Anti-colonial Feminist Ramblings About Everything and Anything

Palaversich, Diana. “The Wounded Body of Proletarian Homosexuality in Pedro Lemebel's Loco afán”. Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 29, No. 2, 99-118 (2002). Pedro Lemebel's writings effectively challenge triumphant narratives about Chilean's economic model, pointing at the marginal subjects that inhabit the city. As well, it emphasizes the "transvestism" of Chilean identity, especially in terms of class and race. He also shatters any project of unitary or global "gay identity" by showing the multiplicity of particular lived experiences of "locas" and other queers marked not only by their sexuality but also by poverty, ethnicity, and AIDS. Moreover, Lemebel engages with three traditions and political projects —gay politics, the Left political agenda, and postmodernism— without being subsumed by any of them. Lemebel's resistance to the global anglo-centered gay identity project (which has also been adopted by Latin American homosexual groups...

Lockhart, Melissa F. “Queer Representations in Latino Theatre”. Latin American Theatre Review, 1998. As "gay culture" becomes progressively more mainstream in North America, what can we consider "queer" in queer theatre? For Lockhart, when issues of class, race and culture are left untouched, then queer theatre looses all subversive potential. In turn, while queer culture has tended to move from margin to mainstream, " queer Latino theatre essentially becomes hyperqueer by enacting the multiplicities and contradictions of living within multiple marginal subjectivities". (68) Lockhart does not identify the term "queer" with gay, but rather with any "gender disruption". She locates the relevance of queer theatre in the potential for transforming the (self) representation of the Latino/a community and collective identities. The works analyzed by Lockhart emphasize stereotypes, hybridity and through the dynamics of "passing", th...

Marrero, María Teresa. “Out of the Fringe? Out of the Closet: Latina/Latino Theatre and Performance in the 1990s”. TDR, Fall 2000, Vol. 44, No. 3, Pages 131-153. Marrero tries to reconstruct art histories of Latino performance in the 1990's, cautiously admitting this can only constitute a partial project. She argues that following Diana Taylor, we can assert that performance, both as art and political practice have the effect of transforming cultural repertoires, thus expanding possibilities for representation. Initially Latino/a theater was oriented towards the building of communities and much too often relegated issues of gender and sexuality, privileging and implicit male, heterosexual identity, while female roles were often limited to traditional and passive women. This prompted the emergence of new forms of theater and performance that subverted women's traditional identities, as well as made visible the diversity of sexual identities within Latino/a communities, which was...

Sommer, Doris. “Love and Country in Latin America: An Allegorical Speculation”. Cultural Critique 16 (Autumn 1990), pp. 109–28. Through the analysis of national novels Sommer is set to tackle the relationship betweeen politics and erotics in Latin America. She argues that narratives of love have been central to the disciplining of subjects within national projects, marked by the conflicts and eventual coming together, reconciliation and amalgamation of different (class, race, region, religious, culture) sectors, producing the effect of: suggesting the productive (though transgressive and heroic) union of different actors in favor of a national project, and at the same time, creating the effect of (sexual, romantic or familial) intimacy among national subjects, resulting in a "passionate patriotism." While romantic love engenders the nation, nationalism is based on romantic love. She produces a dialogue between Foucault's "history of the bodies" and Anderson'...

Saporta, Nancy; Marysa Navarro-Aranguren, Patricia Chuchryk and Sonia E. Alvarez “Feminisms in Latin America: From Bogota to San Bernardo”. Signs, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Winter, 1992), pp. 393-434. The University of Chicago Press. The authors take issue with the North-American assumption that Latin American women do not define themselves as feminists, or that feminism is not a priority or even relevant for women in Latin America. For this purpose, they trace the trajectory of the feminisms in the region through the Encuentros held biannually since 1981. They situate the emergence of contemporary feminisms as part of the broader women's movements in close connection to the Left in the context of the repressive regimes of the 1970's and '80s. There was a tendency then to reject the label "feminist" or to perceive feminism as another cultural imperialism from the North. This is explained here by the way it was stigmatized among male-dominated and sexists politics of the Lef...

Archetti, Eduardo P. “Multiple Masculinities. The Worlds of Tango and Football in Argentina” in Sex and sexuality in Latin America Edited by Guy Balderston and Donna J. Guy (eds.) New York and London: New York University Press, 1997. Archetti considers tango lyrics and football fans chants as texts, and analyzes them as sites for the construction of masculinities in Argentina. He emphasizes that masculinities are multiple, heterogeneous and compete with each other. Lyrics in tango songs present a symbolic gendered world at odds with the traditional familiar order. The narrator is always a young man, nostalgic of the past, that aches to find romantic love, which is determined by women's individual choice rather than duty. Masculinity relies on the ability to obtain romantic love from a woman, rather than subordination and domination. In the world of football chants, an exclusively male symbolic space, masculinity is a sign of victory. Fans from opposite teams point at each others as...

McGee Deutsch, Sandra. “Gender and Sociopolitical Change in Twentieth-Century Latin America”. The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 71, No. 2 (May, 1991). Duke University Press. McGee departs from Scott's statement that politics construct gender and gender constructs politics. She shows how traditional gender roles have been historically used as a paradigm of society. Likewise, power relationships of class and labor have been expressed in gendered terms. In this way, gender ideologies have often served to instill, legitimate, and to make seem "natural" values of industrial/capitalist societies under which the citizens are disciplined. Gender has allowed state discourse to project relationships from the familial to the national order (i.e., symbolizing state-citizens relationships as Father-children bonds). This, in turn, argues McGee, means that to transform social relationships and hierarchies we would need to re-imagine and reformulate the gender relationships, ...

Hutchison, Elizabeth Q., “Add gender and stir? Cooking up gendered histories of modern Latin America” Latin American Research Review, Vol. 38, No. 1 (2003), pp. 267-287. Hutchinson reviews some of the recent work on gender in Latin America and points at some of the most prominent features of it: A progressive engagement of historians with gender issues has meant, beyond studying women, raising new questions, opening up new research problems and looking for new sources. Recent research has proved how central issues of gender and sexuality have been to the articulation of both state power and subaltern agency in Latin America. The studies under review, all look at the specific ways that historical processes are "gendered." Some of them have challenged teleological narratives of linear progress for women, and present the postcolonial period as offering a contradictory scenario for women, with both gains and losses. For instance, how colonial gender ideas were not simply carried ...

Tinsman, Heidi. Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality and Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950-1973. (2002) Tinsman explores the ways that two decades of Agrarian Reform (1950-1973) shaped meanings about gender and sexuality in rural Chile, and more broadly reflects on the ways that gender and sexuality are mobilized to enable or oppose political projects. The Agrarian Reform was a contested negotiation between state discourses (which were in turn also contested within the state) and the actors that exercised their agency, accommodating and stretching these meanings for themselves. In their everyday lives, campesinos negotiated meanings over respectability and equality with their bosses, partners, and children. Patriarchy operates then as a series of multiple, local arrangements that make it heterogeneous and contradictory rather than a universal monolithic system of domination. Even though the Agrarian Reform operated directly on men as heads of households for ...

Rosemblatt, Karin Alejandra. Gendered Compromises. Political Cultures and the State in Chile, 1920-1950. Introduction pp. 1-25. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. This book revolves around the argument that the modernizing project in Chile during the first half of the twentieth-century was formulated as a gendered project, in which the state drew a line between respectable men (workers), respectable women (housewives and mothers), and the undisciplined "other". Moreover, they opposed rationality —linked to modern citizenship— to uncontained sexuality. This was in turn linked also to the racialized aspect of the national project: the whitening of the nation. Thus, trough the control over sexuality the racial boundaries of the nation were to be sustained. Rosemblatt analyses diverse sources, such as state documents and fiction, to document the project of the popular front (the center-left coalition that governed in Chile between the 1920's a...

Power, Margaret. La Mujer de Derecha. El poder femenino y la lucha contra Salvador Allende, 1964-1973. Santiago: Ediciones de la Dirección de Bibliotecas, Archivos y Museos, 2008. Power analyzes the right-women's movement, its role in the opposition to Allende's socialist government in Chile (1970-1973) and in the military coup itself. Power makes a convincing argument that gender ideologies were put at play and performed dramatically during the military coup and the events that lead to it. Women presented themselves as the a-political mothers who were defending their private homes (family) and public home (the Fatherland, the nation) and the opposition to Allende exploited this idea. Women interpellated men in their (lack of) masculinity to defend women and children. They used their kitchen pans as symbols of female domesticity to protest the government, which they accused prevented them from fulfilling their natural roles properly. The public performance of conservative women...

Fiol-Matta, Licia. A Queer Mother for the Nation. The State and Gabriela Mistral. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. This book is key to understand how intentional and deliberate was the deployment of modernizing nationalist narratives in Chile, and Gabriela Mistral's participation on them. It shows, furthermore, how Mistral was highly influential to the crafting of Chilean and Latin American gender and racial ideologies. Fiol-Matta's careful research verses on Mistral's relationship to the Chilean (and later Mexican and Latin American) state cultural politics and how she established a persona that played along with the state's gendered, raced, and sexualized deployments of "national culture." Mistral contributed to the creation of images of motherhood and nationalist womanhood while in her own life not adjusting to heterosexual patterns of sexual performance nor of national identity. The fact is that she consciously made her image to co...

Kulick, Don. Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Kulick presents a detailed ethnographic work on travesti sex workers in Salvador, Brazil. He is interested in the ways that travestis understand and give meaning to their daily practices and identities. Kulick argues that studying the lives of travestis can tell us a lot "about the ways in which gender is imagined and configured in Brazilian society." (11) 1. Travestis in Kulick's research do not identify themselves as women, but as homosexual men who derive pleasure from looking like a woman and triggering (masculine) men's desire. They also do not label transsexuals as women, and refuse to give up their male genitalia as a source of sexual pleasure (I suspect that also as a source of sexual power). In this way, all the analysis that want to elevate travesti subjectivity as the ultimate post-modern condition of a non-identity...

Prieur, Annick. Mema's house, Mexico City: on transvestites, queens, and machos. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Prieur's book is based on rich ethnographic evidence and contains her reflections on the role of homosocial and homoerotic male desire in the construction of masculinities in Mexico. She argues that homophobia, machismo and male bisexuality are all at the same time imbricated in the construction of masculinities: Prieur shows the concrete ways that masculinities are constituted in the stories of 'mayates', men whose bisexual practices do not make them think of their identities as "gays" or less masculine. Since these men can retain the power of labeling others (as homosexuals) they can get involved in bisexual relations without 'losing' their masculinity. Some authors (Carrier, Lancaster) have indicated that given the extension of male bisexuality it ought to be a largely tolerated practice in Latin America. Prieur introduces mor...

Lind, Amy and Jessica Share. “Queering Development: Institutionalized Heterosexuality in Development Theory, Practice and Politics in Latin America”. Feminist futures : re-imagining women, culture and development edited by Kum-Kum Bhavnani, John Foran and Priya A. Kurian. London ; New York : Zed Books ; New York : Palgrave, 2003. This article argues for the need to challenge institutionalized heterosexism in development theories and practice. Along with this, addresses the uneasy relationship between heterosexual and queer feminists in Latin America, and the role of transnational networks of solidarity and activism, as well as globalized consumer culture in making some discourses of "gay rights" available in LA. Lind and Share analyze the dynamics of development "aid" and policies, most of which peaked in the 80's in the context of the AIDS pandemic. This allowed many gay groups to become "ONGized" and get funding for their activities. The groups stru...

Nesvig, Martin. 2001 “The Complicated Terrain of Latin American Homosexuality”. Hispanic American Historical Review 81(3-4): 689-729. Nesvig argues that it is relevant to look at the sexual mores of the colonial period as many of these notions persisted into the modern period in Latin America. He notes that homosexuality was considered the ultimate sin against Nature, God, and the Crown. However, this did not stop the fact that it was a fairly common and semi- institutionalized practice. Because cities offered more opportunity for anonymity and for the development of a clandestine subculture with its own slang and codes it was rather an urban phenomenon. Reviews historiographies of homosexuality, informed by the paradigm of honor/shame, where sexuality is a key component. The metaphor of penetration is contained in the myth of La Malinche, makes being penetrated something that equates being colonized, degraded and defeated. Nesvig argues that scholarship on male homosexuality have been...

Lopez-Vicuña, Ignacio. “Approaches to Sexuality in Latin America: Recent Scholarship on Gay and Lesbian Studies”. Latin American Research Review - Volume 39, Number 1, 2004, pp. 238-253 . University of Texas Press. This article reviews scholarship on gay and lesbian studies in Latin America. The growing body of research has been more marked by diversity and complexity than by confluence. Literary studies have started to "queer" the canon by reading texts through queer desire. Queer studies from the social sciences, have tended more to build bridges between homoerotic desire and narratives of nationhood, between discourses of national identity and sexuality. They pay attention to the interplay of power, desire and race, including the analysis of the construction of whiteness and masculinity in Vargas Llosa's work. The fact that many of the writers of the Latin American literary "boom" (1960's and 70's) rejected dominant masculinity and machismo does not m...

Caulfield S. “The History of Gender in the Historiography of Latin America”. Hispanic American Historical Review, 2001 - Duke Univ Press. Pp. 449-490. Caulfield hace un intento por revisar lo que se ha escrito sobre género en Latino América. A partir de los años 80s comienza una serie de estudios inagurados por Asunción Lavrin que usan género como categoría central de análisis. Nota la falta de diálogo entre lo que se produce en el Norte y en el Sur sobre LA. Examina la historia de las corrientes políticas y académicas que han influenciado los análisis de género en la historiografía de LA (452). El peak de los estudios de género se producen en el contexto de las postdictaduras cuando hay recursos institucionales y respaldo internacional para una agenda global “de género”. La influencia del post-estructuralismo francés resulta en un énfasis en los discursos y las representaciones, las mentalidades, y de los estudios de la mujer se transita a los estudios sobre la feminidad y la mascul...