Abstract: In the heart of Cusco’s tourism industry, Quechua women, with their llama, alpaca, and sheep companions, refuse expectations about what it means to be Indigenous women in the Andes. As they participate in photography tourism and offer their images to tourists, women and animals navigate state-sanctioned gendered, racialized, and multispecies violence and articulations of what Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and Charles Hale call the “indio permitido” (the authorized Indian). Despite this violence, Quechua women insist on making visible their own ways of being and relating. Based on 16 months of visual and multispecies ethnographic fieldwork in Cusco, this talk draws on Audra Simpson’s concept of refusal and Michelle Raheja’s notion of visual sovereignty to develop photographic refusal. This is a process in which Quechua women refuse state-sanctioned ideals of Indigeneity by making themselves and their multispecies relations visible within city spaces and take control of the production of their image. Additionally, this talk engages with anthropological literature on the contested nature of Indigeneity in the Andes to articulate the ongoing racialized and gendered expectations of Indigenous women, as well as the way they refuse such classifications. By participating in photography tourism and offering their images to tourists, Quechua women enact an Indigeneity that defies rural/urban boundaries and longstanding stereotypes of poverty and backwardness, and one that transcends non-Indigenous ideas about multispecies relating. Building on work from Indigenous studies, animal studies, and anthropology, this project sheds light on the contested nature of Andean Indigeneity, mechanisms of state control over Indigenous women and animals, and the centrality of multispecies relations to life in the Andes.
