Queerly Mexican: Art, Identity, and the LGBTQ Movement in Mexico

In his writings about cinema and photography of the African diaspora, cultural sociologist Stuart Hall has argued that cultural identity is “always constituted within, not outside representation.”  Representation through the visual arts was certainly essential to the constitution of 20^th century Mexico’s densely entangled social identities organized around nation, race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality.  Since the emergence of gay and lesbian liberation movements following Mexico’s watershed 1968 student movement, GLBT activists inevitably have felt compelled to confront what had become broadly accepted meanings of national identity signified in the language of heteronormativity.   The production and exhibition of visual art became a central feature of the Mexican GLBT movement’s efforts to create new ways of being fully but queerly Mexican.  Drawing upon the author’s ongoing analysis of a data base of more than 400 images produced by Mexican GLBT artists and allies, this paper explores how those artists have engaged the iconography, aesthetics, and discourses of post-revolutionary national identity, culture, and politics in their work.