Art, Identity, and Mexico's Gay Movement
2016; Volume: 42; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2327-641X
Autores Tópico(s)Political Dynamics in Latin America
ResumoSINCE THE EMERGENCE OF MEXICO'S HOMOSEXUAL LIBERATION MOVEMENT IN THE late 1970s, LGBT activists have worked to transform a cultural politics of national identity that rested discursively on patriarchal constructs of heterosexism, machismo, and rigid binaries of gender and sexuality. In Art and Social Movements: Cultural Politics in Mexico and Aztlan (McCaughan 2012), I make the case that artists associated with Mexican and Chicanx social movements from the late 1960s through the early 1990s created visual languages and spaces through which activists could imagine and perform new collective identities and forms of meaningful citizenship. In this article, I extend that analysis through an examination of the role of art and artists in Mexico's gay movement. The first time I began to understand more fully the extraordinary potential of publicly displayed art to disrupt and queer notions of what it means to be Mexican was in 1999, when I visited the annual exhibition of LGBT-themed art at the Museo Universitario del Chopo in Mexico City. As I moved through the museum's vast galleries, I was confronted with dozens of images produced by gay, lesbian, and allied artists that seemed intent on creating a queer Mexican imaginary. Carlos Jaurena's mixed media assemblage, Los Compadres, for example, included two erect penises intertwined with a tricolor ribbon (Mexico's red, white, and green). Gustavo Monroy's oil and collage Mapa mundi was a map of Mexico populated by indigenous couples engaged in sex. Araceli Perez Mendoza's oil on canvas, !Cacto so good!, offered a nude female in lotus meditation position; her vagina was a green nopal cactus paddle. Salvador Salazar's piece was an oil portrait of a nude, muscular Subcomandante Marcos, the well-known spokesperson of the Zapatista indigenous movement. Salazar's Marcos holds a machine gun aloft with his right hand and a huge Mexican flag in his left. Many of the individual works in the exhibition were engaging, but the cumulative power of this visual intervention was greatly magnified for me by the large number of queerly Mexican images on display in a prominent public venue visited by thousands of people. This article examines how visual art works such as these, produced in the context of Mexico's LGBT movements, helped to shape new discourses and imagine new subjects around the intersections of gender, sexuality, and national identity. The significance of the creation, circulation, and impact of such imagery must be understood in the context of the gradual but uneven, fragile, and still incomplete democratization of Mexico--particularly Mexico City--that began in the 1970s with the opening of the press, the electoral system, and autonomous spaces for organized civil society. Since 1987, a major exhibition of artwork by gays, lesbians, and allied supporters has been mounted each year at the Museo del Chopo, as part of an annual LGBT pride celebration that, in the assessment of the late Carlos Monsivais (1997,13), constituted for civil society critical proof of the way in which alternative spaces have contributed to the diversity and the democratization of Mexican life. Since 1997, Mexico City has been governed by a center-left party that, under organized pressure from LGBT and feminist activists, legalized same-sex marriage and abortion. I argue that artwork created in the generative environment of Mexico's LGBT movements contributed to these cultural and political sea changes by producing new visual discourses that allowed diverse publics to recognize, understand, respect, and inhabit gendered and sexual identities that were previously excluded from hegemonic notions of what it means to be Mexican. Art and the Construction of Mexicanidad In his writings about cinema and photography of the African diaspora, cultural sociologist Stuart Hall (2001, 560) argued that cultural identity is always within, not outside representation. …
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