Shaming the state: feminist escrache, mediated performance, and memory politics in Peru

Abstract This article examines the feminist escraches of Somos 2074 y Muchas Más, a Peruvian collective that mobilizes public shaming to demand justice for the forced sterilizations of marginalized women during Alberto Fujimori’s regime. Focusing on two interventions (Empolleradas and the dead speaking back) the article situates these performances within Latin American traditions of feminist protest and human rights activism. I argue that embodied performance, as it is documented and re-encountered over time, sustains collective memory and ethical implication in the absence of institutional recognition. Rather than producing linear political effects, these actions generate uneven encounters shaped by bodily exposure, performance duration, and mediated return. Drawing on the concept of zones of intermediacy, the article shows how past violence is reactivated in the present and oriented toward unresolved demands for justice, redirecting shame from racialized women’s bodies toward state institutions and collective complicity, while vulnerability becomes a condition of political appearance.