UC Riverside

This thesis examines how queer Chicanx artists negotiate belonging under inner-cultural control through lowrider visual culture in The Q-Sides exhibition. The first chapter, “Up in Flames: Iconoclastic Por Vida,” focuses on Manuel Paul’s mural Por Vida in San Francisco’s Mission District. I begin with a formal analysis of the three panels of the mural to show how Paul transforms traditional Chicanx imagery to represent queer intimacy, transgender visibility, and lesbian autonomy within a historically masculine cultural context. The chapter then goes into the mural's presence on Instagram, revealing how comments and reactions demonstrate digital control of visibility, and uses Koritha Mitchell’s “know-your-place aggression” to interpret efforts to regulate queer visibility in the community. It also traces how these issues led to acts of vandalism and arson, framing the mural’s destruction within a broader history of policing the intersectional queer and Latinx bodies in public spaces. The chapter concludes by considering the afterlife of Por Vida through photography and The Q-Sides exhibition, especially Fred Rowe’s photographic print and House of MORE!, exploring how queer Chicanx artists utilize reproduction and performance to reclaim agency and preserve collective memory that confronts the erasure of queerness in Chicanx spaces. The second chapter, “Disidentifying the Lowrider: Portraits from The Q-Sides,” explores how The Q-Sides photographic series reimagines lowrider visual culture from a queer perspective. I take photography, portraiture, and performance into account in how the photographs aim to reclaim visibility for queer and trans Chicanx and Latinx subjects within a traditionally heteronormative and masculine cultural context. I analyze two photographic prints from the twelve photographs in The Q-Sides, Volume 10 and Volume 3, by artists Vero Majano, Brown Angel, and Kari Orvik, to demonstrate how José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of disidentification embeds itself within the series. As with working on a lowrider, the artists rework the familiar visual language of East Side Story mixtape covers and modify imagery associated with heteronormative Chicanx identity into symbols of queer belonging. Chapter Two also contextualizes the photographs within the broader histories of criminalizing lowriders and the policing of Chicanx fashion. By looking at local queer and trans community members as documentary-style portraits, The Q-Sides broadens the visual archive of queer Chicanx photography. This series of photographs uses the medium of photography as a tool for collective affirmation for individuals of these intersecting identities. Together, these chapters demonstrate that queer Chicanx visual culture does not merely respond to complexities of visibility but actively reshapes the conditions of visibility imposed upon it. Artists in The Q-Sides use various mediums such as muralism, photography, and drag to assert queer belonging in lowrider visuals. Their art demonstrates that visibility is never neutral and interlocks with issues within systems that continue to control bodies over race and gender. By exploring how queer Chicanx artists address these challenges, this thesis contends that visual culture serves not only as a form of representation but also as a means of survival by self-representation in modern California.