Dragging It Straight: Visibility and Camouflage in Contemporary Mexican Cultural Production

Marquez, Alejandra; Marquez, Alejandra

In “Commitment,” a text about politically-committed literature, Theodor Adorno argues that Bertolt Brecht’s works “rejected aesthetic individuation as an ideology.” Instead, Brecht’s goal was to “translate the true hideousness of society into theatrical appearance by dragging it straight out of its camouflage.” Adorno then describes how the characters in Brecht’s plays “shrink before our eyes into the agents of social processes” (Aesthetics 183). “Commitment” proposes that what’s camouflaged should be rendered visible. Our session will reflect on the premise that disguise becomes societal “truth” within the Mexican context. We will consider how queer subjects answer the question posited by Rachel Loewen Walker in Queer and Deleuzian Temporalities: “Are we paying heed to the power dynamics, vulnerabilities, and hierarchies that contribute to any one individual’s navigation of sexuality, gender, and ‘in-ness’ or ‘out-ness’?” (103).

The papers in our panel will explore how the visibility/camouflage, “in-ness”/“out-ness,” and masculine/feminine binaries give way to varied unstable and uneven possibilities for the queer and other non-normalized subjects in Mexico. By unraveling the layers of camouflage and disguise, we aim to reveal how Mexican cultural producers use performative strategies to disrupt and reshape dominant narratives, unveiling alternative perspectives that are always under the threat of erasure.

Furthermore, our session examines how the dichotomy of visibility/camouflage gives rise to identities tied to the notion of normalcy. Paul Preciado traces a path directly tying minoritarian identities to a seesawing societal apparatus that sees them as non-existent: “In onto-political terms, identity is that which, without existing, breaks into [...] the tangible, becomes visible, measurable, quantifiable [...] institutions pretend that femininity, disability, homosexuality, transsexuality or dysphoria exist. The apparent conditions of their empirical proof of existence happen through privilege, discrimination and exclusion. But the very modality of their non-existent existence does not cease to vary.” (Dysphoria Mundi 209-10, our translation)

By following Preciado’s conceptual model, we challenge the patriarchal notion that heteronormativity and gender normalcy are concrete, stable, and inexorable in contemporary Mexican cultural production.

Roberto Fiesco’s Quebranto (2013) documents Fernando García's artistic and personal transformation into Coral Bonelli. Elizabeth Villalobos studies the staging of the different ways of being and becoming a woman in the film. To that effect, she proposes the idea of a gender performativity's breakdown and how performance and camouflage are central to a narrative of becoming through different stages in Bonelli's life. The film is a testimony that makes visible the multiple levels of marginalization of gender dissent and problematizes the sex-gender identity dichotomies of heteronormativity in Mexican society.

Despite being polar opposites tied to a Madonna-Whore binary, two famous Mexican stars, angelic Angélica María, and rebellious Gloria Trevi are mediated in multi-form queer cultural productions that appropriate, reuse, and remake their images. Olivia Cosentino explores how their constructed hyper-femininity is made hyper-visible to expose the performativity of gender in drag performances, especially in Josué Capetillo’s “Angélica” on the Mexican television show, Parodiando (2012-3), trans actor Mariana Santos in the Netflix’s La casa de las flores (Manolo Caro, 2018-20), and in Gloria (2015), a short film by Luis Hernández de la Peña.

Singer Michelle Maciel’s incursion into banda, a regional Mexican music, has been outstanding since he is a trans man in a cis-male dominated space. Following Preciado, Ángel Díaz Miranda’s intervention focuses on how Maciel attempts to embody normative hypermasculinity as camouflage in his particular milieu. This masking gives way to dual, competing vectors: toxic masculinity via a strict conservative view of gender roles and the visibility of queer sexual desire.

Alejandra Márquez analyzes how female masculinity in Mexico can challenge heteronormative constructs of gender, sexuality, and power through an analysis of standup comedian Ana Julia Yeyé. Central to this exploration is the activism stemming from Mexico City's “Marcha Lencha,” a movement aimed at establishing a space for women experiencing same-sex desire that transcends limiting identity politics while condemning the systemic violence inherent in Mexico's patriarchal society. Márquez introduces the concept of “lencha masculinities” to describe a form of gender expression specific to queer women in Mexico that shapes and redefines gender expression while actively resisting participation in the oppressive mechanisms often associated with hegemonic masculinities.

Our panel is 100% minoritarian, 75% women, 75% migrant, and 50% untenured professors. Each of us come from different cardinal points of the country. We agreed to 11 or 12 minute presentations. These linked papers discuss dissident subjects' role in reshaping the contours of visibility vis-a-vis navigating the complex interplay between identities and camouflage in the contemporary Mexican cultural landscape.

112 Dragging It Straight: Visibility and Camouflage in Contemporary Mexican Cultural Production: Calls for Papers