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Abstract
In the aftermath of the democratisation of Mexico in 2000 and the progressive neoliberalisation of cultural spheres, gay pornography appears as a medium where national identities and the racial/ethnic tensions of the mestizo construction of Mexico have been resituated, challenged, and redefined through a liberatory ethics and aesthetics. Mecos Films’ first two films La putiza and La verganza mobilise popular stereotypes such as the luchador wrestler and sexualise national heroes such as mariachis. By narrating the sexual adventures of a lucha libre wrestler heavily mediated with ethnic markers, the films engage with, de-structure, and finally reassemble stereotypes of sexual(ised) citizenship. The sexual(ised) men on screen reformulate a sexual politics where mutual pleasure is the starting point to developing a sexual citizenship liberated from structurally violent gender norms. Comparing the historical arc of Mexican pornographic production from the 1920s (Colección Callado), this article highlights the use of popular subjects (charros, mariachis, chinas poblanas, etc.) as visible representations of queer and non-normative sexual subjects within the space of the nation. The films foreground role-play as a strategic tool to subvert and redefine Mexican masculine sexualities, and ultimately mobilise an aesthetics of pleasure, particularly anal pleasure, that deconstructs and reconstructs liberated Mexican masculinities.
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Notes
1 See Solis Ortega (Citation2015).
2 Here and for the rest of the article, I use obscene to signal the close relations between the moral and political orders, keeping in mind “obscene”s normative meaning of offensive to the senses or to taste and refinement as well as lewd, lustful, and, above all, disgusting and repulsive. This moral-political regime associated with the word also highlights the non-normative definitions and uses of the obscene as a liberatory ethics, with roots that date back to Greek comedy and Sade as well as contemporary variations which include feminist porn and avant-garde gay directors like Bruce LaBruce and John Waters.
3 I use “mestizo” throughout this article as shorthand to refer to the complex cultural construction of Mexican identity that has also been named as “mexicanidad” by scholars in the USA and México. An identitarian construction that rests on the idea of sometimes violently imposed and sometimes consensual miscegenation between Spanish colonisers and Indigenous populations, mestizo ideology has been theorised across Latin American from various standpoints. In México, the colonial writings of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and Francisco de Clavijero are two instances where cultural and genetic miscegenation can be traced as exemplary characteristics of “Mexican” identity, and Ignacio Manuel Altamirano in El Zarco (1901) and José Vasconcelos in La raza cósmica (1925) are leading examples in twentieth-century nationalist México. Following Pedro Angel Palou (Citation2015) and others, I see the mestizo cultural complex as the main ideology through which economic transformations and progressive integration into the structures of exploitation of global capitalism can be navigated while maintaining a political stability in Mexican society. Thus, the mestizo complex and the identities it produces and disseminates serve to shape Mexican (and Mexican American society) around the fiction of a racially mixed and heterosexual couple, while maintaining a series of racist, sexist, homophobic, and classist social structures that characterise contemporary coloniality.
4 See Palou (Citation2015).
5 See Sigal, Tortorici, and Whitehead (Citation2020).
6 I use the categories of hetero- and homosexual to differentiate between films with mostly sexualised female bodies and those with mostly sexualised male bodies. As Zeb Tortorici (Citation2020) explores in his approach to popular erotica, the potential of queerness in these archives lies in the ways in which affect and desire spill over the confined limits of identities, particularly those tied to criminological discourses such as homosexuality. Approaching these films wary of the categories constructed by modernity (sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, etc.) brings to the forefront the dynamics of popular expression and desire. With this in mind for the duration of the article, I use hetero- and homosexual as shorthand to keep the histories and structures of oppression in mind, and to signal the erotic power of bodies that constantly defy them, particularly in their popular and non-institutional movements.
7 Keeping in mind the history of the erotic (eros) in Western culture, I mobilise this term to signal the haptic uses of the body to engage with other bodies, human or social. In other words, following Lorde and also L.H. Stalling, Sharon Holland, Elizabeth Grosz, Rosi Braidotti, and others, by erotic I understand the ways in which bodies touch, smell, taste, hear, feel, and ultimately engage with each other and with institutions aside from the visual (and thus symbolic) regime. The erotic thus signals that vast and concrete arena of human existence contained within the body itself, outside the symbolic or purely subjective realm of state, nation, or culture.
8 Sidra Lawrence defines erotic subjectivity as “an epistemological position through which the political dimensions of sensuality are made real” and sexual encounters as knowledge-production when “a social relationship that is given meaning through culturally grounded interpretative parameters, and is dependent upon an exchange of power, and is therefore always political” (Citation2020, 123).
9 See Sluis (Citation2016).
10 Critical film scholars have been approaching this archive to underline these structures of racialisation, oppression, and heteronormative colonial violence that underlie many of the films. Natasha Varner in La Raza Cosmética: Beauty, Identity and Settler Colonialism in Postrevolutionary Mexico studies one of these films (La campesina) to highlight the indigenist and racist modes of viewing that justify and promote sexual violence (Citation2020, 92–97).
11 I thank Zeb Tortorici for this insight into the playfulness of queerness in these silent films.
12 The charro has become synonymous with Mexico, easily recognisable in the classic mariachi outfit. Originally tied to the rural land-owning elite of central Mexico, the suit was ‘nationalised’ in part through the representation of revolucionarios and the photographs of Hugo Brehme, Luis Márquez, and Rafael Carrillo, among other traditionalist photographers. The china poblana was a regional style of dress from the central state of Puebla; through the depictions of both figures dancing the jarabe tapatío from the state of Jalisco, the couple quickly became the ideal depictions of national citizens, particularly as they hailed from the rural camposcape while able to navigate the urban landscape.
13 The camposcape is “a distinctive form of orientalism that equated exotic landscapes of the countryside with indígenas, the past, and national identity. Because of the campo’s perceived ties to an eternal and unchanging nature, camposcape represented a constellation of spatial imaginaries imbued with pastoral qualities rendered as timeless, static in geographic, physical and human features” (Sluis Citation2016, 18).
14 In this sense, “the activity of desiring, inscribing bodies that, though marked by law, make their own inscription on the bodies of others, themselves, and the law in turn, must be counterimposed against the passivity of the inscribed body” (Grosz Citation1995, 36).
15 “If, as pornography studies scholars have shown, pornographic consumption relates to the fantasy of penetrating not just the bodies but also the ‘true’ desires of the pornographic subjects, then we maintain that ethnographic and ethnohistorical consumption relate to the fantasy of penetrating both the bodies and desires of the human subjects studied by anthropologists, ethnographers, historians, and other observers” (Sigal, Tortorici, and Whitehead Citation2020, 9).
16 My use of the erotic here appeals to the erotic as the measure of sharing joy - physical and emotional – with an-other, thus generating an alternative to the projects of belonging that racist structures propagate and enforce onto racialised bodies (Holland Citation2012, 3).
17 Following Mireille Miller-Young (Citation2014), I understand erotic sovereignty as “a process, rather than a completely achieved state of being, wherein sexual subjects aspire and move toward self-rule and collective affiliation and intimacy, and against the territorializing power of the disciplining state and social corpus. It is part of an ongoing ontological process that uses racialized sexuality to assert complex subjecthood, inside of the overwhelming constraints of social stigma, stereotype, structural inequality, policing, divestment, segregation, and exploitation under the neoliberal state” (16).
18 See Solis Ortega (Citation2015).
19 See Sluis (Citation2016, 147–149).
20 Amber Musser (Citation2018) defines the process of pornotropic as “a process of objectification that violently reduces people into commodities while simultaneously rendering them sexually available. Pornotroping does not just illustrate the materiality of the body, then. Through its discourse of fleshiness it emphasizes the ways that power and projection produce certain bodies as other, thereby granting them a mysterious quality of desirability, which is always already undergirded by violence and the assumption of possession” (Citation2018, 6).
21 See Miller-Young (Citation2014, 12, 14).
22 The performers are motivated “by a desire to fulfill a sexual fantasy rather than to become porn stars like those in the US and Europe (…) pornography is not regarded by such men as a route to financial success or to overcome poverty, but as a further exploration of their own gay desires” (Subero Citation2014, 176, emphasis is mine).
23 See Mercer (Citation2017).
24 “thus gay emerges, as an identiarian category that signified a pride that reclaims homosexuality, but that was quickly constructed by marketing as an expanding market segment that has been named the ‘pink market’” (Salinas Hernández Citation2011, 227).
25 While official censorship is rarely mobilised against these studios, these films coexist in a mediascape that continuously reinforces the nationalist-patriarchal tropes of penetrated = weak, virility = strength, femininity = shame, etc. continually reproduced in mainstream media. The recent global success of Manolo Caro’s Netflix series La casa de las flores/The House of Flowers (2018) is a prime example of this dynamic. In this way, moral censorship continues to function in a national space still dominated by the paradigms of colonial/modern nation-building.
26 That is, feminist porn defined as that porn that “uses sexually explicit imagery to contest and complicate dominant representations of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, ability, age, body type, and other identity markers. It explores concepts of desire, agency, power, beauty, and pleasure at their most confounding and difficult, including pleasure within and across inequality, in the face of injustice, and against the limits of gender hierarchy and both heteronormativity and homonormativity. It seeks to unsettle conventional definitions of sex, and expand the language of sex as an erotic activity, an expression of identity, a power exchange, a cultural commodity and even a new politics” (Taormino, Shimizu, Penley, and Mireille-Young Citation2013, 9).
27 In this sense, the erotic desire of Diamante saturates the film from the opening, since “the erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire” (Lorde Citation2007, 105). For Diamante, his chaotic feelings of anal pleasure begin with the anus of another and lead back into his own body. While acknowledging Audre Lorde’s critique of pornography as distinct from the erotic, and also acknowledging Mecos Films’ position in a global pornographic industry that does depend heavily on objectification, exoticisation and economic exploitation (with the inherent structures of abuse that come with this), I bring an erotic reading to these two first films in Mecos Films’ catalog to highlight the serious play with mestizo masculinities that characterises some aspects of contemporary Mexican homosexual cultures.
28 See Cervantes-Gómez (2020, 337, 342).
29 That is, “we might think of this [anal pleasure] as a bodily practice that arguably has synesthetic dimensions in that what is felt in the body is also produced as an impression, not of physicality or as an expression of an ego-ideal, but of a self not-yet-ego and, through that impression, of reconfigured social relations and culture” (Scott Citation2010, 164). Particularly for men subjectified in a highly patriarchal and pseudo-militaristic homosociety, this explicit and recognised pleasure attached to the act of penetration constructs an in-between space that opens up political possibilities outside the realm of shame and homophobia.
30 The paradox of highly erotic anal pleasure alongside the ethnopornographic name “Verga Azteca” (Aztec Cock) is not lost, and I underscore this as another subversive strategy of ridiculing the sexual norms of the mestizo nation, and proposing a sexual subjectivity that belies exclusionary sexual roles and identities, playfully engaging with histories of (sexual) oppression.
31 According to John Mercer in his study of gay pornography from the global North, saturated masculinity serves as a model that allows for contingency, contextuality, and reflexivity towards the specific cultural conditions in which masculinity is existing. Discursive and iterative, saturated masculinity is “a contemporary condition in which masculinity, historically tied to binarisms, has become overburdened with a range of meanings, associations and connotation to such an extent that it becomes a category that is increasingly indeterminate and threatens to collapse under the weight of its own hyperbole” (2017, 4).
32 Sexual affectivities can be understood as “a variety of pleasures and interests in activities and objects that are connected to, but not always centered around, the sexual (…). Affectivity would be a form of sexuality that is both beyond the attachment to the unconscious fantasies and without the libidinal restriction to aim and function” (Rehberg Citation2019, 115, 124)
33 Sayak Valencia (Citation2018) has coined the term gore capitalism to describe Mexico’s (and other countries’) current economic model where bodies are commodified and traded in their murders, disappearances, organs, and the representations of violence that circulate in TV and digital media.
34 A later example of this is the film Corrupción Mexicana (dir. Gerardo “El Diablo” Delgado, Citation2010), where kidnapping, police corruption, drug criminalisation, extortion, and high-business illegal dealings are laid bare and counterpointed with erotic and reciprocal pleasure as a political strategy. The film ends with credits-series with still images of the different actors and production crew with a brief note telling their subsequent life-adventure after the film’s events; reality and fiction are blurred in a political move that centers corruption and how it is navigated.
35 Thus, caught in the powerful grip of El Master, Diamante’s “bottoming thus becomes a metaphor and a model for one of the black powers we are seeking in abjection: among its many inflections of meaning, it evokes the willed enactment of powerlessness that encodes a power of its own, in which pain or discomfort are put to multifarious uses” (Scott Citation2010, 165). While the films are distant from the African American literary bodies that Scott approaches in his monograph, this tracing of pleasure through the lens of the erotic adds a layer of meaning on the already-thick brown masculinities of Mexico, shaped by similar histories of racialisation, colonisation, and exploitation in a different geographical context.
36 Scholars and activists Javier Saez and Sejo Carrasco call attention to the anus (el culo) as a political space, “a place where discourses, practices, surveillances, gazes and looks, explorations, prohibitions, ridicules, hateful messages, murders, and sickness are articulated. We call this precise network of interventions and reactions political” (Citation2011, 63).
37 As Cervantes-Gómez underlines, “passivity as a self-annihilating act is an embrace of the abject contours of the sexual futurity that shapes the nation-building project. Pasivo ethics are a response to the false universal ideals of heteronormativity that capture a sexual futurity for Mexico” (2020, 346).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Iván Eusebio Aguirre Darancou
Iván Eusebio Aguirre Darancou is Assistant Professor at the University of California, Riverside. Their book project, tentatively titled “Consuming Bodies: Countercultural Citizens of Mexican Capitalism in the 20th Century”, traces how a series of cultural artefacts – photograph exhibitions, music, performance, film, concerts, journalism, theatre – were used by citizens during the postrevolutionary period to generate alternatives constructions of nation, consumption habits, and counterculture. Other research projects involve studying marginalised female and lgbtttqi countercultural producers of the 60s–80s, focusing on a variety of media from children’s books to songbooks to Super 8mm film production, as well as examining the ways in which humanimal subjectivities interact with ideologies of nationalism and gender. They have published articles on authors such as Augusto Monterroso, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Parménides García Saldaña and José Agustín in journals such as Hispanic Review, Tierra adentro, the Revista de Literatura Mexicana Contemporánea and Romance Notes. They also work on and have published chapters on film directors Nicolás Echevarría and Sergio García Michel. Their fields of interest include Latin American literature and culture (emphasis on Mexico), critical theory, film and media studies, queer theory, ethics, and countercultural studies.