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# Performance and Video Artists Challenge Our Perceptions Around Femininity
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/bitch-slap-human-resources/
- Published: 2019-10-01T20:50:21.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T15:38:50.000Z
- Description: Bitch Slap! presents an evening of performance and video art by several female and non-binary artists.
- Author: Matt Stromberg
- Tags: Art, California, Events, Human Resources, Los Angeles, Performance, Video, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:34 (2019, 2020, part 1)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2019/10/bitch.jpg)

l to r: Liz Miller-Kovacs, “Pink Venus” (2019) (left); Rochelle Fabb (right) (all images courtesy the artists unless otherwise noted)

[Bitch Slap!](http://humanresourcesla.com/event/bitch-slap/?ref=hyperallergic.com) is an evening of performance and video art by several female and non-binary artists. Organized by Liz Miller Kovacs, hosted by Rochelle Fabb, and produced by Marcus Kuiland-Nazario, the performances challenge traditional notions of femininity, while also tackling stereotypes about race, gender, and sexual orientation.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2019/10/the_perfect_ones_nao_bustamente_matt_johnstone2007jpg.jpg)

Nao Bustamante and Matt Johnstone, “The Perfect Ones” (2007), eight minutes, film

Johnny Forever Nawracaj’s performance *STUDS* (2019) subverts the gender binary through an awkward, architecturally aided dance. Teetering on high heels, they will struggle to strap 10-foot-long wall studs to their body using panty hose. The *Perfect Ones*, a 2007 film by Nao Bustamante and Matt Johnstone, follows an amnesiac housewife as they discover a new life after entering a lesbian punk club. Dulce Soledad Ibarra’s video-performance work *Tierra Rara* (2019) features telenovela auditions by actors across the Latinx diaspora.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2019/10/virgensota_jota_xandra_ibarra2015.jpg)

Xandra Ibarra, “Spictacle III: La Virgensota Jota” (2015), 6:20 mins, video

Between 2002 and 2012, Xandra Ibarra performed hundreds of live “spictacles” (“spectacles” modified by a derogatory term for Latinxs**)**, as her alter ego La Chica boom. These raunchy, campy skits played on racial and sexual tropes regarding her identity as a queer, border-straddling Latinx woman. In *Virgensota Jota*, she plays the role of La Virgen de Guadalupe, Patron Saint of Mexico (and Patroness of the Americas since 1999), who births “[a Hitachi Wand vibrator, converts herself into the Mexican version of the Statue of Liberty and masturbates to orgasm while chewing gum](http://www.xandraibarra.com/spictacles/?ref=hyperallergic.com).” Liz Miller-Kovacs also takes aim at another iconic female figure, Botticelli’s Venus, who emerges into a future “filled with psychedelic sludge” in her surreal 2019 performance *Pink Venus*. In her 2018 video *Thou*, Micaela Tobin, who performs as White Boy Scream, transforms from an elegant opera diva dressed in white to a purple-hued “ube queen” in celebration of her Filipina heritage, as the music dissolves from melodic hymn to aggressive noise.

Using lo-fi abjection, transgressive humor, and campy theatricality, the artists in Bitch Slap! prove that there are multiple ways to express the feminine, as well as critique the gendered status quo.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2019/10/thou_white_boy_scream2018.jpg)

White Boy Scream (Micaela Tobin), directed by Katie Stenberg, “Thou” (2018), three minutes, video

**When:** Sunday, October 6, 7–10pm  
**Where:** Human Resources (410 Cottage Home Street, Chinatown, Los Angeles)

*More info at* [*Human Resources*](http://humanresourcesla.com/event/bitch-slap/?ref=hyperallergic.com)*.*