Queer subversions in Mexican and Chicana/o art activism

abstract

As they developed in the 1970s, the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) and feminist movements in Mexico and among Mexican Americans (Chicana/os) in the United States (US) faced many formidable challenges. Not least of these was how to transform a cultural politics of national/ethnic identity that rested discursively on the patriarchal constructs of heterosexism, machismo, pious motherhood, and rigid binaries of gender and sexuality. Given the history of European colonialism, US imperialism, and North American racism, queer and feminist activists were typically part of larger networks of leftist movements for which cultural nationalism was a cornerstone. The fit was often uncomfortable at best, as many ‘progressive’ Mexican and Chicano social movements of the era conformed to the culture's hegemonic heterosexism. Activist art proved to be one of the feminist and queer movements’ most effective tools for producing counterhegemonic discourses of gender and sexuality. This Article describes how gay, lesbian, and feminist artists active in social movements worked to queer representations of Mexican and Chicana/o identity and to subvert dominant constructions of gender and sexuality.

keywords:

• Art
• Chicano movement
• feminism
• LGBTQ movements
• Mexico

Notes

1. Contemporary feminist scholarship has challenged such sexist and racist interpretations of Malinche. See, eg Del Castillo (1974) and Miller (1991).

2. For additional analysis of Bustamante, Mayer, Polvo de Gallina, and this performance in particular, see Blanco Cano (2006).

3. On the legend of Aztlán and art work derived from it, see Fields and Zamudio-Taylor (2001), especially the essays by Amalia Mesa-Bains and Victor Zamudio-Taylor in this collection about the relationship of Aztlán to the Chicano movement and associated art.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Edward J McCaughan

EDWARD J MCCAUGHAN is Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of Sociology and Sexuality Studies at San Francisco State University in the United States. He is the author of Art and Social Movements: Cultural Politics in Mexico and Aztlán (Duke University Press, 2012); Reinventing Revolution: The Renovation of Left Discourse in Cuba and Mexico (Westview Press, 1997); and, with Peter Baird, Beyond the Border: Mexico and the US Today (NACLA, 1979). He is the co-editor, with Robert Irwin and Michelle Nasser, of The Famous 41: Sexuality and Social Control in Mexico, c. 1901 (Palgrave, 2003), and, with Susanne Jonas of Latin America Faces the Twenty-First Century: Reconstructing a Social Justice Agenda (Westview, 1994). Email: [email protected]