Queerness in Exile A Dank Essay Final PDF

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Adan Esparza Professor Jackson Spanish R1A November 28December 13, 2018 Queerness in Exile: The Story of José Pérez Ocaña (I’m going to try keep Ocaña’s gender pronouns as she when they are in drag and he when they’re doing painting and puppeteering. Also im going to be using Judith Butler’s term Queer that she would create in her work The Gender in Dispute. I’m only going to have this little info box in the prewrite.) José Pérez Ocaña is a defining symbol of admiration to the the punk movement and the first LGBTQ+ protest movements in Spain. He was foreshadowing a sexual and gender disobedience movements that would be called ‘queer activism’. Ocaña’s performances ranged from drag, paintings, and exhibitions. When she was performing drag, it was being openly performed in the end of Franco’s regime. Being openly gay in a fascist regime, causes internalized exile because of the ostracization form the community.Being openly gay in a fascist regime, caus es forms of internalized exile because of the ostracization from the community. OOcaña is from small Andalusian village and from adolescence experienced abuse and marginalisationmarginalization because he didn’t conform to gender norms. His artistic tastes and his his drag put him in to the public gaze of intolerance, reinforcing his internalized exile, which ultimately culminated into a voluntary exile to Barcelona. Ocaña left the small village ending up at the red-light district of Plaça Reial which was the most liberal hub in ThatBarcelona, helping to champion for queerness. That self imposedself-imposed exile not only makes him important in aan exilic sense, but also in a Charnego sense. Ocaña’s life

is the key to understanding internalized exile and using that to explore the Charnego community in Spain. Ocaña suffered from internalized exile when he arrived toat Barcelona, but that leads to the question, can internalized exile ever be escaped? Ocaña’s life shows that it can be throughinternalizes exile can be escaped through expression, performance, and exhibition. Ocaña draws most of his inspiration from his home state of Andalusia Andalonia where he uses Catholic and AndalonianAndalusian traditions in his artwork. Ocaña creates and performs art to bring his homeland under his control to escape internalized exile. His control comes from reimagining and appropriating his own Sevillian/Andalusian culture to make it into a place he feels comfortable. He does that to bring his homeland under his control to escape internalized exile, because his escape is reliant on reimagining home into a place he feels comfortable. Therefore, internalized exile can be escape if its reimagined through the use ofusing artistic mediums, that force home to become an embracing existence rather than an alienating one. ( Paragraph one is going to be on drag, second one is going to be on his artwork, third one is going to be on the puppets, fourth one on charnego community, then conclusion) One of Ocaña’s most iconic ways he reimagined Andalusian culture was through drag. Ocaña uses drag as a way toto reconfigure himself in exile, both externally and internally. He created a microcosm in The Ramblas, the main street of Barcelona, where he was able to create a place where he can bring his AndaloniaAndalusia roots back. Especially when Ocaña’s performance becomes something more political and radical. It is an endless commitment to a future absent of bureaucratic/fascist agency. It becomes the embodiment of recognition towards creating anti-cooptation forces that challenge the dominant narrative of exile

and queerness. Independently, drag is an enactment of self- acceptance that refuses outside acceptance. Ocaña’s performance becomes crucial in confronting indoctrinated “truths”, in this case heteronormativity and homophobia, his individualism is crucial to enacting reidentification. Reidentification is That retrieval of Andalonia was key to fight his internalized exile, becauseexile because he created the home that rejected him and reimagined it. That reimaging is the critical ideology that makes Ocaña special. An example of this is when created a reenactment of a Holy Week procession while in drag. The way she was presenting herself and singing taking takes herself back to the roots of where she came from, because those processions only happen in small towns in Spain like where she is from. That The ability to recreate Barcelona's main street into a work of art, is putting her body on display is fundamentally key to reidentification. The queer body in drag is a work of art, especially when it’s an enactment of self-acceptance. It creates ways to refuse outsideacceptance, that resist the need for recognition from an oppressing structure. Performing drag creates radical possibilities, these possibilities are directly related on how the world is perceived. In the case of Ocaña it creates a world where his drag will become an ideology of resistance to the “truths.” In that resistance he will be able to reimagine and use his roots as material to make a new world where he is accepted as queer. Ocaña was also a creator, he created many things like paintings and puppets. There is a special significance for the queer to create. The queer is constantly creating spaces for themselves to feel free and liberated, therefore reimagination is inherently freeing. They create art and literature on just expressing who they are. Ocaña fell under many categories with his creations, but the most famous was the physical space in The Ramblas. He created a world where he enabled a rehabilitation from his exile. He could decompress and escape the exile, he

legitimized himself, while ignoring the outside state and its hatred towards him. That is why creation is important for queerness. What he created besides a community in The Ramblas was paintings. In some of his paintings it depicted people dreaming. One was about a girl in bed seeing three fairies, another was about a person seeing a lot of people above the bed with a town in the distance. What is uniquely key about the paintings is the topic of dreaming because it ties perfectly with the concept of reimagining. Dreaming allows for oppressed people to reimagine their lives. It provides openings to another world, it’s a world where they can decouple an antiqueer structure and secure a queer future. Ocaña painted about dreaming under the same context, where he dreams up a future where he is free to be himself. There are many different types of dreams, dreams can get infected by toxic ideologies like capitalism, and hetero-patriarchy. However, in these dreams there is an opportunity to deconstruct these ideologies with a more critical form of dreaming. Constructive dreaming fosters hope, and helps build towards bigger revolutions, like how Ocaña foreshadowed an entire sexual and queer revolution in Spain. Understanding that the dreams can eventually become reality is something unique to the oppressed, for Ocaña it was The Ramblas and his work. All these abilities to escape, dream and find self-acceptance are unique ways to subvert internalized exile. Ocaña was also prolific in using his Charnego background in his work. Ocaña using his culture as medium to escape internalized exile is very interesting, because he isn’t rejecting where he came from. Instead of outright rejection of his culture and history, he shows pride in it. He did many shows dealing with the Catholic religion, and even in an interview he talked about loving the proceedings of funerals. The use of his culture is important in an exilic context because it shows longing for home, even if it was hostile to him. The use of his Charnego culture and upbringing shows a clear attachment to his homeland, that attachment causes him to feel

exiled internally because he can’t go home and be treated normally. So, he created artwork using the Charnego culture as a medium to combat his internal feelings of exile. Therefore, by using Charnego culture in his queer art, he creates a form of visibility for queerness. That form hypervisibility creates spaces especially in the Charnego community for acceptance. Homophobia happens become of the invisibility of the queer, under the eyes of society. However, with art work involving Charnego culture it creates ruptures in that transparency. In the ruptures queerness becomes opaque and is forced into discussion. In that discussion queer struggle can’t be ignored and that is what Ocaña wants. Therefore, opacity becomes a visual metaphor towards a more visual culture, destroying stereotypic and heteronormative forms of representation. That resistance allows for completeness in the form of the inclusion of different forms of sexuality. Opacity creates more complex relations with others and allows greater inclusivity. The reason he uses Charnego culture is to create opaqueness for himself, allowing others to also reimagine queerness so he is accepted and then escapes internal exile. Ocaña’s many uses of the arts are just many ways for him to escape internalized exile. He went through reimagination, dreaming, and opacity, to try and achieve a form of selflove and self-acceptance of his queerness. Even though he felt exiled from is Andalusian home, he was able to redefine home and that made him escape. That escape answers the question regarding the ability to ever leave internalized exile. It shows that self-expression is very effective in trying to reorient oneself to combat exile. In that combat relying on one’s culture is very effective medium to achieve the selfcare and self-acceptance. Once reimagination is achieved, the exilic mentality will devolve into one that has found a home. A person has reimagined their position in the world and is no longer an exile and is accepting of who they are. Only when one is not solely reliant on

a country, history, or culture to define one’s identity and position in the world, can they escape internalized exile.

important in escaping and reimagining internalized exile. (Paragraph one is going to be on drag, second one is going to be on his artwork, third one is going to be on the puppets, four one on charnego community, then conclusion) I think I need to quote evidence but I don’t know if I can quote video. I

Adan, Great start! The road map in your second-to-last paragraph here is helpful. Just make sure you’re really building from one paragraph to the next. Your last comment—about needing “citations”— is a really good point. Obviously you won’t be bringing in textual quotes, but you should still build your arguments on close reading—close reading, in this case, will entail observations about the space (you’re already doing that in this prewrite), commentary on the visual imagery (think back to the class sessions where we tried to simply name everything we see), etc. I think you’re moving toward an argument about claiming Andalusian identity in Catalonia and how this is subversive in many ways, but you need to tidy up the analysis so that it’s clear what the specific argument is. I really look forward to reading the finished paper. Well done. 15/15...