Desiring Chicanismo: Gay Chicano Art and the Intersection of Race and Sexuality

Abstract

“Desiring Chicanismo: Gay Chicano Art and the Intersection of Race and Sexuality,” analyzes the work of three contemporary gay Chicanx/Latinx artists and the ways that these artists mediate on race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender to map new ways of responding to xenophobia, racism, and homophobia. Thus, I treat art as cultural text, a medium through which artists try to make sense of our social realities. This has been particularly true for racialized artists who have attempted to understand the historical traumas of colonization, racism, and homophobia. Art historian Jennifer González (2008) argues that the works of artists of color “offer a critical articulation of the history and persistence of race as a form of visual hegemony” (2). Furthermore, as art historian Jennifer Doyle (2006) argues, art is “shaped and determined… by specific conflicts within our understanding of what art is, where it comes from, what and who it is for” (xxi). I demonstrate that gay Chicano men are using digital art, collage, and performance to theorize the articulations, (re)constructions, and (re)imaginings of identity within complex scenes of “conflict” (to use Doyle’s term). In this work, identity is shown to be a messy project with multiple turns and twists, and art allows for the messiness of identity, as well as theory, to be momentarily contained, represented, and thought. The cultural production of gay Chicano men is thus an undertheorized site that can offer innovative ideas about identity formation and in turn, document the tactics implemented by queers of color to respond to histories of oppression and marginalization. My dissertation develops a complex accounting of race and sexuality over three chapters, each dealing with a contemporary gay Chicanx/Latinx artist and their work: AB Soto, Christopher Velasco, and Julio Salgado. I am drawn to these three artists because the explorations of race, sexuality, and gender in their work meditate upon the dynamic nature of gay Chicano men’s subjectivity.