Auswahl der wissenschaftlichen Literatur zum Thema „Zenil, Nahum B., 1947-“

Este estudo objetiva pensar o processo de criação artística como espaço-fronteiriço matricial. Ancorado na abordagem metodológica da bricolagem, analisa-se a criação da obra de dança performativa Tú, él, nosostros tres, inspirada em obras dos artistas mexicanos Frida Kahlo, Arturo Estrada e Nahum B. Zenil. Com isso, o processo criativo é entendido como espaço/útero modelado por interconexões e permeabilidades, gerador da obra de arte e capaz de recriar o/a próprio/a artista.

Nahum B. Zenil es reconocido primordialmente por su obra pictórica elaborada durante la década de los ochenta y los noventa. La crítica y la historia del arte han demarcado las interpretaciones que hasta ahora han caracterizado a sus piezas en dos posturas disímiles: la paternalista noción de la confesión como la liberación de una opresión íntima y la satanización de la escatología y la exhibición del cuerpo. La presente investigación tiene como objetivo brindar argumentos teóricos que revivan el valor crítico de su obra en los términos que siguen: la reiteración de la cita homosexual en sus autorretratos fragmentan la relación entre la normatividad del género y la identidad nacional. Para este propósito, esta tesis propone un marco metodológico que desglosa la lógica de la matriz heterosexual en sincronía con la construcción de la mexicanidad. Es decir, el aparato discursivo que fomenta la congruencia entre una identidad sexual en conjunto con la noción de pertenencia a una cultura y a un territorio. Este análisis va de la mano de la teoría de la performatividad de Judith Butler y los estudios profusos sobre el nacionalismo y la identidad homosexual en México de Carlos Monsiváis.
Nahum B. Zenil is recognized primarily for his paintings from the eighties and nineties. Art history and art criticism have circumscribed the interpretations that have characterized his pieces until the moment into two dissimilar stances: the paternalistic notion of confession as releasing an intimate oppression and the demonization of eschatology and exhibitionism of the body. This research aims to provide theoretical arguments to reinforce the critical value of his work in the following terms: the reiteration of homosexual citation in his self-portraits subverts the relationship between gender normativity and national identity. For this purpose, this thesis proposes a methodological framework that breaks the logic of heterosexuality in synchrony with the construction of mexican identity. That is to say, the discursive apparatus that promotes congruence between sexual identity in conjunction with the notion of belonging to a culture and a territory. This analysis is developed under the parameters of performativity exposed by Judith Butler and the profuse studies on nationalism and homosexual identity in Mexico elaborated by Carlos Monsivais.

This dissertation examines the role of scientific and medical disciplines in the construction of homosexuality in Mexico, and how non-normative gender and sexual subjects engaged in political activism, body modifications, and aesthetic production to challenge the pathologizing discourses reinforced by the increasing authority of the biomedical sciences. Chapter 1 examines the role of photography as a medical instrument in the first documented sex-reassignment treatment in the Western Hemisphere performed by Mexican physician and sexologist Rafael Sandoval Camacho in the early 1950s, and how his patient Marta Olmos, Mexico’s first transsexual woman, embraced photojournalism as a medium to document, archive, and validate her identity as a woman. In chapter 2, I examine the popular phenomenon of publishing photographs of erotized trans sex workers known as Mujercitos during the 1970s in Alarma!, Mexico’s most influential crime tabloid magazine, and how these marginalized subjects appropriated biomedical technologies like “sex hormones” intended to regulate gender and sexual deviance to construct bodily identities that challenged the medical and criminological positions on the essentialist natures of gender expression, sexual desire, and the sexed body. Chapter 3 examines the early gay narrative of Luis Zapata and José Rafael Calva that emerged in conjunction to Mexico’s Homosexual Liberation Movement in the late 1970s. My analysis demonstrates how Zapata’s El vampiro de la colonia Roma [Adonis García: A Picaresque Novel] (1979), and Calva’s Utopía gay [Gay Utopia] (1983) present sharp critiques shared by Mexico’s homosexual liberation groups on the growing authority of disciplines like psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and biomedicine in pathologizing homosexuality. Chapter 4 examines the changing understandings of homosexuality, homosexual desire, and the homosexual body during the HIV/AIDS crisis through the work of Julio Galán, Nahum B. Zenil, and art collective Taller Documentación Visual. My analysis presents the role of the HIV virus not as an explicit visual reference but rather as an elusive, spectral, and dangerous entity that is identifiable through the aesthetic and formal composition of the artists’ works, best exemplified by the references to condoms as physical and symbolic devices in the mediation of gay sexual contact and desire. This dissertation demonstrates the critical roles of biomedicine, criminology, sexology, and psychiatry in regulating diverse forms of Mexican homosexualities, while simultaneously functioning as liminal disciplines strategically adopted by homosexual subjects to redefine, shape, and validate their desired bodily, sexual, and subjective identities.