Of asses, bears and digital perreo: dissident performativity in Javo León's regaytón mexa (2025)

Abstract

This article analyzes the dissident performativities present in Javo León’s (2025) regaytón mexa, emphasizing two central symbolic axes of his artistic proposal: the ass as a political space of desire and identity, and the critical reappropriation of the bear figure within LGBTIQ+ communities. Drawing on these imaginaries, the article explores how the artist articulates a sonic and corporeal aesthetic that subverts white, thin, masculine gay normativity, while constructing an affective and sexual archive from a non-hegemonic perspective. The study employs a qualitative methodology with an emphasis on digital ethnography, considering the production, circulation, and reception of Javo León’s discursive content on platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, and Spotify. To do so, it analyzes audiovisual performances, posts, audience interactions, and social media discourses, recognizing these spaces as contemporary sites of queer socialization, visibility, and activism. In this sense, the analyzed videos constitute a musical and performative proposal that confronts sex-gender normativities from a virtual space, problematizing the corporeal and aesthetic inscription of a fat, racialized, effeminate, and non-normative masculinity in the urban cultural field of contemporary Mexico. The article proposes a critical reading that moves beyond traditional categories of musical analysis to consider regaytón mexa as a platform for subaltern enunciation that eroticizes, politicizes, and redefines the margins of LGBTIQ+ communities through jouissance, the body, and the algorithm.