Vision Through Ecstasy: Fabián Cháirez & Queer Catholic Symbology

Abstract

Spanish colonialism in the Americas offered a single vision of holiness, crafting Western notions of visuality and sign(s) as rooted in Christian imagery. The reality of figures of faith is bound to images and visual perception. This paper aims to examine this notion, how it upholds Western power structures, and how mysticism disrupts gendered boundaries within the Catholic Church. Mystic experience emphasizes female pleasure and women’s capacity to commune with the holy, ultimately subverting the Western construction of women as sinful. Fabián Cháirez’s subversive use of religious symbols in queer contexts challenges Catholic notions of sin, sensuality, and visibility. An analysis of Cháirez’s paintings Estigmas (2023) and La Eucaristía (2020) evaluates tensions in terms of femininity and female pleasure, contesting the Catholic teachings of women as sinful, vision as sinful, and highlighting the paradox of this within socially accepted Catholic art and signs. By placing Cháirez’s paintings in conversation with Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647–52) this paper finds that Catholic constructions of gendered sin inform religious signs, while the mystic body, across both Europe and the Americas, functions as a site of controversy and ecstatic pleasure where queer reinterpretations challenge traditional ideals through depictions of female ecstasy.