Velázquez Meets Queer Tango: Portraiting Dissident Lineages

Abstract

This article presents an artistic investigation focused on a series of oil portraits of queer tango dancers, created through a contemporary and dissident rereading of the Spanish portrait tradition, particularly influenced by Velázquez, Zuloaga, and other visual genealogies. Using a qualitative, autoethnographic, and visual artistic methodology, a pictorial archive is constructed that activates new forms of representation for dissident bodies—not from a place of marginality, but from dignity, complexity, and desire. Thus, conceived through a situated practice that intertwines artistic creation and embodied experience as a tango dancer, the project explores portraiture as an archive of queer subjectivities, proposing an affective cartography of bodies and identities that escape normativity. The various portraits display a deliberate aesthetic diversity that dialogues with multiple eras and visual imaginaries, pointing to a queer trans-temporality that connects visual genealogies of the past, present community, and future possibility. The dancing body—and its pictorial representation—becomes a space of political inscription, where tensions between gender, desire, memory, and affect are explored. Through an articulation of painting, performativity, critical theory, and care, the proposal seeks to make dissident corporealities visible and complex, conceiving art as a space for resistance, reinterpretation, and the creation of possible worlds.