ABSTRACT
It was an inspiration. I suddenly realised that for the next carnival in Buenos Aires I should go out as a female impersonator of the Virgin of Guadalupe. I therefore started to look carefully at pictures to find dressing clues to help me with the dying of bed-sheets and other home-made manoeuvres to be the Guadalupana for one night. Pasting silver paper half moons to the skirt? Making my hair look even darker than it is? The little carnival number could then consist of me and two other friends (Mary Magdalene and the other Mary) with me, as the principal of the trinity of Marys, addressing the carnival multitudes with a mimicry of Virginal discourses starting with words such as ‘My children!’ The original inspiration came from a painting called the Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe by an important Chicana artist, Yolanda López. She has painted her self-portrait as if coming from the opened cloak of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which, if looked at carefully, has the appearance of an open, gigantic red vulva. The image of the Virgin of Guadalupe has been described in terms of the dark colour of the skin of the image and the style of her clothes, but curiously, nothing has been said about this tender, swollen reddish vulva from where she emerges. López, as the Virgin of Guadalupe, emerges from this divine vulva looking like a young Latina, dressed with a modern skirt and trainers, and in a jogging attitude. 1 Looking at the portrait, one of the implicit metaphors in the image of Yolanda López as the Virgin of Guadalupe could be a point for self-identification. That is to say any woman (not only a Latina) could theoretically see herself in the picture. This would work as a sort of funfair photograph, creating the illusion of being whoever is in the picture painted on a board: you simply put your head in the hole in place of the head of the person or animal represented. In our example, it is a case of sexual positions. To put your head through the hole, to see yourself as the Virgin emerging from a divine vulva, requires a sexual option. For instance, you need to consider where God is in this, because God's position is a sexual option in itself. Sexual identities are usually found in the places we are accustomed to inhabit and in the way we position ourselves and are positioned in the narratives of the past (Stuart Hall, quoted in Weeks 1995: 97). We can 48 consider, for instance, whether God is a female divinity represented by a vulva, but even beyond that, whether God relates to an autonomous sexuality or a reflected one (such as in the case of women's sexuality in traditional heterosexuality). Or is God a pleasurable site, a G spot somewhere hidden but built around mythical (sometimes exaggerated) proportions? In that case, we need to consider the mythical proportions of penetration in traditional theology. Traditionally, theology has seen the world as coming from God's dissemination which has been represented by the Highest Phallus men could conceive of: the Word of God. Systematic theological thought has been made by these forceful seminal disseminations and their discursive reproductive powers. Christian issues of humility and submission to God come from that premise; the ejaculatory movement of the Word of God requires an immobile receptacle, such as the Virgin Mary, for instance. However, there are many varieties of sexual positions which Systematic Theology has not considered yet. For instance, that sex does not need to be penetrative disseminations, as the portrait of the artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe seems to convey. The G(od) spot does not need to be located as a supplement; the G(od) spot belongs to the vulva and her pleasure; to the embrace of the lips and the hardness of the clitoris. From that undifferentiated sexual position we can then think about ourselves, as the portrait of the theologian as the Virgin of Guadalupe and her challenge to reconsider the sexual position of God in this.
