The Body I Always Was. A drag queen of life names herself is a Performance Art piece that interrogates the distance between the body the world names and the body one inhabits. Through transformation as a drag queen of life (not as a costume but as an act of embodied truth), the performance declares that the process of becoming oneself is a political, poetic, and ritual act. The piece is structured around Barbarita’s monologue, performed by Kiriam Gutiérrez in the Cuban film Los dioses rotos (Daranas Serrano, 2008), a text that functions as the verbal and ritual backbone of the action. Following the tripartite logic of the rite of passage (separation, threshold, and reincorporation; Van Gennep, 1909; Turner, 1969), the action unfolds in a filmed domestic space where the mirror is the only witness to the transformation process. Framed within Arts-Based Research methodology, this article sets out the conceptual, symbolic, ritual, and historical foundations of the piece, situating it within the genealogy of Cuban transformismo and Latin American trans struggles