TRANSLATING KUIR MAGAZINE

2. HOSTILITY HAS A SOCIAL BODY
Now, let us, at the other extreme of cordiality, look for its opposite, and we find “hostility”. Here
we uncover another word erased from the official contemporary line up; probably, in this case,
because it is too gentle when compared to other, more forceful terms (violence, bullying, hate
crimes, discrimination, abuse, aggressions) that circulate in militant discourse and, for some
time now, in progressive and not so progressive medias as well.
But hostility is much more than a vintage and inoffensive gesture in comparison with a pointblank
gunshot or orchestrated persecution by the State itself. “Hostility” rests in the foundation
of all these other words. You could say that without hostility, the others would not be possible.
Hostility is not a matter of bad manners, it is the great enemy of truth. Because “rather than
reconsidering their own opinion, a hostile individual dedicates themselves to convincing and
forcing the world to adjust it to their way of thinking, regardless of the costs and effort involved.”
An orthopedic world marching towards a single point is the world hostility constructs.
At the extreme opposite end from the patience of listening, and especially opposed to the
curiosity, hostility proposes a single thought, outside of all truths. And here is where within
TRANSLATING KUIR emerges the circulation of a specific knowledge with a great capacity to
multiply itself arises.
Nine guests invited to discuss the problem of translation in their different spaces, the
provocateurs speak from a “privileged” knowledge about this hostility. Whether they suffered it
personally or not, they know in a singular way its forms, languages and strategies of necessity.
And somehow that shared knowledge is revealing. Not as tears anymore, nor revolt, nor pride,
but as raw material. The starting point of the artistic event. From Argentina, for example, Lolo
and Lauti analyze the place of humor, not as a virtue of “laughing about or laughing with” but as
a possibility of adopting a point of view completely apart from the heteronormative perspective.
Marlene Wayar develops what she herself calls a Latin American Trans theory.
Each story reveals the extent to which this shared knowledge, lived in each body, has become
part of artistic practices. The tone of the conversation remains focused on what you cannot
translate, on telling a story that borders the singular word.
From Brazil, known for being “the country that kills the largest number of transvestites in the
world”, Transalien historicizes her experience like someone singing a new song: “When I was
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