Five
In a middle-class shopping precinct just a few blocks from the Zócalo (the historic center of Mexico City), the entrance to the sexual funhouse called “Sex Capital” seems like an anomaly. The cobblestoned street is lined with shoe stores and bakeries whose storefronts display white, multitiered wedding cakes. Among them, the four-story complex Sex Capital is set off by its distinct kind of fetishized objects. Sex Capital is a veritable strip mall of sex: it contains a XXX cinema, a mixed-gender sex club called Lujuria, and a food court where visitors can consume (stereo)typical American fare (burgers and fries) while erotic dancers perform simulated sex acts to booming club beats on two circular raised stages. If you decide to use the cabinas (inexpensive porn-viewing booths) that are stocked with US and some Mexican pornography and that also promote the use of glory holes for semiprivate sexual encounters between lovers and strangers, you can pick up condoms, lubricant, or a variety of other erotic accoutrements at any one of twenty-one sex shops that populate the first floor. The sex museum, El Museo del Sexo (MuseXo), crowns the Sex Capital complex on the fourth floor. MuseXo is not, therefore, a destination in itself but a place for processing the sex one has just witnessed or performed in one of the other more explicitly live sexual locations in Sex Capital.
Because of the closure of Sex Capital and, with it, MuseXo in December 2008, this chapter gives a snapshot of the three-year run of Latin America’s only explicitly named sex museum and serves as an archive of the ways in which an eclectic array of queer Mexican and chilango curators displayed sexualities for a brief period at the beginning of the twenty-first century.1 I position MuseXo in Mexico City as a specific display space that playfully bracketed an encounter with what Gloria Anzaldúa has called a queer mestizaje2 that is composed of conflicting and coalescing sexual-cultural identities in Mexico City today and communicated through curator-invented forms of rhetoric that intermix diverse sets of sexual knowledge and a multiplicity of transnational influences.
The cultural and rhetorical influences of late capitalist globalization work in multiple directions on sexual life in Mexico City. I concentrate on the influence of popular US culture and discourse on MuseXo as the curators’ approach to museum signage allowed for an analysis of the flow of sexual ideas and objects in this direction. Taking my cue from MuseXo’s displays, I focus on the ways in which US-Mexican relations, specifically in the wake of the cultural exchanges facilitated by the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1992, may have contributed to the new discourse of sexual identities for the practicing sexual subject in Mexico City today. Like Evelyn Blackwood’s scholarship on transnational discourse and circuits of queer knowledge in Indonesia, I critique the circulation of global queer discourse in Mexico City to interrogate the processes by which sexual knowledge, particularly that oriented toward homonormative versions of Western gay consciousness and the LGBT (in Mexico, LGBTTTI) political movements of the United States, is received and appropriated.3 I refer to the transnational codification of sexual identity discourse as the sexual modern and propose the use of this term to refer to (homo)normative display practices that textually manifest prescriptive sets of social codes for articulating cosmopolitan queer subjectivity.
All sex museums allow for a variety of museum publics—scholars, visitors, and curators—to reconfigure, rework, and redefine sexual modernity by tracking, consuming, or creating environments where certain practices, identities, and people become visible. While there are instances of temporary exhibitions dedicated to gender and sexuality in mainstream museums, and while museum studies scholars overwhelmingly agree that museums play pivotal roles in identity formation, little attention has been paid to the ways in which the display of gender and sexuality influences the formation and cultivation of communities.4 The representation of sex and sexuality in museums has always been instrumental in the creation and cultivation of certain normative community formations. Sex museums provide unique sites that highlight the performativity of display in other locations as they too struggle with internal and external pressures to reproduce normativity and domination through technologies of display while at the same time seeking to challenge those norms by exposing the histories of sexual stigmatization.
Perhaps it is not surprising that sex museums, as I have discussed them thus far, depend on categorical identity formations as a way of making visible gay and lesbian lives (and, to a lesser extent, bisexual, intersex, asexual, and transgender experiences). Relying on these categories can lead to the marginalization of certain sexual practices even within a space that is expected to be explicit and free of censorship (no warning signs here). When categories that are specific to particular classed and racial groups become the logic and framework for the display of nonnormative sex practices in non-US sex museums, their relevance is thrown into question. When sex museum curators depend on Western discourse and even more specifically US definitions of what it means to be sexually modern in contexts other than the United States, a different set of questions rises to the surface: what it means to be a cosmopolitan queer is at stake.5
Throughout this book, I mobilize queer, on the one hand, to refer to a reconfiguration of the sexual “order of things,” to borrow a phrase from Michel Foucault,6 where the term announces a dreaming of new forms of sexual sociality and collectivity between bodies, things, and nations in public institutional display spaces such as museums. Specifically, queer as employed with regard to curatorship allows one to highlight and rearrange normative narratives about what it means to be a historically and geographically specific sexual subject. At the same time, it is increasingly being used to refer to a universalized, cosmopolitan narrative about what it means to be sexually modern, that is, postconfessional, out, urban, identity based, and public.
Martin Manalansan and Joseph Massad, among other transnational sexuality scholars, have argued that the contemporary sexual moment has increasingly become determined by stories of sexual liberation that are particular to white, Western, and bourgeois gay citizens.7 This discursive global script dramatizes all sexual subjects as forging a monolithic road to sexual freedom from the shame-filled closet of sexual repression to the pleasure-filled parade of out identity. Thus, I join anthropologists, political scientists, and economists who study how ethnicity, gender, nationality, and citizenship factor into the theories and lived realities of globalization in local contexts8 and transnational sexuality scholars who have revolutionized the field through their research into the historical intersections between queerness, colonialism, and globalization.9 Above all, I view MuseXo as a space that entertained an inquiry at the forefront of Mexican sexuality scholarship, that being what the limitations or the benefits of queer theory are when it is applied to the Latin American context. How does an Anglo-originating term such as queer (or, as it is sometimes translated in Mexico, cuir) need to be revised and recontextualized in Latin America and specifically in Mexico?10 I hope to contribute to this research by locating museum spaces as contact zones at the junction of theory and practice and at the crossroads of the local, the regional, the national, and the global where negotiations between this global universalized script and localized sexual realities play out.
The Mexico City sex museum was a site for exploring how global queer discourse is informed by the transnational flow of popular culture and for analyzing how rhetorics of sexual identity and practice are received, appropriated, or rejected. Mexico is the ideal site to investigate the effects of trade and globalization on a quotidian expression such as sexuality. More so than any other country in Latin America, Mexico exemplifies a society that has committed to institutionalizing neoliberal capitalism—NAFTA being one hugely influential example—in the past three decades. By neoliberal capitalism, I mean a pervasive macroeconomic market philosophy of late capitalism that extends to quotidian, microexperiences and -practices that occur within even the most nonnormative of sexual environments and that depends on the recognition of certain minority differences (e.g., certain forms of cosmopolitan gay subjectivity) while simultaneously disciplining other forms of difference (e.g., female dominance, queers of color, genderqueerness, asexuality, etc.).11 Most of the objects that populated MuseXo (e.g., pornographic films, sex toys, music, ephemera related to gay pride parades) were distributed by mega porn and sex industry companies in the United States and then imported to Mexico in the years following NAFTA. At that time, Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari famously claimed that NAFTA would usher Mexico into the so-called First World. Increasingly, the sex objects on display in MuseXo have become necessary props in the performance of sexual First World–ness. The publicity and accessibility of these objects in post-NAFTA Mexico City inspired MuseXo curators to display and define sex and sexuality using these objects and their attendant set of sexual values, which in many instances are particular to the experiences of white, urban gay men in the United States.
Yet MuseXo curators also took a humorous approach to the exhibition of transnational sexuality discourse, particularly the adaptation of a US model of sexual modernity into Mexican sexual vernacular. Instead of assuming a serious narratorial voice, they constructed wall texts as albures, or sexually laden jokes with doble sentido (double meanings), to negotiate and rearticulate this global queer discourse via mexicanismos (Mexicanisms or vernacular Mexican Spanish), an approach to sexual discourse that is specific to Mexico City and grows out of the verbal combat games described by the essayist Octavio Paz.12 As a megalopolis that both adapts to and resists global pressures to modernize, Mexico City is sometimes perceived by the rest of the Mexican Republic to defect from more traditional approaches to gender and sexuality, particularly from idealized gendered norms and the use of sexual silence, which the sociologist Héctor Carrillo has described as the “foundation stone of the traditional management of sexuality in Mexico.”13 In his scholarship on sexuality in Mexico in the time of AIDS, Carrillo also explains how albures have been one consistent tool that Mexico City residents use to work with and around sexual silence by employing the Mexican literary and rhetorical tradition of double meanings in their everyday lives.
As Carrillo has shown, the current moment in Mexican sexuality is a confusing time of diverse sexual vocabularies and cultural blendings when Mexicans negotiate new ideas about sexuality that mainly come from the Internet and the availability of popular culture items from the United States and other Western megapowers and contain messages that are sometimes incompatible with local, regional, and national notions about Mexican traditional sexual values, or “actors’ understandings of ‘how things used to be.’”14 In the major metropolitan areas where Carrillo conducted his fieldwork: “[Modern] refers to understandings of ‘new,’ emergent attitudes, norms, values, behaviors, or identities, including those perceived to arrive from outside Mexico. In other words, the terms ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ are shorthand to separate perceptions of ‘what was in the past’ and ‘what they inculcated in us.’”15 Ultimately, MuseXo curators used US popular culture to display a museum performance of disidentification, to borrow a term from José Esteban Muñoz, that simultaneously reached toward and selectively translated the sexual language of the dominant North American culture, in this instance, white, bourgeois, gay culture.16 The exhibits, but particularly the wall texts in MuseXo, disidentified with a narrative of sexual modernity that could not adequately articulate the complex and layered desires and subjectivities particular to cuir Mexican life.
Sex Capital
In 2005, the successful Jewish Mexican businessmen Gabriel Kibrit and his son Alberto attempted to capitalize on what they saw as a lacuna in the sex industry market and opened Sex Capital. The Kibrits marketed Sex Capital as an extension of their Sex and Entertainment business enterprise, the crowning event of which is the annual Sex and Entertainment Expo (Expo Sexo y Erotismo). Held at the Palacio de los Deportes (a sports arena) every year since 2004, the expo was modeled by Alberto on the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo (AEE) in Las Vegas. Attended by more than 100,000 people over a six-day stretch, the Kibrits’s sex fair far surpassed the attendance at AEE (around 30,000) and has been advertised across Mexico City as “300,000 square feet of ‘pure sex,’ an erotic twist on Mexico’s chaotic market culture and affinity for spectacles.”17 In Sex Capital, Kibrit planned to build on the success of Expo Sexo to create a permanent location in Mexico City for sexual recreation.18
Unlike the marketing extravaganza that accompanies Expo Sexo, Kibrit’s attempt to advertise Sex Capital encountered numerous obstacles in local newspapers or on billboards partially owing to its location at the historic intersection of Venustiano Carranza and Dieciséis de Septiembre, the latter street named after Mexican Independence Day. “This is a place where families come,” the sales manager Arturo Romo told a reporter in 2005. Romo thought the sex plaza would frighten away customers with children, while other vendors argued that it would bring crime and prostitution. Once known as “the street of pastries” in the eyes of neighboring businesses, the mall’s giant red, white, and yellow banner renamed it “the world capital of sex.”19 Eventually, surrounding businesses pressured Kibrit and his Sex Capital team to remove the colossal sign and replace it with a smaller one that crampily read: “Sex Capital: La capital mundial del sexo, el primer centro de entretenimiento para adultos en todo el mundo” (Sex Capital: The world capital of sex, the first entertainment center for adults in the world).
Kibrit’s local advertising challenges paralleled my difficulties in researching MuseXo from the United States. Finding information about MuseXo through online searches before I arrived in Mexico City was virtually impossible. I contacted local LGBT groups, Mexican and international journalists who covered the opening of the museum and Sex Capital, and Luis Perelman, the president of the Mexican Federation of Sexual Education and Sexology. With the exception of Perelman, who hailed Sex Capital as a site of sexual freedom, especially for women,20 most people told me that they had never heard of it or that serious sexuality scholars had already written it off as a joke. After piecing together enough information about the museum’s location, whom I could contact at Sex Capital, and how I could begin preparing for my trip, I arrived in Mexico City funded by a small grant only to find out the museum was temporary closed because of a change in management and exhibit renovations (luckily it opened halfway into my stay). Collectively, these factors—poor management, advertising difficulties, and the pressure of local businesses on this historic street in the Centro Histórico—contributed to the closure of the museum only a year and a half later.21
As I stood snapping those first research photos of the small street sign reading “Sex Capital,” a man who had recently descended the broken escalator stairs leading up to the complex’s interior approached me. Performing an obvious script of commercial seduction, he flirtatiously invited me inside. I soon learned that he was a bartender at the once advertised gay discothèque turned “mixed” sex club Lujuria. I smiled, thanked him, and explained to him in Spanish that I had a meeting with the mall’s manager and that I might visit the club later that day.
As I made my way through each floor of the complex, I noticed how few women were there. A few couples shopped for sex toys, and some mixed-gender groups ate lunch together at the food court and watched the athletic performers dance seductively for them, but most of the visitors were men. A man approached me and asked what I was doing, perhaps prompted by the fact that I navigated the space alone. I somewhat naively told him about my research on sex museums and how I was exploring the rest of the Sex Capital sites before I visited the museum on the top floor. He quietly asked me to accompany him and told me he had a place to go that was only just around the corner. With my labor as a researcher of sex mistaken for another kind, I declined and gently told him that he misunderstood and perhaps I was not expressing myself clearly. As he descended the staircase, he kept looking back at me, inviting me with his eyes. He had come to Sex Capital for a more interactive sexual experience.
I arrived at the entrance to Lujuria. The facade was decorated in neon outlines of naked women, much like one would see on a big-rig truck’s mudflaps. Next to these neon silhouettes was the glowing figure of a kneeling man performing fellatio on the outline of a man standing over him. I paused at the entrance, wondering how the club could advertise to this multiplicity of desires simultaneously. As I paused, the bartender, recognizing me from our earlier encounter and wanting to continue his market-driven flirtation (and encourage more women into this scene of sexual consumption), invited me into the club space. Witnessing the type of sexual performance the actors enacted onstage only increased my intrigue at the seemingly paradoxical strategy of the club’s exterior marketing.
As I entered the club, the bartender waived the cover charge and gifted me a glass of pineapple juice to sip as I sat at a small table among an audience of men and a few women. We watched as two male audience members removed their clothing, mounted the stage, and gently caressed the body of a naked, blonde woman whom I had seen earlier; she had performed a striptease and the simulation of a penetrative sex act with a male performer at the food court on the floor below us. The performance ended, and on my way out I thanked the bartender for his generosity and asked him, “Tienen un horario o algo que explique a un cliente potencial quién y qué espectáculo van a tener en el club cada día?” (So, do you have a schedule or something that lets potential audience members know who will be performing or what will be performed in the club each day?). He replied: “No, la gente ve lo que sea, lo que tenemos ese día.” (No, the people watch whatever is going on or available for that day).
In Catholicism, lujuria, or lust, is one of the seven capital sins, a word that encapsulates the disorganized and uncontrollable desire associated with sex. In a predominately Catholic country, the club Lujuria plays on the taboo of engaging in sin as you enter through the door. The publicity of the club as a place to view the sex of lo que sea or “whatever,” however, was an unfamiliar and unexpected form of advertisement to me as US adult businesses so often gear their marketing strategy toward a binary understanding of sexual identity, namely, homo or hetero, male or female. Contrastingly, Lujuria played on the prevalence of Catholicism and the recognition of lust as a cardinal sin to justify the mixing of sexual bodies and pleasures within its space. Just as likely as intentionally confusing the binary, however, the neon sign of two men performing fellatio is also a trace of the once-gay discotheque turned mixed sex club, now aimed more in the direction of a new target market—toward Mexicans who identify with the burgeoning category of heterosexual or normal. At the point in time that I encountered Lujuria, it certainly held the potential for a kind of postmodern or alternatively modern sexual chaos capable of delighting any queer theorist interested in the disorienting and antisocial potential of public sex.22 In this juxtaposition between the display of the club’s exterior and the sexual performance inside, my expectations of the space, of Sex Capital, and the sex museum I was about to enter became unfixed to any normative notion of sexual identity. At the time, I wondered how the museum—the most text-driven site in the entire complex—would rhetorically navigate what Lujuria embodied.
Inside MuseXo
During our interview in his home in the gay enclave La Zona Rosa (the Pink Zone), I asked MuseXo’s chief curator, Tarcisio (Tacho) Padilla Carrillo, to describe the reputation of US sexuality in Mexico:23
JT. I wanted to ask and return a little—
Padilla. Yes.
JT. —about the . . . the reputation of US sexuality here in Mexico.
Padilla. Oy (he says dramatically, waving his hand as if he could go on for days).
JT. And now?
Padilla. The reputation . . . we think . . . there’s a saying that goes something like, “they’re swingers” or “how modern despite the fact that they’re gringos.” Because we think that Americans have a very free sexuality. Utopically speaking, because it’s not the truth. Utopically [as if ventriloquizing Mexican opinion] because they have the technology, because they have the [Greenwich] Village in New York, because of the bathhouses they have . . . But everything is underground. It’s hidden, right? It’s hidden, it’s dark. Always with sexuality, we look for it as if it’s mysterious. And we think that even though they’re gringos [Americans], they are utopic. It’s like the example of Mexico. For South Americans, Mexico is the springboard to arrive at the “American dream.” That is, Brazilians, Argentines, Bolivians, Peruvians. All arrive in Mexico with this big dream. It’s more the society of artists, as far away as the Iberian Peninsula, as far away as Spain they arrive because they believe that Mexico is a paradise . . .
JT. Of sexuality?
Padilla. Hmmm . . . Paradise in the sense of opportunities, if not of sexuality, to get to the United States. And the concrete question you asked me, yes, we have the impression that they are . . . are . . . “Ay, they’re gringos, they’re very good at sex” or “they are very big” or “they’re very strong.” Because they [Americans] have an adulation for the cult of the human body. But if you don’t look like Jennifer Lopez, you’re nobody! If you’re not Arnold Schwarzenegger, you’re nobody! And I could just be a normal person, and . . . The images that we receive in the world of the United States are that it’s all-powerful.24
For two hours, Padilla and I discussed what it means to be a sexually modern subject and the influence of US definitions of sexual liberation on what it means to be a cosmopolitan queer. We talked about histories of colonialism, imperialism, and consumerism on so-called authentic Mexican sexuality. We discussed twentieth-century sex tourist practices, such as those enacted by los spring breakers, whereby white Americans participate in the “enormous vogue of things Mexican” and draw from pop culture representations that depict the land itself as a sexual escape where they can partake in “primitive” acts of sexual licentiousness.25 Lionel Cantú’s scholarship offers a queer theoretical perspective on this projection of sexual fantasies onto “premodern” Mexico when he observed how “the political-economic links between the United States and Mexico . . . have given rise to gay and lesbian tourism” for which online tourist advertisements targeting the English-speaking gay male traveler from the United States sell “not a Mexico of social inequality, economic turmoil, indigenous uprisings, and mass emigration” but “a sexy Mexico” at a reasonable price.26 These advertisements often use exoticized visuals of native Mexicans as hypermasculine gay caballeros or Latin lover stereotypes. Faced with these stereotypical sexual hierarchies between the United States and Mexico and traditional notions of gente normal, Padilla and his band of Mexico City curators (consisting of diverse sexual pedagogues, local artists, and established museum set designers, many of whom identify as gay or lesbiana) carved out a space to reflect on what Padilla described as “la mezcla que tenemos nosotros” (the cultural blending or mix that Mexicans have) that uniquely constitutes the Mexican sexual experience in the twenty-first century. He described his curatorial challenge as one of negotiation, to teach his audience about sex with all its transnational influences but through tactics he called sumamente Mexicano (quintessentially Mexican).
After having traveled up three sets of escalators and passed the other floors of Sex Capital, you pay the thirty-five-peso entrance fee to access the museum. When I was there in September 2007, this was roughly $3.21, a class-conscious price as one of the goals of Sex Capital’s owner was interclass contact, much like the vibrant sexual cultures that Samuel Delany depicted before Mayor Rudolph Giuliani began his urban cleanup projects.27 Entering MuseXo, the visitor encounters a sign that reads:
A song for such a charmer, part man or woman, heterosexual, gay, or chimera [transgender or genderfuck or any other form of gender expression]. Don’t be frightened by the “cousins” of the flower, the fauna, the spring: Ludic, Erotic, and Lubricated, accompanied by El Bizcocho28 and the super hero, Chacalator,29 they guide you into an almost unknown universe. Prepare yourself to enter the marvelous world of eroticism; also, get ready to laugh: Perhaps you’ll become mystified or aroused. Are you curious? Sexually aroused? Enter and you’ll find out. This is not a scientific or a moralistic experience. It is simply a form of knowing and enjoying the infinite charm of loving: the pleasure of life.30
Just beyond this greeting, visitors view the reconstruction of an ancient Indian temple on which groups of copulating figures are engraved. A video mounted inside the temple’s center depicts a sexual world tour through ancient erotic cultures in China, India, Rome, Greece, Japan, and Latin America. The video intends to bring visitors to an initial consciousness that sex was and is felt and experienced differently, everywhere and at all times.
Visitors have the option of taking a guided tour where the removal of clothing is figured as a game. The two main tour guides (a young heterosexual-identifying man and a young woman who expressed an orientation toward or desire for both men and women but who preferred not to use the term bisexual) lead groups of visitors through the museum while asking for responses to often factual, pleasure-related, or health-related sexual questions. For Padilla, who trained them in this mode of tour guidance, this game allows visitors to laugh while learning and also to potentially become aroused by the possibility of removing clothing and mingling around other half-dressed visitors. Padilla’s inspiration for the tour is strip poker, an erotic game whose history has been traced to the brothels of New Orleans in the early nineteenth century.
Proceeding alone or with your tour guide, you may move in one of many directions. For example, you might gravitate toward the enormous mural of sex symbols where Mexican heartthrobs like Tin Tan, María Félix, Dolores del Río, Silvia Pinal, Valentin Trujillo, and other stars from the golden age of Mexican cinema seductively smile down from a display inspired by collage technique and the Catholic tradition of ex-voto installation.31 And—saying something about the (erotic) politics of the curatorial team and the roots of socialist resistance in Mexico—the portrait of Che Guevara, cigar in hand, also graces the wall of “Legendarios Seductores.” These legendary seducers intermix with US sex symbols like Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, James Dean, John Lennon, Elizabeth Taylor, and, for the museum’s flexibly queer logic, Rock Hudson.
Or perhaps you find yourself humorously captivated by the enormous whale penis mounted as an archway between this room and the next. Or you might look up to see the many-colored papier-mâché depictions of vulvas along the top of the far wall, a kind of multiculturalist joke: negra consentida (the pampered black one), inspired by a popular song by the same name; perla del oriente (the pearl of the orient); venita abusadita (the well-used, or -abused, one); marciana (the extraterrestrial vulva); mi aprieta lindo (my beautiful, brown slit), a reference to “La Prieta Linda,” the nickname of the folk singer Queta Jiménez; and la colorina (my rosy-colored one), named after the actress Lucía Méndez, famous for her role as la colorina, a sex worker who wears heavy makeup, in the telenovela of the same name. Underneath these sculptures, an interactive globe that also reinforces cultural sexual difference features facts and figures about sexual practices.
As you walk underneath el pene de ballena (the whale’s penis) into the main gallery, you encounter the narrator of the MuseXo experience: a bare-chested mannequin, tongue out, penis in hand, and prepared to welcome visitors by the simulation of ejaculating on them as they pass into the main exhibition room. This gesture is meant to elicit surprise, disgust, and then laughter as visitors realize that they have been tricked into becoming defiled by the museum’s exhibits. In this instance, MuseXo parodically plays with the cultural fear of sexual fluids, thumbing its nose at that fear while at the same time creating a humorous environment for its visitors by positioning a well-known figure at the center of the museum’s narrative.
This is the wildly crass pop culture icon Chacalator, introduced to visitors at the outset as el héroe of the MuseXo experience. As visitors walk underneath the balcony in which he’s positioned, motion sensors trigger water to squirt from the erect plastic penis he holds in his hands. It is significant that the MuseXo experience remains the domain of this tattooed rebel-rousing lower-class Mexican male figure who in this instance is also a well-informed, sexual pedagogue with a penchant for performing the publicly inappropriate.32 He is the narrator of the museum’s sexual story, a story he tells using seductive and sexually subtle and laden jokes known as albures.
Throughout MuseXo but especially in this last gallery, Padilla and his curatorial team used albures to work with and around sexual silence. In employing the Mexican literary and rhetorical tradition of doble sentido, Padilla wanted to tap into how, across the Republic, Mexicans talk about sex in their everyday lives. While jokes and the telling of jokes always refer to imbalances of power and represent a creative form that many cultural contexts employ to cope with anxiety, Mexican sexual jokes are unique to that national context, particularly insofar as the popularity of using albures to talk sex reveals the paradoxical role of sex in everyday Mexican culture. According to Héctor Carrillo: “Sexual joking is not just about telling jokes that concern sex. Instead, it involves an elaborate and sophisticated language in which phrases are carefully crafted to convey concealed, sexually charged messages about others participating in the verbal game.”33 Albures, as written on the walls of MuseXo, signify a rhetorical method of indirectly communicating desire or, in the case of MuseXo, new sexual information. This genre of humor allows sex and sexuality to be indirectly yet frequently explored in everyday discourse. At the same time, even within the context of MuseXo, albures communicate a persistent shame in dealing frankly and openly with sex.
5.1 “Chacalator.” El Museo del Sexo, Mexico City, September 2007. Photo by author.
In MuseXo, Padilla and his curatorial team used albures as the primary mode for communicating sexual knowledge and thus imitated the ways in which chilangos both use and surpass the tradition of sexually explicit jokes to enact a brazen and playful adaptation of the foundational way in which Mexicans negotiate quotidian rhetoric pertaining to sex. Looking more closely at these texts, one can see how the albures in MuseXo served the strategic function of a sexual negotiation that used display as a tool to represent and shape what sex means for the Sex Capital tourist. Using albures, MuseXo staged US sexual discourse, particularly mainstream gay and lesbian discourse, and Mexican vernacular in a verbal competition or a game that communicated the desire for a new sexual order in a seductive, noncommittal, and playful manner.
Life-sized and light-skinned, seminaked, manga-inspired cutouts lead the visitor into the first chamber of the largest exhibition room. There videos on kissing and the intersection and allure of sex and food churn out popular and at times US media-inspired images of erotic scenarios against a sonic backdrop featuring such songs as Prince’s “Kiss,” Consuelo Velázquez’s “Bésame Mucho,” and Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer.” This mix of musical anthems from Latin American and US cultures signals another instance of how MuseXo curators sensually create an atmosphere of transnational exchange for the museum’s visitors. As in all sex museums, music is integral to creating the desired mood, one that arouses a constrained libidinous relationship to the objects on display. At the World Erotic Art Museum in Miami Beach, Macy Gray, Nat King Cole, Phil Collins, and Al Green intermix with the occasional booming club beats (what Mexicanos onomatopoetically refer to as punchis punchis). At the Museum of Sex in New York, club beats might greet you in the front room, but almost every rotating exhibit has its own soundscape offering a geographic or temporal backdrop particular to the sexual environment MoSex curators envision.
The association between music and the sex museum is a crucial consideration in the museumification of sex. As Alex Weheliye points out, the nonlinguistic power of sound performs both as a text that abstractly and systematically signifies and as the embodiment of sensuality.34 The inclusion of sound in any museum challenges the prevailing Western discursive bias toward the visual and the written. In sex museums, sound provides a way of communicating the embodied and affective intensity of sexual pleasure while foreclosing the possibility of physically performing interactive and embodied sex. At MuseXo, the music was chosen for its international and timeless appeal as well as the songs’ connections to what, on their release, was considered sexually transgressive. MuseXo curators unapologetically play songs in English and Spanish (only) as a fitting extension of, a contexualization of, or another kind of (intangible) transnational sex object on display.
With this sonic accompaniment, the visitor moves through a main gallery divided by a circular platform on which two (white) female mannequins in SM gear torture a hairy (white) male mannequin, his face concealed by a leather hood, and his arms chained and manacled to the platform. The wall of “Parafilias o Perversiones” takes a humorous stance on kink and fetishism: for example, gerontofilia (gerophilia) is defined as “te calienta el chocolate abuelita” (grandma’s chocolate makes you horny). (This is closely related to the chocolate brand Abuelita, which pictures Sara García, a golden age actress who through her acting roles became known as the quintessential Mexican grandmother; Abuelita is now owned by Nestlé.) The song “Smack My Bitch Up” by the band Offspring emanates from a video hovering over the wall of perversions, but it also predominately flashes images of women dominating men, mostly within the context of fetish culture. Overhead clouds and eroticized constellations assume their mythic human- and animal-like formations. The display, titled “Juguetilandia” (toy land), decorates the last corner of the second chamber.
5.2 “Juguetilandia.” El Museo del Sexo, Mexico City, September 2007. Photo by author.
With multicolored vibrators plugged into the wall so visitors can apply them to their bodies, MuseXo curators modeled Juguetilandia’s display on US sex shops and mixed these display techniques with the Catholic symbolism of the crucifix and the church altar. “Toca, juega, y aprenda” (touch, play, and learn) reads the sign under a buxom white mannequin with a strap-on cradling a large dildo that almost matches its skin tone. Advice on mutual masturbation and anal sex with sex toys (primarily geared toward the penetration of male bodies without specifying sexual orientation) decorates the wall leading up to the display.35 The form and logic of the display communicate a sensual and visual pleasure signifying a colorful cornucopia of sexual alternatives created by the pleasurable use of prosthetic additions to the body, but they also reference the new phenomenon of sex toy sales in Mexico City and the advent of sex industry businesses that play increasingly significant roles in making and unmaking the transnational terrain of normative sexual consumption.
MuseXo is distinct from US sex museums as it contains no artifacts: it is an environment entirely fabricated by its curators and arranged with popular commercial items. Padilla’s curatorial team covered the walls with new sexual vocabularies and filled the displays with sex toys primarily bought from Erotika, the largest Mexican sex shop, owned by two partnered gay-identifying Mexican men. Erotika’s products arrive in Mexico through US distributors such as Wet, Hustler, Private, California Dreams, and other megaporn, sex toy, lubricant, and condom companies. Juguetilandia thus exhibits the transnational commodification of sex toys that flooded the market after NAFTA, the target marketing of women and men who sleep with men as sexual consumers, and the influence of US sexual discourse for forging new discursive relationships between objects, sexal practice, and sexual identity in Mexico City.
A series of images along the upper walls connected both chambers of the main exhibition room. This series, called the “Kama Sutra Chilango,” renamed nearby streets and thus recaptioned the everyday passageways outside MuseXo in various erotic configurations between men and women, men and men, and women and women. Padilla explained:
Because there’s a Kama Sutra, and then there’s a Chilango Kama Sutra. The “Chilango” pertains to the avenues. A “A-venida” is “Coming Way,” yes? On the second floor there are two people on top of each other—it’s Anillo Periférico (the outer beltway of Mexico City) is spelled “Ano-illo-periférico” (or Anus-illo-Beltway). . . . For example, Niños Héroes are two boy heroes of Mexico who fought for their country, right? So I make this into an albur, a double sense of two homosexuals. Morena Bichola are two streets, so then they are two lesbians, and they are represented in the style of those little half-pornographic booklets that they sell in every newspaper stand. The blue-collar worker, the taxi driver, the general public very much enjoy those little pornographic books, little stories like comics that are illustrated.36
MuseXo was not, therefore, a space oriented toward or around any one sexual practice or sexuality. With the abundant inclusion of white mannequins throughout the museum, the same could not be said of its racial orientation. When I asked Padilla about his choice of mannequins, his answer was simple: white mannequins were abundantly available for the right price on his curatorial budget. The prevalence of white mannequins in display spaces such as museums and storefronts (in Mexico but also globally) orients these environments toward a particular desire of racialized consumption. In MuseXo, the objects of whiteness, but not the objects of heterosexuality, became something that bodies were invited and coerced to orient themselves not only toward but also around. The manga-inspired cardboard cutouts arranged in perverse dioramas made up the other dominant anthropomorphized display. Japanese and US sexual cultures epitomized modern sexuality, while references to Greco-Roman and South Asian cultures exemplified MuseXo’s ancient erotic pioneers.
Keeping the gaze upward, one would then enter the final exhibition room, the first section of which was more explicitly dedicated to queer sexual pedagogy. This gallery continued the use of albures to translate a US model of gay identity into Mexican vernacular. Leading visitors into this space, a white, brown-haired mannequin in stilettos and thigh highs and equipped with a sizable strap-on dildo (also white) swiveled below a rainbow-decorated archway that reads: “Ser Gay va más allá de ser simplemente homosexual. Es una forma de vivir la libertad en plenitud y el camino para recuperar el erotismo.” (Being gay goes beyond simply being homosexual. It’s a way of living freedom to the fullest and the path to recover eroticism.) To move beyond this archway was to come out as the gateway from one gallery space to another was stylized to look like a closet from which the visitor emerged. On the opposite side, one encountered a looping video playing images from recent gay pride marches in Mexico City. The sound system pumped music from the Village People and George Michael alongside gay-male anthems such as the Weather Girls’ “It’s Raining Men.” While MuseXo dedicated a significant portion of its wall space to lesbian subjectivity, the music choices in this room oriented the visitor to view lesbian culture (in Mexico and universally) through a very specific sonic register: gay, white American male culture of the late 1970s/early 1980s.
I regarded these curatorial choices as strategic; like the white mannequins, US gay pop culture, with its visual and aural semiotics, is abundantly available throughout Mexico City. For example, the influence of gay dance culture on the circulation of a notion of gay liberation not only within the United States but also across the border was demonstrated in this moment of aurally framing the utopia beyond the rainbow.37 While the (white) mannequin with the strap-on dildo gestured toward gender variant and/or female dominance/penetration as the defining factor in ser gay, the music overwhelmed, or at least complicated this notion in the last gallery.
The rest of this gallery was dedicated to defining queer sexualities against straight or heterosexual sexualities and exploring the emergence of swinger culture in Mexico City.38 For example, visitors encountered a series of definitions in the form of games like the “Verbo . . . lario,” a metallic wall of blocks conceptualized as a vocabulary-building device for visitors. The blocks swiveled on visitor interaction: on one side, words like gay, lesbiana, jotita discreta (a discreet sissy), and buga (a term that queer people in Mexico use to refer to straight people) are printed.39 Turning these blocks revealed their respective definitions per the museum curators’ use of albures and doble sentido to playfully entertain the chilango version of sex object choice: “gay” becomes “la persona que asume su homosexualidad sin problema y con alegría” (a person who assumes his homosexuality without problem and with happiness”); “lesbiana” becomes “una mujer con buen gusto” (a woman with good taste); “jotita discreta” becomes “no hay” (there aren’t any); and “buga” becomes “el que jala, no le gusta arroz con popote, no cacha granizo, ni se agacha por el jabón” (he who pulls [on top], who doesn’t like rice with a straw [does not give blow jobs], who neither is effeminate nor bends for the soap).
5.3 “Verbolario.” El Museo del Sexo, Mexico City, September 2007. Photo by author.
In addition to the intra-Mexico negotiations for sexual speech that MuseXo incorporated, the vocabulary markings of transnational sexual ideological flows between the United States and Mexico covered its walls. Sexual categories based on sex object choice were rigorously defined, in a didactic, though not unproblematically humorous manner. These included:
Heterosexual: People who like physical and emotional relationships with the opposite sex.
Bisexual: Those people who all of sudden, or after two beers, like to have a little adventure with people of the same sex and then forget about it.
Transgender: People without genital surgery that act and look like the opposite sex. They can have breast implants, feel like a woman, and act accordingly, tuck in their penis, or they can also be women who act and feel like men.
Transexual: A person who feels like the opposite sex and who transforms, not only his image, but also undergoes the “jarocha operation” (a sex change).40
In these game-like displays of definitional pedagogy that matched sexual behavior with sexual identity, MuseXo certainly challenged the stereotypes of machismo and homophobia with which Mexico is associated. Sexual games and seductive jokes were aimed at disarming MuseXo visitors so that they are more receptive to the new pedagogy of sexual identity and gender performance occurring in urban centers throughout Mexico.
On the one hand, MuseXo aimed to reconfigure the traditional, transnational stereotype of Mexico as a nation of macho men and passive women whose identifications align with what Gayle Rubin has called the sex/gender system, which Eve Sedgwick has defined as “the system by which the chromosomal sex is turned into, and processed as, cultural gender,” the “feminist charting of this system,” Sedgwick goes on to note, “hav[ing] tended to minimize the attribution of people’s various behaviors and identities to chromosomal sex and to maximize their attribution to socialized gender constructs.”41 In the past, Mexicans typically self-identified either as hombres or mujeres, a somewhat anxious set of terms that mean “real men” and “real women” and not only indicated the biological sex of the individual in question but also denoted normalcy in terms of gender performance and sexual attraction. Today, Mexicans sometimes use the term normal to distinguish themselves from various forms of sexual practice or gender performance considered to be deviant or abnormal.42 MuseXo was therefore teaching its visitors how to wield sexual vocabularies at a confusing time for the Mexican sexual subject, when many people, as my interactions with visitors in MuseXo attested to, were unsure about what words to use when describing their own sexuality, the sexualities of those they encountered in their everyday lives, or the images and messages they received from abroad.
In MuseXo, as in all sex museums, sexual pedagogy referred to a range of curatorial strategies that engage the tourist, the browser, the curious, the academic, and the pleasure seeker. The term describes a method of teaching that balances the pleasures, politics, and performance of displaying sex with what I call a pedagogy of comfort, or a mode of communicating that invites a wide array of visitors to become comfortable with multiple and explicit forms of sexual knowledge. Sex museums must anticipate all these visitors and cultivate a curatorial adaptation of insider sexual knowledge that provides visitors with a safe space to explore sexuality without the pressure to know it all or the threat of embarrassment when encountering an unfamiliar sexual word or sex act. In MuseXo, the use of albures invited visitors to laugh off their potential discomfort as they learn about the latest sexual nomenclatures.
MuseXo’s pedagogy of comfort, however, relied on the assumption of homosexual, gay, and lesbian as universal identities the public recognition of which leads to happiness and sexual freedom. Furthermore, particular stereotyped clichés rife in US gay rhetoric also accompanied these definitions. For example, the sexualities of women who love women were celebrated via the often-inapplicable signs, symbols, and events that characterize the unique experiences of Anglo gay males (e.g., disco balls, bare male muscular torsos, the song “YMCA”). Additionally, phrases like the opposite sex reified gender binaries when used to describe what kinds of crossings transgendered and transsexual individuals engage in when performing their genders. The definitional displays also relegated gender dissidence to a subset of sexual identity and held feminine or effeminate men up for ridicule. These phenomena reflected the homonormativities that were concurrently emerging outside MuseXo’s walls. For example, jokes about jotería (akin to faggotry) in MuseXo corresponded to trends in Mexico City bar and nightclub cultures: during my time at MuseXo, the leather bar El Taller (the Workshop), which previously allowed entry to women as well as locas (feminine men), began to regulate admission, allowing access only to those men who enacted some mode of gender performance that could be read as hypermasculine.
In MuseXo, claims to gay identity, and the social intelligibility and cultural capital that come with those claims, were displayed as sexy, just as much as if not more so than the diverse sex acts discussed and shown in the exhibits. MuseXo’s argument that sexual identity should primarily be viewed as pleasurable, rather than as a means to collectively and politically address group trauma or material loss, is a significant departure from the political thrust of transnational sexuality discourse as it reconfigures the method and function of US identity politics.43 For example, MuseXo skipped Stonewall and other militant riots and focused on the parties and the pride parades afterward. But Padilla and his team of curators also chose not to display key Mexico-specific events, such as the Dance of the Forty-One (el baile de los cuarenta y uno) of 1901, the relationship of the 1968 student uprising to the sexual rights movement or the organization of the Frente de Liberación Homosexual (homosexual liberation front) in response to the firing of an outed Mexico City Sears employee in 1971, or the Oaxacan Zapotec culture of the muxhes, whereby individuals assigned male at birth enact performances of gender and sexuality that resist categories such as gay and even transgender. Ultimately, MuseXo did succeed in turning ser gay or “being gay” from a bad object into something else, but Padilla also produced a version of Mexican sexual modernity that incorporated the rhetorical centrality of a sexually liberated United States that he otherwise philosophically refutes. This is not to say that the curators acquiesced to such rhetoric but rather to show how it has become increasingly more difficult to articulate “la mezcla que tenemos nosotros” when faced with the overwhelming ubiquity of US cultural representations in the post-NAFTA years.
Beyond MuseXo, the logic, arrangement, and aesthetic of display of Latin America’s only sex museum pointed to the contradictions of sexual liberation discourse in Mexico. Especially in the urban metropolis of Mexico City, lawmakers and everyday citizens actively navigate the contentious terrain between the right to pleasure and the right to civic inclusion, all the while working within a global order that gives preferential treatment to what can enter the neoliberal market. Museums dedicated to exhibiting sexuality provide sites where we can read how and to what ends US sex products and the ideas embedded within them travel as well as how locals rearticulate and selectively appropriate those things and ideas. MuseXo exemplified a local context that exhibited how queerness gets translated as a concept across borders. In so doing, MuseXo moved beyond representation. Its displays did not merely show Mexican sexuality to its visiting publics; rather, it had a performative function that both staged and attempted to create new ways of talking, feeling, and viewing modern Mexican sexuality. What did and did not get lost in translation offers provocative and playful lessons on US-Mexican relations when it comes to the transnational circulation of sexual modernity.
Rezoning the Sexual Modern
Claims to sexual modernity are often slippery and unstable. To make sense of this discursive landscape, we need, I argue, sex museums to track who does and who does not belong to the new sexual world order. Yet sex museums are both subversive and normative. Introducing explicit sexual display into museums certainly seems like tactical resistance, especially when one considers the rigid body choreographies typically performed in the modern museum and its free market alignment with the cult and culture of respectability, taste, and elitism. For these very same reasons, however, sex museums buckle to the aesthetic and organizational designs of past display spaces that unwittingly organize knowledge, expertise, and subjectivities according to historically ingrained notions of who and what museums primarily serve. In furnishing display spaces for the obscene (the “off scene”), individual sex museums both push and pull the existing and historical boundaries of what is and is not appropriate to think, feel, and do in the museum context.
A reading of this kind would be difficult to perform in most US sex museums as the intersectional display of sex, race, and nation is rarely entertained. The architecture of the red-light district discussed in chapter 4 renders it a “global sexual marketplace, where race and nation, as much as sex and gender are culled and proffered as commodities for sale.”44 One might expect that sex museums might play off this paradigm of postindustrial sexual commerce when it comes to advertising different racialized desires by fetishizing bodies of color in their displays. Throughout my research in sex museums in the United States, however, I only rarely encountered displays that examined how issues of race play out in sexual scenarios or how performances of race and sexuality outside the museum’s walls pertain to, interrupt, and influence the ways that sexual histories of pleasure and power are constructed inside the museum. Elsewhere, I have critiqued sex museums for a lack of textual signage that could take a critical stance regarding the preponderance of white sexual bodies exhibited; sex museums could also provide information on why white sexualities are more prominently exhibited and what the relationship between sex and whiteness means.45 Whereas sex museums in the United States can tacitly provide museum patrons with an anthropological perspective on white sexual cultures in North America, MuseXo explicitly claimed a chilango display perspective, which situated the museum as not only a national representation of sexual ideology but also a regional one.46
Perhaps it goes without saying that Latin American queer sexualities are less frequently, if ever, exhibited or labeled as such in most sex museums. When they are displayed, these sexualities are typically considered as ethnographic (as in the pre-Columbian sexual artifacts from Latin and South America exhibited at the World Erotic Art Museum). In other words, when displayed in groups, nonwhite sexualities are placed in a time other than the present, an anthropological phenomenon that Johannes Fabian has called the denial of coevalness.47 Otherwise, individual artifacts pertaining to these sexualities are included in larger exhibitions that offer visitors no critical race or ethnicity frame for understanding them within their national, transnational, or diasporic contexts.
MuseXo’s displays and in particular its wall texts served as evidence of how globalization is informed by the transnational flow of sexual discourse between nations. When juxtaposed to US sex museums, MuseXo opened up a less rigid categorization system for understanding sexuality to humorously exhibit the queer problem of transnational discourse. MuseXo offered an alternative space of erotic drama where visitors could flirt with sexual knowledge, particularly ideas about sexual modernity that may be produced and imported from el norte but that are also interpreted, rejected, and modified from a Chilango perspective.
MuseXo also testified that sexual expansion is not the same as social justice. In MuseXo, then, sex is not deprivatized or liberated from its silence but rather rezoned. Rezoning the ways in which we experience sex in public and reflecting on the differences of sexual experience as we travel across cultures provide a method for destabilizing the normative idea of sexual history as a linear progress story or a performance of modernity that some have enacted more convincingly than others. For a brief period, MuseXo used display to exhibit an alternative modernity, a queer mestizaje, to explore the sexual moment as multidirectional, complex, and constantly in flux.
6.1 Leather sword sheath and whip. Leather Archives and Museum, Chicago, 2009. Photo by author.