Breaking Down, Breaking Together: Xandra Ibarra’s <i>Nude Laughing</i> and the Violence of the Encounter

This essay considers the fragility of social relations through an understudied action that reveals the limits of sociality: laughter. In Latina artist Xandra Ibarra’s performance piece Nude Laughing, the artist’s manic fit of laughter goes on for several minutes, suggesting that to face the contorted body of another subject laughing is to face the uneasy reality of encounter. Analyzing three iterations of Nude Laughing across geographic locales, the essay focuses in particular on a performance in Mexico City that culminated in an act of male aggression. The author reads this instance of woman’s laughter that resulted in violent retribution from men who fear being laughed at to conclude that the encounter with an/other’s body made strange through laughter, especially across difference, offers a radical possibility to engage with a feminist and queer ethics of encounter.