The Incongruities of Queer Decorum: Exploring Gabriel García Román’s Queer Icons

ABSTRACT

Gabriel García Román’s Queer Icons series disrupts the traditional form of renaissance era religious artwork, allowing viewers to consider the juxtaposition of the queer and trans people of color he foregrounds within the constructs of traditional religious iconography. Demonstrating a socially conscious brand of art that is emblematic of some of today’s visual artists, García Román works within and through traditional constraints (material, temporal, and spatial) to innovate new means of civic engagement and rhetorical intervention. Expanding on Pérez and Brouwer’s work on queer decorum, I argue that García Román uses perspective by incongruity to revise the relationship between the center and margins, rearticulating what counts as art, where it ought to be viewed, and how it functions rhetorically.

KEYWORDS:

• Art
• perspective by incongruity
• piety
• queer decorum
• U.S. identity

Acknowledgment

This article was presented at the Southern States Communication Association Conference in Greenville, SC, in 2017.

Notes

During the time period between May 2015 and April 2016, García Román’s work was highlighted or discussed by writers at The Huffington Post, The Advocate, NPR, and Remezcla (to name just a few), demonstrating that this project has captured the broad attention of culture bloggers and Internet correspondents and suggesting its appeal to other Internet surfers.

The acronym QTPoC is the marker that García Román uses to refer to his subjects and is adopted in this article to reflect his choice.