Images of Ambiente: Homo-Eroticism and Gay Identities in Latin American Art from 1821 to the Present - Hardcover
Synopsis
This text traces the geneology of gay and lesbian art in Latin America from the era of independence to the present. Studies of gay and lesbian art have focused on North America and Europe, leaving the rich homo-erotic imagery of much Latin American art unregarded. The book aims to widen the horizons of art history by uncovering and interpreting homo-erotic representations from post-colonial Latin America. Homosexual imagery or "homotextuality" was implicit and codified by academia, romanticism or indigenist traditions. By the end of the 19th century, an alternative aesthetic language gained acceptance, essentially tributory to European fin-de-siecle art. While embracing the radical sexual politics of decadent art and literature, it created a platform in Latin America's modernizing cities for coded representations of a "gay" sensibility, of homo-erotic desire. The resulting dialect illustrates how the tension between homophobia, male bonding and homo-eroticism is an explosive one, especially in a Latin American context configured in, for example, the Leftist rhetoric that policed artistic production in Castro-Cuba or military regimes that forced non-conformist art underground.
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