Johan Mijail's Performative Resistance: Desidentification and the Dominican Body

Artishock Revista publishes an essay on Johan Mijail, a Dominican artist whose performance practice challenges colonial and capitalist narratives through the desidentification of their body. The essay, written in 2023 as the basis for the author's doctoral research, analyzes Mijail's performance 'Transatlantic postales' (2016), a response to Frank Báez's poem 'La Marilyn Monroe de Santo Domingo'. In the performance, Mijail presents their naked, made-up body in a car wash, wearing a wig and a giant plastic phallus, subverting the hypersexualized image of the black body. The work critiques the colonial gaze, the fetishization of black skin, and the ambiguity of sex-gender, drawing on theories by Aníbal Quijano, Lélia Gonzalez, and Paul B. Preciado. Mijail's practice also involves 'analquismo', a concept combining 'ano' and 'anarquía', proposing an affective, life-affirming space against necropolitical management. The essay references the historical exhibition of Saartjie Baartman in the Musée de l'Homme, the engraving 'The Voyage of the Sable Venus' by Thomas Stothard, and contemporary phenomena like the 'negro de WhatsApp' meme. Mijail, a practitioner of Dominican Santería, venerates Santa Marta la Dominadora, positioning themselves as a 'dominatrix' in a symbolic reversal of power. The essay includes images of Mijail's performances and works by Devin Osorio. The publication includes a content warning for graphic sexual images.