Lopez: “Our Lady” interrogates the layers of the Virgen’s image and Chicana gender, sexual, and spiritual ideology.

Latorre: Employing the taboo of gender and sexuality, Chicana artists broke with the nationalist Chicano platform.

Response:

Latorre in her article Chicana art and Scholarship on the Interstices of our Disciplines remarks that the Chicana artists felt marginalized by the feminist women’s movement in the 1970s, which was supposed to be an inclusive platform for all women. However, as the movement increased and was thrust into the national spotlight, it excluded many identities and issues, resulting into a homogenous “middle class, white woman’s movement”.

Many of these excluded identities had different issues they wanted acknowledged which one movement would not suffice. For example, in Alva Lopez’s work Our Lady, she addresses discontent with feminist reinterpretations of religious images within the Chicano sphere. I thought the gender divide of the supporters and antagonists was interesting because it was so readily apparent, that women, Chicanas and professors admired her work, while men and religious leaders not only wanted her work taken down but tried to appeal to the courts and fast until their demands were instated. Lopez’s remark that people have no problem with naked depictions of Jesus and men in church, but that the bare breasts, stomach, and legs of women created a fury within the culture.

Our Lady Book cover

Our Lady represents the Virgen as a dynamic figure, a woman and ideology that many cultures interpret due to their own experiences, upbringing, and values. Because of this, her image has been reinterpreted and (re)presented to instill spirituality in the modern era. Some would argue that the proliferation of her image has debased her religious nature, and others would comment that it adds to the universality and prominence of her influence in daily life. Therefore, Lopez has every right to (re)present the Virgin as Virgen, a Chicana modern woman, unafraid of her sexuality and body in the face of misogynistic, fundamentalist beliefs.