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- Convenors:
-
Megan Daigle
(Humanitarian Policy Group (ODI))
Raúl Marchena Magadán (University of Manchester)
- Location:
- Malet 632
- Start time:
- 4 April, 2014 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
Sex and gender are not mere descriptives but theoretical tools to understand Latin American political and cultural realities-local, global, transnational, diasporical. Intertwined with discourses of progress, family and nation, bodies and sex are sites of resistance through a Latin American lens.
Long Abstract:
Though theories of gender and sexuality may have originated in the West, thinking through lenses of sex, gender, and queer theory is not alien to the Latin American context. Terms such as 'gender', 'sexuality', and 'queer' are no longer merely descriptive categories or movements that seek sexual vindication, but in a broader sense, they are useful theoretical tools that have helped to understand the political and cultural realities of Latin America and its connections to the local, global, transnational, and diasporical. Sexual identities, activities, and relationships are intricately intertwined with discourses of progress and development, and the acceptance of certain models of sexuality (and rejection of others) is seen as central to notions of family and nation. As ideologies and normative imperatives are played out on, in, and through bodies of all kinds, those very bodies and sexuality itself can become the sites of powerful forms of resistance.
In recent years, increasing interest in gender and sexuality in the Latin American academy has combined with expanding access of Latin American scholars (both within and outside the region) to global publishing and regional policy shifts on related issues, creating a perfect platform for the formation of a Latin American understanding of sexuality and gender. This panel invited engagements with issues of sexuality and gender across the region, creating a forum for discussion and analysis of sexualities as sites of resistance.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
This research project bring together the imaginary and autobiographic photo elicitation to explore social strategies among carriers of the HIV/AIDS virus to subvert stigma and exclusion in Chile.
Paper long abstract:
The paper explores routes to intimate and self-reflexive narratives of the participants using innovative ethnographic methods based on collaborative photography. The photo elicitation will draw on the imagination of the participants to give access to their experiences and to appropriately represent their journey as HIV carriers, creating strategies for survival within Chilean society. The participants create their own imaginary photographic diaries in relation to their disease, and then to interpret their photographs. They will choose the motives of their photographic diary spontaneously, as an imaginary response to their physical and social environment, to approach dreams, desires and expectations.
Paper short abstract:
By comparing the ambiguous relationship between a transvestite and a revolutionary with that of Pinochet and his wife, Pedro Lemebel questions sexuality and gender norms in dictatorial Chile as well as the social institutions founded upon them.
Paper long abstract:
Pedro Lemebel's novel, set around the 1986 assassination attempt on Augusto Pinochet, absorbs the reader into the world of la Loca del Frente, a 40-something transvestite living in terrible poverty. He chooses to give a voice and a gaze to a protagonist who is almost invisible to the regime, and in so doing allows a uniquely subversive view of dictatorial Chile at a critical political moment. Underneath the theatrical façade of la Loca's imagination, there is a careful deconstruction of some of the most prevalent and undemocratic notions in Chile during the 1980s. In the upside-down world of the novel, nothing is to be taken at face value: women are men, supposed heroes are monsters and cowards, and the most marginalised members of society are inextricably tied to the most powerful. Most importantly of all, Lemebel questions deeply-held notions about sexuality and gender and forces us to ask what we think really makes a woman and what really makes a man. As the Chilean dictatorship was built on a foundation of traditional gender roles, Lemebel's debunking of popular ideas of masculinity and femininity calls into question even the notion of the Dictador, whose rhetoric and public image are shattered by imagined insights into his life which reconstruct him as a coward and a bully.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores modes of representation of the LGBTIQ child/adolescent in four post-2000 Argentine films. It argues that the emerging ‘figures of the anti-Child’ allow for forms of mobility that resist existing frames for childhood sexualities onscreen: deviance and heteronormative futurity.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the modes of representation and politics of visibility of the LGBTIQ child/adolescent in the New Argentine Cinema. The figure of the socially marginalised, criminalised and institutionalised child/adolescent is a recurrent one in Argentine cinema since the late 1950s, and it is within this frame that the first instances of non-normative child/teenage sexualities appear on the Argentine screen. It is thus argued that in post-2000 Argentine films the depiction of queer childhoods moves beyond the previous frame of institutionalised 'deviance' imposed on them, by opening up the scope of representation to a much wider range of social classes and settings, including the rural/urban and inter-class interactions. Through an analysis of four films (Glue [Dos Santos, 2006], XXY [Puenzo, 2007], El último verano de la Boyita [Solomonoff, 2009], Miss Tacuarembó [Sastre, 2010]), I suggest that these cinematically reframed childhood sexualities can be read as rhetorical sites where 'figures of the anti-Child' emerge. By being capable of actualising certain lines of flight, these 'sinthomosexual' figures of the child allow for new connections between bodies and spaces that render possible different forms of mobility that resist familial-teleological narratives by 'making them flee' from heteronormative futurity. The analysis focuses on practices of visibility and spatialization, such as the regime of the open secret as inextricably linked to the rural/urban divide, and the different types of outing, including the repressive and violent outing that confirms the closet, as well as other, 'queer-child' outings that allow for positive movement and new connections and alliances
Paper short abstract:
This paper will examine the rebellious energy conveyed in the Pizarnikian subject through Julia Kristeva's theory of subversion. The analysis will illustrate that Pizarnik's subversion of the Symbolic world is implemented through the sensation of a shattered body and the notion of sexual fluidity.
Paper long abstract:
It is universally perceived that the poetry of Alejandra Pizarnik practices frequently the alteration of the speaking subject. The duplication of being begins to appear explicitly in Árbol de Diana (1962); it then surfaces more frequently in Extracción de la piedra de locura (1968); by the time of her last book El infierno musical (1971) it is no longer merely a duplication but a multiplication. In the essay named 'Le Sujet en procès', published in Tel Quel in 1972, Kristeva illustrates the destructive power of semiotic expulsion and the implication - a split subject in process, fragmented body - for the Symbolic Order under such an invasion of 'destruction, aggressivity and death'. This paper will posit the frequent dispersion of the subject in Pizarnik as a manifestation of the subversive sujet en procès. Two essential features inextricably linked to the establishment of such a subject in Pizarnik's poetry will be examined. The first important aspect intrinsic to the subject in process is the simultaneous existence of the impression of impersonality and the sensation of a shattered body. The innocent voices created by Pizarnik will also be studied for such feature coincides with another central characteristic of the subject in process - the notion of sexual fluidity and neutrality, often manifested in the subject's bisexuality.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the development of cross-dressing festivals and their impact in the production of popular culture as a way of resistance to the heteronormative cultural policies in Cuba.
Paper long abstract:
Culture and cultural practices, have been a priority of the Cuban Revolution since its triumph in 1959 in order to build up a national identity. However, homosexuality, and any manifestation associated with it, which represented part of the segregated and discriminated minorities, found a barrier that was an extension of the inherited machismo from previous historical periods.
The recent recognition of drag queen festivals nationwide, for a hetero-normative society like Cuba, represents a breakthrough in a culture where sexual differences acceptance has been surrounded by the stigma carried through years of heterosexual norms. The appearance and spread of cross-dressing performances have developed in Cuba from underground clandestine gay parties to nationwide cultural festivals in the last fifty years of revolution, which can be compared to the same fait suffered by the Nueva Trova movement in the first decade of the Cuban revolution. Cross-dressing performances, like Nueva Trova music, have been stigmatized, persecuted and dismissed during years but finally it is finding its way into the national recognition as a "new" way of popular culture production.
Paper short abstract:
This paper highlights intertextuality in identity performance, conceptualisation and theorisation in spaces of policy formation and government-civil society engagement. We see how LGBT identities are politicised, and their occupation of specific political spaces in public policy development and contention.
Paper long abstract:
Forms of 'empowered participatory' decisionmaking have been a part of Portoalegrense and Riograndense local government exercise since redemocratisation, and recently these have extended to engagement with identity-based ('new') social movements. This paper explores how (multiple) LGBT identities are produced and utilised in civil society-government interaction and, importantly, both how they are oriented-to and spoken of in discourse. Through analysis of accounts (e.g. Wooffitt, 1993), repertoires in action (Potter and Wetherell, 1987) and Membership Categorisation Analysis (Sacks, 1974), the conflict between essential and anti-essentialist concepts of identity can be drawn out from talk highlighting the general messiness of identity work and talk. It will show, too, how despite serving as a space for particular identity-based politics, other intersecting identities are invoked both as a complement (e.g. gender) or as a counterpoint or 'other' (e.g. religious) are brought into play defining a conceptual landscape of identity-based (local) politics.
The purpose of the paper, then, is to explore the political performance of identity in policy development and resource mobilisation, defining the limits of 'LGBT's, how they conceive and are conceived, which political spaces they occupy and how are they limited in political space. It will argue, too, that an understanding of cross-frame identity-based political alliances and competition are essential for an understanding of the current political landscape and public policy development.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing from Brazilian “travesti” sex workers’ experiences, this paper aims to reflect on broader processes of transphobia in the country and, at the same time, rethink the way queer theory considers every unintelligible body as “transgressor”.
Paper long abstract:
Queer theory usually considers that people with bodies which are unintelligible according to the sex-gender dichotomy system are "transgressors", as they question heteronormative social identities. As I will describe when referring to Brazilian "travesti" sex workers, I understand that these bodies, without a political will of transgression, are not transgressors themselves.
Affirming that they are not/do not feel like transgressors does not mean thinking that they are passive individuals. On the contrary, they are agents who strategically combine acting and embodying a kind of femininity with the desire to claim the sexual pleasure of being penetrated, and at the same time penetrating with their penises. "Travestis", who are not cross-dressers nor transsexuals, repeatedly declare that they are seeked out and desired due to their "masculine" role. However, their penises mean that for Brazilian society in general their bodies are not understood as ambiguous but as abject, because these bodies belong to "viados" ("fags"). Transphobia in Brazil is founded precisely through the consideration that the infractions that these "men" incur when making their bodies feminine and desiring other men, must be punished.
In short, whatever the level of "reaction" to their bodies, and even though there is not a political will of transgression on the part of "travestis", it can be affirmed that their bodies interpellate and are not indifferent as they mobilize the male/female dichotomy very well established in a patriarchal society as the Brazilian one.