Statement: Amores Postmodernos

Amores Postmodernos” a photographic series that aims to show pleasure in a queer lifestyle. I use queer subjects from Guatemala City, in scenes with a contemporary narrative base of social media, sex, gender and sexuality, with layers of religious symbolism. I want my work to provoke political disturbance through the act of rendering visible a community of humans that seek a queer heterotopia. As philosopher and historian Michel Foucault (1986) suggests,“queer heterotopias are places where individuals can challenge the hereronormative regime and are free to perform their gender and sexuality without being qualified,marginalized or punished.

All of the subjects are friends or strangers that were encountered through my daily life in Guatemala City, via social media, hookup apps, or circles of friends that in their own way are disrupting gender norms by exploring and experimenting with crafting a queer identity. In thinking, in particular, about queer love and how it affects oneself and others, it is clear that it cannot be defined by standard norms, but is instead shaped and defined through sexual practice or the aesthetic transformation of one ́s bodyin a way that seeks to disrupt a binary gender system. But what price must one pay to challenge a society that still doesn ́t recognize one’s identity? Seeking pleasure,putting make-up on, wearing heels, a dress, kissing your lover in public, or dressing in drag—any of these small actions allow bodies to reclaim space. But expressing a gender identity outside a strictly normative culture, also exposes one to fear, physical repression, or even death. Youth in Guatemalan society started testing the limits of their cultural background, using gender and love to shape a political state of hate by reclaiming their own space, by not conforming.

The photographic medium allows me to capture the performative essence of these subjects’ gender/sexual expressions. I also use Catholic symbolism throughout thework to specifically protest the Catholic Church’s repressive binary view and sustained discrimination toward the queer community. I use the work to create a narrative that clearly contains a queer sexual practice or aesthetic, juxtaposed with religious connotation found in gestures or objects. I appropriate directly from the religious doctrine that rejects the very existence of the subject.