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Article Excerpt
Luis Zapata's literary production addresses the concept of personal identity as a role to be explored by actor/participants, also challenging the reader to engage in the process of identity formation. This can be seen in his novelistic production beginning with the publication of Hasta en las mejores familias (Even in the Best of Families) (1975), through later novels such as El vampiro de la Colonia Roma (Adonis Garcia) (1979), Melodrama (1987), La hermana seereta de Angelica Maria (The Secret Sister of Angelica Maria) (1989), and La mas fuerte pasion (The Strongest Passion) (1995). Zapata's fictions are necessarily Queer in that they create a fictional universe which fully incorporates the experiences of individuals who defy patriarchy's two basic oppressive strategies with regard to gender and sexuality, namely: 1) the false premise that gender is a binary construct where masculinity and femininity are genetically-determined expressions of physical sex traits; and 2) the dominant, and thus normative stares assigned to heterosexuality for the purpose of marginalizing other sexualities. Zapata's literary production contradicts these essentialist theories of gender/ sexual performances. He does this by presenting gender, and indeed identity itself, as performative or "acts," as may perhaps best be seen in his novel-as-film-script Melodrama. This text is a good example because of its presentation of lived experiences as a role-play whose script is the unwritten narrative of human interaction. Zapata's novel and his work in general occurs within the context of Mexico and therefore plays off specificities particular to that culture. However, in what can be called something of a post-national turn, it also connects with cultural imaginaries through cinema and literature beyond the limits of geographic boundaries. In this way it participates in and helps in establishing a Queer canon that includes but is not limited to Mexico. Also, it invites readers to identify and join in the process of a Queer identity that is both global and local.
While the struggle towards emancipation as well as social and legal equality for non-heterosexual oriented persons is obviously an ongoing one, contemporary theorists on gender have also made extraordinary headway towards the undermining of patriarchy's essentialist theories regarding gender traits. During the last twenty years, numerous highly influential studies have concluded that many of the components of social identity are indeed performed and are thus not biologically derived. In the field of sociology, one of the seminal articles on gender is Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman's "Doing Gender," where one way "doing" may be read is as a synonym for performance. The authors state that "gender is a socially scripted dramatization of the culture's idealization of feminine and masculine natures, played for an audience that is well schooled in the presentational idiom. To continue the metaphor, there are scheduled performances presented in special locations" (7). In their study, West and Zimmerman parallel Zapata in their suggestion of scripted behavior, and in a direct negation of the essentialist stance upheld by the traditional defenders of patriarchy. In another article, "Gender Inequality: New Conceptual Terrain," Fenstermaker, West, and Zimmerman present their own overview of sociological research on gender. Here they conclude that there is no evidence to suggest a relation between biological sex and social meanings, and that the reduction of gender to a false binary system, based upon an equally false reduction of physical sex to two, and only two systems, has impeded advances in the study of gender roles and traits from at least the nineteenth century forward (26).
Likewise, psychoanalytical studies like that of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble postulate a similar theory of gender as performance (32). With regard to the performative nature of perceived and lived genders, Butler states:
In this case, gender is not a noun, but neither is it a set of free-floating attributes, for we have seen that the substantive effect of gender is performatively produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of gender coherence. Hence, within the inherited discourse of the metaphysics of substance, gender proves to be performative--that is, constituting the identity that it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed. (33)
Queer cultural production has repeatedly insisted that gender roles and traditional gender characteristics are simply part of the facade of social existence, and it may be for this reason that: 1) cross-gender identification has played such a major role in works written and/or embraced by gays and lesbians; and 2) theater, film, and television narratives have played such a major part in the transference of Queer culture across geographic frontiers and from one generation to the next. This is because, in acted dramatic narratives, the concept of surface identity as sustained role-play governed by a director (read as the controlling force of homophobic or heterocentric societies), is underscored. Homosexuals have historically been conscious of social gender performances due to the need to "act" straight in homophobic or heterosexist contexts, indeed they perform the closet as Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick says in Epistemology of the Closet (21-2).
The questioning of gender identity, and how it is constructed, combined with a near obsessive inclusion of cinematic elements, brings Zapata's writing into a dialogue with popular mainstream acted narratives. However, his works do not recycle Hollywood or US Queer/camp icons as do those by other gay canonical authors such as Spain's Terenci Moix, Portugal's Al Berto, or even Manuel Puig, but instead blend almost exclusively Mexican high and low cultural products in order to produce an identifiably Mexican Queer artifact. (1) Zapata's artistic production is formulated on two principles: first, it is well-documented that Zapata has adopted the US gay fictional trend to deproblematize homosexuality (Westmoreland, "Camp" 45; Perez 205; Torres-Rosado 277); secondly, he has done so while maintaining his focus on a necessarily Mexican gay experience by demonstrating that the mass cultural artifacts of any nation, in this case that of Mexico, may be "Queered" or used as tools in the creation and transference of a non-hegemonic cultural practice. This is, of course, in stark contrast to those authors who have attempted to create a body of work with references to almost exclusively Anglophone cultural products such as Portuguese novelist Al Berto in Lunario (1988) and Terenci Moix's novel Amami Alfredo: Polvo de Estrellas (1984).
With regard to the fusion of media in Queer cultural production, one must remember that it is perhaps only through art that gays and lesbians had been able to historicize before the Gay Liberation Movement. Pre-liberation (in this case, also pre-film) gay icons include artistic and literary products by such creators as Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Maria de Zayas, Gongora, Sor Juana, and Giacomo Leopardi, with this phase of the Queer canon perhaps ending with Oscar Wilde after his public trial for sodomy. Whether these and other authors and artists were homosexuals is almost irrelevant; their works "seem Queer." This implies, of course, another type of performance, one which entails the imagining of narratives and their possible worlds by Queer readers/ spectators/participants. Both Wolfgang Iser and Umberto Eco help establish the validity of a theory of reading allowing for multiple interpretations. They postulate reading itself as a performative act. As Eco says in The Role of the Reader. "every reception of a work of art is both an interpretation and a performance of it, because in every reception the work takes on a fresh perspective for itself" (49). Homosexual readers have perhaps become even further incited to perform Queer-infused or Queer-oriented readings of artworks since the true sexual orientation of those same Queer icons (again, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, director George Cukor, etc.) has now become public knowledge, proving that Queer readings/interpretations of their works, traditionally rejected as forced readings, can now be "justified"...
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