Queering Transcultural Encounters In Latin American And Francophone Contexts

My dissertation proposes a new queer transcultural perspective of "Frenchness" as it is conceived in Latin America and North Africa. This concept plays a noteworthy role in the formation of queer identities from both of these so-called "marginal" geographic areas, whether it is represented as a cultural influence or personified by characters who travel abroad. Using the framework of Queer Studies, Semiotics, and Transculturalism, I analyze queer subjects who navigate transcultural spaces and experience cross-cultural encounters in seven works: José González Castillo's Los Invertidos (Argentina), Alfonso Hernández-Catá's El ángel de Sodoma (Cuba/Spain), André Gide's L'immoraliste (France), Mohamed Choukri's Le pain nu (Morocco), and Rachid O.'s narratives Chocolat chaud, Ce qui reste, and L'enfant ébloui (Morocco). In the Latin American context, the trope of exclusion is associated with "Frenchness" as sexually deviant and thus undesirable. Yuri Lotman's semiosphere reveals the ways in which national culture organizes boundaries to exclude or include un/wanted individuals--and, more specifically, queer subjects. In the North African context, the predominantly masculine public space facilitates cross-cultural encounters with French men, allowing a controversial bond to form between the privileged European tourist and local impoverished boys. My project uses Homi Bhabha's cultures of survival and mimicry, as well as Marcel Mauss's gift exchange relationships, to show how social conditions prevent or allow the younger participants in these exchanges to develop sexual agency and sites of resistance to global economic power structures. Finally, my project explores the homosexual agency and subject formation of a young protagonist thanks to French media in Morocco. It analyzes the affective attachment and sensorial connection to French television broadcasts developed by an adolescent who manages to turn public space into a realm of intimacy. Ultimately, the character transforms his attraction for racial difference into a source of postcolonial subversion and forges a new transcultural identity.

In a highly original and interdisciplinary work bridging French and Francophone studies, cultural studies, media studies, and gender and sexuality studies, Luis Navarro-Ayala examines the transnational queer body as a physical and symbolic entity intrinsically connected with space. Through a transcultural and intersectional approach to bodily representations, socioeconomic conditions, and postcolonial politics, Navarro-Ayala analyzes queerness and Frenchness in narratives from North Africa and Latin America, revealing that Frenchness is coded to represent a sexually deviant “Other.” France and Frenchness, in two distinct regions of the global South, have come to represent an imagined queer space enabling sexual exploration, even in social conditions that would have otherwise prevented queer agency.

In this book, Meenakshi Gigi Durham outlines and advances a progressive feminist framework for digital ethics in the technosexual landscape, exploring the complex and evolving interrelationships between sex and tech. Today we live in a “sexscape,” a globalized assemblage of media, transnational capital, sexual practices, and identities. Sexuality suffuses the contemporary media-saturated environment; we engage with sex via cellphone apps and airport TVs, billboards and Jumbotron screens. Our techniques of sexual representation and body transformation — from sexting to plastic surgeries — occur in relation to our deep and complex engagements with mediated images of desire. These technosexual interactions hold the promise of sexual liberation and boldly imaginative pleasures. But in the machinic suturing of technologies with bodies, the politics of race, class, gender, and nation continue to matter. Paying acute attention to media’s relationship to the politics of location, social hierarchies, and regulatory schemas, the author mounts a lucid and passionate argument for an ethics of technosex invested in the analysis of power.

Discusses how theories of queer performativity, as articulated within the US Academy, are unable to capture the whole of Latino American queer subjectivity and experience. The Avowal of Difference explores the potentialities and limitations that queer theory offers in the context of Latino American texts and subjects. Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui contrasts Latino American sexual genealogies with the Anglo-European “coming out” narrative—and interrogates the centrality of the “coming out” story as the regulating metaphor for gay, lesbian, or queer identities. In its place, the book looks at other strategies—from silence to circumlocution, from disavowal to indifference—to theorize queer subject formation in a Latino American cultural context. The analysis of texts by José Lezama Lima, Luis Zapata, Manuel Puig, Severo Sarduy, Junot Díaz, and others offers a comparative approach to understanding how queer sexualities are shaped and written in other cultural contexts. “The Avowal of Difference is a delightful critical encounter between queer criticism and Latino American literature and culture. I wish I had written it myself.” — Ramón E. Soto-Crespo, author of Mainland Passage: The Cultural Anomaly of Puerto Rico

This book aims to reflect on how to translate "queer" in the context of Latin America. Queer theory is becoming consolidated on an international scale as an effort to understand dissident bodies and their inventions. But how can we utilize such a rich body of literature and proposals without merely applying in the Global South what has been formulated in the Global North? Through meetings between dissident bodies in the Global South, the book suggests that the theoretical-poetic inventions formulated in this part of the world cannot be forgotten and proposes a discussion on how to approach queer theory from a decolonial point of view. There is still only a scant body of literature that systematizes and approaches these questions from a Latin American point of view; or, to use the term that gives this book its name, the "tropics." The book points out the necessity of staying aware of the connections between western modernity and colonial practices. The book therefore invites us to pass through borders, to question limits, and to allow ourselves to be affected by Others, a fundamental exercise in the context of social inequality as drastic as that in which the majority of the population live in Latin America and in the Global South in general. Theories, like bodies, travel; in being translated, they transform themselves. The movements and the bending of bodies and theories are disturbing and subversive. Queer in the Tropics arises from these translations, from this bending, and from these subversions.

What does it mean to queer a concept? If queerness is a notion that implies a destabilization of the normativity of the body, then all cultural systems contain zones of discomfort relevant to queer studies. What then might we make of such zones when the use of the term queer itself has transcended the fields of sex and gender, becoming a metaphor for addressing such cultural phenomena as hybridization, resignification, and subversion? Further still, what should we make of it when so many people are reluctant to use the term queer, because they view it as theoretical colonialism, or a concept that loses its specificity when applied to a culture that signifies and uses the body differently? Translating the Queer focuses on the dissemination of queer knowledge, concepts, and representations throughout Latin America, a migration that has been accompanied by concomitant processes of translation, adaptation, and epistemological resistance.

Imagining Latinx Intimacies addresses the ways that artists and writers resist the social forces of colonialism, displacement, and oppression through crafting incisive and inspiring responses to the problems that queer Latinx peoples encounter in both daily lives and representation such as art, film, poetry, popular culture, and stories. Instead of keeping quiet, queer Latinx artists and writers have spoken up as a way of challenging stereotypes, prejudice, and violence occurring in communities ranging from Puerto Rico to sites within the mainland United States as well as transnational flows of migration. Such migrations are explored in several ways including the movement of queer people from Chile to the United States. To address these matters, artistic thinkers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, and Rane Arroyo have challenged such socio-political problems by imagining intimate social and intellectual spaces that resist the status quo like homophobic norms, laws, and policies that hurt families and communities. Building on the intellectual thought of researchers such as Jorge Duany, Adriana de Souza e Silva, and José Esteban Muñoz, this book explains how the imagined spaces of Latinx LGBTQ peoples are blueprints for addressing our tumultuous present and creating a better future.

"Author continues his work on gay studies by questioning the makeup of the canon and the occlusion of the queering rhetoric. Includes essays on homoerotic writing by Chicano authors, lesbian desire in representations of Evita, feminine pornography in Latin America, and the crisis of masculinity in Argentine fiction. Very well researched; theoretically sound and provocative. Required reading in queer studies. See also HLAS 48:5657 and item #bi 97002052# by the same author"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.

Rethinking mestizaje and how it functions as an epistemology of colonialism in diverse sites from Aztlán to Manila, and across a range of cultural materials

An examination into queer identity in relation to Latino/a America According to the 2000 census, Latinos/as have become the largest ethnic minority group in the United States. Images of Latinos and Latinas in mainstream news and in popular culture suggest a Latin Explosion at center stage, yet the topic of queer identity in relation to Latino/a America remains under examined. Juana María Rodríguez attempts to rectify this dearth of scholarship in Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces, by documenting the ways in which identities are transformed by encounters with language, the law, culture, and public policy. She identifies three key areas as the project’s case studies: activism, primarily HIV prevention; immigration law; and cyberspace. In each, Rodríguez theorizes the ways queer Latino/a identities are enabled or constrained, melding several theoretical and methodological approaches to argue that these sites are complex and dynamic social fields. As she moves the reader from one disciplinary location to the other, Rodríguez reveals the seams of her own academic engagement with queer latinidad. This deftly crafted work represents a dynamic and innovative approach to the study of identity formation and representation, making a vital contribution to a new reformulation of gender and sexuality studies.