Abstract
In December 2019, roughly two hundred protesters stormed Mexico’s Palace of Fine Arts to denounce Fabián Cháirez’s painting La Revolución (2014). The image, which depicted the revolutionary icon Emiliano Zapata (1879–1919) dressed only in high heels and a pink sombrero, reignited debates about obscenity in Mexican art and Zapata’s long-disputed sexuality that excludes any discussion of bisexuality. In this article, I take up bisexual erasure as a conceptual tool to understand the erotic tensions in Zapata’s legacy. Bisexuality’s slippery signification regarding varying romantic interests has often been characterised as multifarious and unrestrained. These characterisations, furthermore, are most often applied to racialised minorities who are seen as “premodern” and resistant to a “true” sexual identity. Bisexuality thus exceeds and subverts regimes of sexual desire, encompassing what Deborah Vargas terms “lo sucio”: the lewd, obscene, and undisciplined behaviours that oppose normative respectability and comportment. Embracing this radical, multifarious methodological potential, I use bisexual erasure as a recuperative project to historicise the desire to know – via rumour and speculation – Zapata’s unknowable sexual desires and to highlight how Zapata’s erotic legacy offers a lesson in the plurality of sexual pleasures that resist the globalised mandates and colonial dictates of sexual identification and decency.
Published Version
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