Beauty marks: the Latinx surfaces of loving, becoming, and mourning

Queering Traditions, Decolonizing Queerness: A Literature Review of Queer Worldmaking Tradition Bearers

“…Zambrano's performance art challenge patriarchal and machismo attitudes through its valorization of feminized practices, such as putting on makeup and domestic labour. Author Jillian Hernandez (2018) describes one scene in which Zambrano smokes a cigar while lying on the ground with her sister, the two of them recreating the intimate bodily gestures of a photograph Zambrano took of her two grandmothers posing as Frida Kahlo and Chavela Vargas. It is an intricately layered embodiment of three woman-loving-woman relationships that speaks to the power of religious appropriation and repetition in preserving queer ancestral memory.…”

“…While not explicitly sacred in the same way that the other examples are-rooted in religious ritual-Manapul's intentionally chosen safe space is infused with critique of mainstream queer spaces, and I argue that the creation of a safe space is a sacred space. There were also appropriations of religious iconography, which served as queer reclamations of the body, critiques of heteropatriarchy, and offerings to one's feminine ancestors (Serna, 2017;Hernandez, 2018). Alma López's queer version of La Virgen de Guadalupe, Lupe and Sirena in Love, challenges the Catholic Church's use of La Virgen as a tool of gender and sexual oppression in its visual consecration of women's sexual bodies, lesbian love, and eroticism (Serna, 2017), whereas Patricia Zambrano's art installation ofrendx challenges patriarchal and machismo attitudes through its valorization of feminized practices, such as putting on makeup and domestic labour (Hernandez, 2018).…”

Special issue: The art of Latina and Latino elderhood

“…New directions in the study of Latinx older adulthoods are unfolding in the interdisciplines. A growing corpus of political-economy-informed performance studies and ethnic studies scholarship contemplate racialized Latinx aging bodies vis-à-vis the performance of queer gestures, expressions of gender and sexuality, and knowledge production (see Rodriguez 2014Rodriguez , 2015Rivera-Servera 2017;Hernández 2018). We look forward to more research that centers and deeply engages LGBTQIA + Latinx elderhood and older adults' ongoing connection and participation with cultural production, as well as studies of their community activism and social life more generally.…”