F L E S H  &  F A T H E R L A N D
​​(2021)

“At least since the early twentieth century, wild spaces have been understood and organized in a way that presents nature as a site for the enactment of a specific heteromasculinity… Outdoor pursuits came to serve as a new space for elite enactments of white male superiority... White men came to assert their increasingly heterosexual identities in the wilderness explicitly against the urban specter of the queer, the immigrant, and the communist.”
 -Excerpt From Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire.

My intimate relationships are with those who contrast with my identity as a small brown immigrant queer: they are larger, older, and white. My husband, my friends, and my lovers embody white American masculinity; my brown body exists within the concentric circles of their privilege. 
 
In this work, the bodies of my subjects are situated within and among nature--within a fatherland they’ve never been uprooted from. Is the “queerness” of the gay men in my photographs enough to destabilize the enactment of a specific heteromasculinity in the organization of nature? Or,  does their whiteness always overpower their ability for subversion?

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© David De Lira