictacles, again as a parody of the derogatory term spic- that is levied upon Latinx people. Ibarra’s Spictacles were created with the purpose of using camp and disidentification to critique majoritarian views of queer, brown-skinned, women.
However, after ten years of ejaculating hot sauce, fisting piñatas, masturbating as the statue of liberty, stripping in a luchador mask and more, Ibarra felt that her work had ultimately “failed.” Ibarra spoke at length in our interview about how in the end she was performing for mostly white audiences who just “didn’t get it.”
In more recent years, Ibarra’ work has turned to photography, film, and confrontational “menstrual prints” sold on Etsy. This chapter turns to Ibarra’s later “opaque” works that walk the line between performance, art, and pornography to ask, just how far is too far in performance, and what happens when audiences fail to read her explicit works as she would like them to be read?