¡Que la quemen! Fabián Cháirez’s Revolutionary Bodies
From ‘Fabian Chairez’ on Facebook
A body twists, arches, stretches, reclines, half-shudders. Its shoulder rises to hide a coquettish face, posed in the way of a pin-up model: the cheeks shine for the pleasure of the spectator, eyes drooping downwards in gentle suggestion, as the curve of a back reaches down into nakedness. And yet this is no Rita Hayworth pinned up on a cinephile’s wall, no Anita Ekberg dipping into the glistening waters of the Trevi Fountain. The man that reels with such shy pleasure here does so with the luxury of a Hollywood star, though a candy-pink sombrero rests on his head, as he rides the unsettling figure of an aroused stallion.
In the introduction to Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler puts forth an understanding of the materiality of the body that utterly excludes ontological objectivity. As she argues instead for the existence of a system of ‘bodily norms’, having been constructed and continually cited by those seeking to define categories of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, she insists on the formation of a structure of exclusions – a ‘heterosexual matrix’, a system of regulation and reiteration that insists on objectivity, that cannot accept ‘deformation’. The bodies who deviate, unable to qualify as fully ‘male’ or ‘female’, ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’, are thus handed the sentence of ‘perversion’. On the one hand, Butler argues, this might fortify the oppositional tendency, strengthening the binaries on a dynamic of exclusion. On the other, deviance might corrode at the binary: indeed, much like this pin-up model guerrillero, it might be revolutionary. As she begins, she asks,
‘What challenge does that excluded and objected realm produce to a symbolic hegemony that might force a radical rearticulation of what qualifies as bodies that matter, ways of living that count as “life,” lives worth protecting, lives worth saving, lives worth grieving?’
In December of 2019, a large crowd of protestors gathered outside the prestigious Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, flooding the steps with bright red and green banners. Amid the mad jostling of bodies, demands were torpedoed out in chants, as the chaos was pierced with furious voices: ¡Que la quemen! ¡Que la quemen!
Burn it! Burn it!
The museum was in the throes of its latest exhibition, Emiliano: Zapata después de Zapata (‘Emiliano: Zapata after Zapata), a commemoration of a hundred years since the death of famed revolutionary general Emiliano Zapata. Though brutally assassinated in 1919 by government forces, the iconic figure, with his mantra ‘Tierra y Libertad’, continued to serve as a beacon of hope for countless compatriots, having fought valiantly against historic colonial-era repressions and for radical agrarian reforms in Mexico’s southern states. For millions, Zapata has since reached the level of quasi-sainthood, representing ultimate resistance in the face of oppression, and serving as the inspiration for the indigenous Zapatista uprising that overtook much of the state of Chiapas in the 1990’s. Zapata’s image, with its famous curved mustache and recognisable piloncillo sombrero, was intended to be celebrated at the Palacio, which had exhibited a wide variety of works depicting the general throughout the ages. In the midst of all this, however, tucked away in the corner of one of the exhibition halls, a small painting by a small artist, Fabián Cháirez’s La revolución, caught the eye of Mexico’s Secretary of Culture. She posted it to her social media. In no time at all, the controversy had exploded around the country, and, on the 10th of December, a mob of around 200 stormed the Palacio to order the piece’s removal.
Cháirez’s Zapata is not what Butler calls a ‘viable body’. In an interview with reporters, Jorge Zapata (the grandson of the ‘Caudillo del Sur’ himself) denounced both the artist and institute for ‘denigrating the figure of our general [by] painting him as gay’ (‘denigrar la figura de nuestro general pintándola de gay’). The issue, then, is clearly one of homophobia. Cháirez’s other works are no stranger to breaking the confines of gender and heterosexuality: his attention spans from homoerotically charged clergymen (take the cardinals licking an Easter candle in La venida del Señor, or the nuns caressing a statuette of the Virgin Mary, caught in ecstasy, of La Eucarastía) to masked luchadores reclining in corsets (Flamingo, Ficciones), embracing in the air (Idilio), or running their tongues down phallic cobs of corn (Luchador con elote)...
There is a distinct sense of ease within Cháirez’s artistic visions: a languishing, albeit an isolated one. His subjects ooze sensuality, male macho figures subverted into scenes of femininity and even vulnerability. Their female counterparts, too, resist the pigeonholing of traditional gender roles, such as the machete-wielding La revoltosa. Throughout Cháirez’s works, we are constantly confronted with a profound discontent with the way bodies are structured in a patriarchally Catholic society. The generally solitary nature of these bodies also hints at a detachment from society: the artist flows against the politics of the multitude, aiming instead at the individual and their personal, bodily queerness, at the discovery of the re-made self away from the vitriol of the crowd. As he addressed the backlash, Cháirez commented on the public sphere’s remarkable inhospitality for subversive bodies. ‘There are some people who experience discomfort from bodies that don’t obey the rules,” he remarked. ‘In this case, where is the offence? They [the protestors] see an offence because Zapata is feminised.’
It might be said that the conflict at the heart of La revolución is its misunderstanding. For those to whom homosexuality, queerness, feminisation, and generally anything which works against the impermeable imposition of the macho male, counts as perversion, Cháirez’s efforts are an insult. For those to whom it does not, the Zapata that he paints is anything but. The symbolic value of the subject’s dissident body, and indeed all bodies that have been said so many times not to ‘matter’ in the deep continuous woundings of an oppressively heterosexual, forcibly gendered society, is unmappable.
Fabián Cháirez represents a new generation of Latin American artists in with the guts to question the religious and cultural institutions that have for so long attacked their queer subjects, with a fearlessness and a mastery that enacts a public show of resistance. LGBTQ+ artists have often drawn on scenes of disruptive and unfiltered arenas of sexuality to express themselves and to shake the heteronormative institutions that may confine them – and Cháirez is no exception. It is, however, his commitment not to the dissolution of cultural figures (and his Zapata, himself a liberatory figure, is not upon his canvas to be dissolved) but to their re-interpretation via (homo)eroticism, that spotlights him, too, as a revolutionary. Not an annihilation of culture, but a re-construction of it.
A re-dressing, a re-gendering. All to confront us with the bodies that matter.
