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29 - Mesoamerican Mythmaking as Queer(ed) Visionary Hermeneutics

from Part V - Geographies of Same-Sex Desire in the Modern World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2014

E. L. McCallum
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
Mikko Tuhkanen
Affiliation:
Texas A & M University
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Summary

Applied to Mesoamerican history and worldviews, revisionist mythmaking functions as an innovative, transformational practice that queers normative stories in various ways. The various ways include: retelling a well-known mythic story from different points of view, rewriting the story by altering the plot and revising the story itself and writing new stories. While Mesoamerican-inspired revisionist mythmaking often focuses on individual and collective identity related issues, at its most innovative, these recursive uses of "Mesoamerica" produce new ontologies, epistemologies, aesthetics, metaphysics, and ethics. This chapter examines these philosophical contributions as they occur within three complex, recurring Mesoamerican-inflected themes: Aztlan, mestizaje, and cosmic mythic figures. Referencing Aztlan and an indigenous "Azteca" identity, Chicano nationalists redefined mestizaje in positive ways, reclaiming their indigenous ancestry while downplaying or entirely ignoring their European-Spanish roots. The cosmologies of the Maya, Toltecs, Olmecs, and other pre-Conquest Mesoamerican peoples were peopled by rich, complicated divinities who defy easy categorization.
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2014

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