Abstract:

This article analyzes La Frontera the border separating the US from Mexico as a performance by studying the relationship between sexuality and politics. Specifically, it compares heterosexual hegemony with political hegemony, and demonstrates how both sexuality and politics engage in a navigation of power through performance by proposing the term el drag guadalupista. An analysis of a virgin-whore complex present in contemporary Mexican and Chicano society, made apparent by the roles of La Virgen de Guadalupe and La Malinche in the creation of Mexican and Chicano national identity, will show how the visual representations of the Virgin created by the artists Alma López, Alex Donis, and Jim Ru challenge both the heterosexual hegemony within Mexicanidad, Chicanidad, and Latinidad, and the political and cultural power of the United States by means of representing, and re-presenting, the sexuality of La Virgen

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