Queer Lines, Queer Time

This chapter examines illustrations by Mexican Roberto Montenegro (1885-1968) in the Revista Moderna de México (1903-1911) and Mundial Magazine (1911-14), edited by Rubén Darío is Paris. The chapter argues for a reading of modernista periodicals that foregrounds how the relationship between words and images on these publications’ pages also tells a story about the genders of modernismo. As an artistic movement and attitude that developed on the pages of periodicals, modernismo has often remained a phenomenon dominated by male heterosexuality. The chapter navigates Montenegro’s early affinities for figures like the English illustrator Aubrey Beardsley (1872-98), as well as his position as one of Spanish American modernismo’s principal illustrators, alongside Mexican Julio Ruelas (1870-1907). The reading of these artists pursued in this chapter recognizes a queer aesthetics that, in conversation with fin-de-siècle discourses of decadence and degeneration, disrupts the more conservative, heteronormative, and literary trajectory of modernismo.