Through insightful, high-paced commentary this book directs attention south, towards Argentina. Current events, political debates, and the cultural production of artists, authors and public figures, including César Aira, María Moreno, Naty Menstrual and Copi, among others, provide case studies where heterosexual social models are rejected and, in their place, queer frameworks become the preferred model for living differently. Queer Argentina traces the movements of today’s marginalized communities as they pass through and choose to remain within the closet: a space that is emblematic of collective struggles in silence and community formation outside the (hetero)norm.
Revisits a foundational moment in Argentine history to demonstrate how the crisis of modernity opened up new possibilities for imagining kinship otherwise.
Argentine Queer Tango: Dance and Sexuality Politics in Buenos Aires investigates changes in tango dancing in Buenos Aires during the first decade of the twenty-first century and its relationship to contemporary social and cultural transformations. Mercedes Liska focuses on one of the proposed alternatives to conventional tango, queer tango, which proposes to rethink one of the alleged icons of a national culture from a feminist conception and to imagine social transformation processes from bodily experiences. Specifically, this book analyzes the value of bodily experiences, the redefinition of the mind-body relationship, and the transformation in the dynamics of the dance from the heteronormative movements of tango. In doing so, Liska addresses the ways in which bodily techniques and gender theories are involved in the denaturing and corporeality decoding of tango and its historical senses as well as the connections between different tango dance practices spread throughout the world.
The Other/Argentina looks at literature, film, and the visual arts to examine the threads of Jewishness that create patterns of meaning within the fabric of Argentine self-representation. A multiethnic yet deeply Roman Catholic country, Argentina has worked mightily to fashion itself as a modern nation. In so doing, it has grappled with the paradox of Jewishness, emblematic both of modernity and of the lingering traces of the premodern. By the same token, Jewishness is woven into, but also other to, Argentineity. Consequently, books, movies, and art that reflect on Jewishness play a significant role in shaping Argentina's cultural landscape. In the process they necessarily inscribe, and sometimes confound, norms of gender and sexuality. Just as Jewishness seeps into Argentina, Argentina's history, politics, and culture mark Jewishness and alter its meaning. The feminized body of the Jewish male, for example, is deeply rooted in Western tradition; but the stigmatized body of the Jewish prostitute and the lacerated body of the Jewish torture victim acquire particular significance in Argentina. Furthermore, Argentina's iconic Jewish figures include not only the peddler and the scholar, but also the Jewish gaucho and the urban mobster, troubling conventional readings of Jewish masculinity. As it searches for threads of Jewishness, richly imbued with the complexities of gender and sexuality, The Other/Argentina explores the patterns those threads weave, however overtly or subtly, into the fabric of Argentine national meaning, especially at such critical moments in Argentine history as the period of massive state-sponsored immigration, the rise of labor and anarchist movements, the Perón era, and the 1976–83 dictatorship. In arguing that Jewishness is an essential element of Argentina's self-fashioning as a modern nation, the book shifts the focus in Latin American Jewish studies from Jewish identity to the meaning of Jewishness for the nation. This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships Open Book Program—a limited competition designed to make outstanding humanities books available to a wide audience. Learn more at the Fellowships Open Book Program website at: https://www.neh.gov/grants/odh/FOBP, and access the book online at the SUNY Open Access Repository at http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/1711.
Argentina was the first nation in Latin America to legalise same-sex marriage, but the situation is far from perfect. In the beautifully packaged and affordably priced Revealing Selves, award-winning photographer Kike Amal collaborates with individuals in Argentinian transgender communities, living side by side with them and documenting their day-to-day lives in a series of strikingly intimate colour and black-and-white images. Revealing Selves is both a celebration of the trans community in Argentina and a clear-eyed examination of what remains to be done in the struggle for trans rights.
A beautifully packaged and profound exploration of human desire and queer sexuality in Latin America by the acclaimed Argentinian photographer Claudia Jares In Dark Tears, award-winning Argentinian photographer and performance artist Claudia Jares takes her lens to the reality of queer experience in Argentina, Venezuela, and across Latin America, exploring questions of sexuality, religion, and identity with the raw eroticism that is the hallmark of her style. Here she tells the stories of a number of people struggling to come to terms with their identity in a region that, despite much progress in LGBTQ rights in recent years, still moves to a strongly conservative Christian heartbeat that condemns same-sex relations and reveres the institution of the heteronormative family. Drawing on the queer traditions of burlesque and drag, Dark Tears is a journey into an interior erotic landscape as it profiles a number of different couples—gay, lesbian, gender nonconforming—to delve into the hidden corners and diverse configurations of human desire as it conflicts with more staid, traditional values. A balance of celebrating acceptance and recalling the clandestine, furtive history of queer sexuality, these explicit black-and-white and color images are a challenge to the viewer as voyeur, but also an invitation to enter with empathy into the intimate world of Jares's subjects. Dark Tears was designed by Emerson, Wajdowicz Studios (EWS).
"The aftermath of Argentina's last dictatorship (1976-1983) has traditionally been associated with narratives of suffering, which recall the loss of the 30,000 civilians infamously known as the "disappeared." When democracy was recovered, the unspoken rule was that only those related by blood to the missing were entiteld to ask for justice. This book both queries and queers this bloodline normativity. Drawing on queer theory and performance studies, it develops an alternative framework for understanding the affective transmission of trauma beyond traditional family settings. To do so, it introduces an archive of non-normative acts of mourning that runs across different generations. Through the analysis of a broad spectrum of performances--including interviews, memoirs, cooking sessions, films, jokes, theatrical productions and literature--the book shows how the experience of loss has not only produced a well-known imaginary of suffering but also new forms of collective pleasure"--Back cover.
Revisits a foundational moment in Argentine history to demonstrate how the crisis of modernity opened up new possibilities for imagining kinship otherwise. As Argentina rose to political and economic prominence at the turn of the twentieth century, debates about the family, as an ideological structure and set of lived relationships, took center stage in efforts to shape the modern nation. In Argentine Intimacies, Joseph M. Pierce draws on queer studies, Latin American studies, and literary and cultural studies to consider the significance of one family in particular during this period of intense social change: Carlos, Julia, Delfina, and Alejandro Bunge. One of Argentina’s foremost intellectual and elite families, the Bunges have had a profound impact on Argentina’s national culture and on Latin American understandings of education, race, gender, and sexual norms. They also left behind a vast archive of fiction, essays, scientific treatises, economic programs, and pedagogical texts, as well as diaries, memoirs, and photography. Argentine Intimacies explores the breadth of their writing to reflect on the intersections of intimacy, desire, and nationalism and to expand our conception of queer kinship. Approaching kinship as an interface of relational dispositions, Pierce reveals the queerness at the heart of the modern family. Queerness emerges not as an alternative to traditional values so much as a defining feature of the state project of modernization. “Argentine Intimacies provides a valuable intervention in the fields of cultural studies, Latin American studies, LGBT/queer studies, literary studies, and photography studies. Pierce conducted extensive archival research on the historically significant Bunge family in Argentina and offers lucid, theoretically informed, and original readings of their lives and cultural productions.” — Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, University of Michigan
Gay and Lesbian Communities the World Over examines the treatment and status of gays and lesbians in 21 countries around the world. The countries included are Canada, the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Israel, Egypt, Iran, Nigeria, South Africa, India, China, Japan, and Australia. The book explores the history of homosexuality dating back to ancient Greece and Rome, as well as attitudes toward gays and lesbians within the world's most prominent religions, the arts, literature, and film. This investigation is unique due to its comprehensive and innovative analysis of a wide range of topics concerning gay and lesbian communities across a large number of countries. The authors report on the rights of gay and lesbian citizens in the countries listed above, as for example the right to marry, adopt, serve in the military, hold certain occupational positions. They also describe the status of gay and lesbian citizens as for example, the legality of homosexuality and sanctioned punishments. When available, public opinion data are reported on how respondents feel about gays and lesbians in their country as well as their opinions on what rights should be afforded to this group. Data are reported on respondents' opinions on allowing gay marriage, civil unions, adoption, and allowing gays to openly serve in the military. The representative sample of countries in this study will help scholars get a better sense of the status of gays and lesbians across the globe.
Viewing contemporary Latin American films through the lens of queer studies reveals that many filmmakers are exploring issues of gender identity and sexual difference, as well as the homophobia that attempts to defeat any challenge to the heterosexual norms of patriarchal culture. In this study of queer issues in Latin American cinema, David William Foster offers highly perceptive queer readings of fourteen key films to demonstrate how these cultural products promote the principles of an antiheterosexist stance while they simultaneously disclose how homophobia enforces the norms of heterosexuality. Foster examines each film in terms of the ideology of its narrative discourse, whether homoerotic desire or a critique of patriarchal heterosexism and its implications for Latin American social life and human rights. His analyses underscore the difficulties involved in constructing a coherent and convincing treatment of the complex issues involved in critiquing the patriarchy from perspectives associated with queer studies. The book will be essential reading for everyone working in queer studies and film studies. The films discussed in this book are: De eso no se habla (I Don't Want to Talk about It) El lugar sin límites (The Place without Limits) Aqueles dois (Those Two) Convivencia (Living Together) Conducta impropia (Improper Conduct) The Disappearance of García Lorca La Virgen de los Sicarios (Our Lady of the Assassins) Doña Herlinda y su hijo (Doña Herlinda and Her Son) No se lo digas a nadie (Don't Tell Anyone) En el paraíso no existe el dolor (There Is No Suffering in Paradise) A intrusa (The Interloper) Plata quemada (Burnt Money) Afrodita (Aphrodite) Fresa y chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate)
