The Place of Gay Male Chicano Literature in Queer Chicana/o Cultural Work

Abstract

If one agrees to meet the challenge posed by gay Mexican artist, Nahum Zenil's self-portrait, Tiro de dardos (Dart Game), what is one agreeing to? Those who possess a trenchant gaze whose aim is true will prove their acuity at a great cost to the body in the painting, for the bull's eye of this target is figured as Zenil's heart. The point of agreeing or not agreeing to play along with the painting's morbid, sexual, and humorous demand may, in fact, be a moot issue since the "dart," or any other missile, for that matter, which might be thrust at the target is figured as the viewer's scrutinous gaze. To look at this painting is to acquiesce to its terms, to agree to the painting's passive seduction of the viewer to penetrate the figure before her with an accurate gaze. A careful surveillance of the target is crucial for any success in Zenil's game. To look then, it would appear, means also to enter into a certain drama of surveillance of Zenil's body. I would like to suggest that the deployment of surveillance in this drama staged by Zenil indexes and then scrambles the codes by which a homophobic Western cultural imperative insists on the inherent textuality of the homosexual body in order to track it, locate it, read its surface as a target wherever it threatens to go unremarked upon by power laden discourses and techniques.1 Positioned in front of an expansive target whose surface is keyed in the red and green colors of the Mexican flag, Zenil's naked body