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  • Drawing Offensive/Offensive Drawing:Toward a Theory of Mariconógraphy
  • Robb Hernández (bio)

I suppose people will use [maricón] in jest. But I don’t know if that makes it any less offensive. . . People will say many things in private. People swear. But there is a difference when you display it.

—Michelle Gonzalez (qtd. in Kelly)

On September 15, 2012, Toronto Blue Jays shortstop Yunel Escobar took to the diamond of Rogers Centre armed with all the accoutrements of a professional baseball player facing off against his team’s adversaries, the Boston Red Sox: oiled glove in hand, sunglasses to deflect the intrusive stadium lighting, and eye black to withstand the sun’s glare. However, inside the covered stadium dome there would be no interfering sunlight, no meddlesome reflective surfaces, and no need to evade natural elements impinging on his sight. Escobar entered the arena facing throngs of spectators, teammates, and sports journalists bearing a brash message written in the greasy smudging beneath his eyes. It read: “Tú ere[h] maricón [You are a faggot]” (see Figure 1).1

His face inscribed with a defamatory Spanish slur, Escobar became the subject of intense scrutiny for what some defended as a “joke” in poor taste. Social media sports bloggers picked up Escobar’s photograph and circulated it widely. Many mainstream news outlets questioned the premeditated nature of the act and whether the anti-gay pictorial statement merited punishment. Major League Baseball investigated and finally suspended the shortstop for three games. At a poorly organized press conference, Escobar apologized and yet explained that maricón in his native Cuba could not be accurately translated into English—that it was a “word without meaning” (qtd. in Duque). He explained that the statement was aimless, harmless, and directed at no one in particular.2 His defense of cultural mistranslation was puzzling; he struggled to clarify its ordinary use among Cubans as a culturally specific turn of phrase that was nevertheless empty of historical, social, or political significance.3 In the eyes of Escobar, maricón meant nothing.

Yet his bodily articulation said otherwise. His facial self-inscription in the visual field marks slippage in body, image, and text. His visibility is contingent [End Page 121] upon a dialectic of the hypermasculine macho and its oppositional other, the abject maricón. Thus, in order to read Escobar’s machista virility, the public had to rely upon a repertoire of unseen images removed from the baseball arena and beyond the bounds of the athlete’s photocomposition. His portrait, resonating with broader sports imagery of athletic heroism, redirects our vision to the blind spot of this image, to that “blind field” in Roland Barthes’s assessment where our “partial vision” (57) grasps at that which exists beyond the photo frame, “triggered” (55) by the punctum—Escobar’s hailing of the invisible figure of the faggot.4 This raises the question: if he is not a maricón, then who is?


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Figure 1.

Tom Szczerbowski, photograph of Yunel Escobar (2012), photograph. Image courtesy: Getty Images.

In this essay, I interrogate the “archival sight” of two competing though interrelated image archives of heteronormative Latinidad and Eurocentric gay male visual culture. Drawing on what José Esteban Muñoz calls “race myopias/queer blind spots” (Disidentifications 8), in which queer of color subject positions confront and disidentify with shortsighted exclusions in race and sexuality identity discourse, separating one from the other, I call attention to the partial vision engendered by image archives granting racial and sexualized subjects exclusive visibility, yet reinforcing queer racialized blindness. It is necessary to develop a disidentifying visual analytic to read through these manifold blind spots and discern how, in this case, maricón abjection is contested and reclaimed through oppositional rereadings and image productions. The result is a cultural theory of maricón iconography, which I term maricónography.5 [End Page 122]

Embracing the hybrid linguistic nature of Latina/o transcultural and transborder subjectivities through the conjoining of maricón and iconography, maricónography is a shared sensibility and subversive line of image production that empowers culturally distinct ways of being and seeing maricónes...

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