Translating the Queer: Body Politics and Transnational Conversations - Notes
Héctor Domínguez Ruvalcaba: Translating the Queer
Professor Héctor Domínguez Ruvalcaba teaches queer and gender issues in Latin American literature, film, and culture at the University of Texas, Austin.
Translating the Queer: Body Politics and Transnational Conversations
Published in 2016 by Zed Books Ltd.
ISBNs:
978-1-78360-293-3 hb
978-1-78360-292-6 pb
978-1-78360-294-0 pdf
978-1-78360–295-7 epub
978-1-78360-296-4 mobi
Contents
Introduction: Troubles and travels of the queer
Latin American queer studies in transnational dialogue imply cultural translation politics.
Colonialism/decolonization tensions are implicit in queer dissidences articulation.
Queerness associated with modernity in debates about gender/sexuality in the twentieth-century.
Queer as critical thinking methodology, deconstructing the gender system, questioning the nation/state foundations.
Neoliberalism consumption and disposability machineries complicate body liberation/queer expressions processes.
1. Queer decolonization
Coloniality and queerness: A discursive invasion
Queer colonial and translation
Reading the visceral
Centrality of the liminal
Conclusion
2. Queerness and the nation in peripheral modernity
The modern politics of the body
The aesthetic weapon of queerness
Knowing the queer
To cover and to uncover: From closet to scandal
Queer resistance
Conclusion
3. LGBT politics and culture
The libertarian age
Gay culture in Latin America
Coming out: Recurring asymmetries
Homophobia: The capital cause
The AIDS pandemic
Normalizing the queer
4. Beyond LGBT struggles: Trans politics and neoliberal sex
Trans talk
Queerness and the neoliberal order
Conclusion
Conclusion
References
Index
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Carlos Amador, Adam Coon, Ruth Rubio, Nat Zingg, anonymous reviewers, and Kika Sroka-Miller (Zed Books editor).
This book summarizes transnational dialogues with a rich critical mass and activists, including the Sexualities Section of the Latin American Studies Association, Queering Paradigms conferences, and the Permanent Seminar on Gender Violence.
Special thanks to Pedro Lemebel, Juan Pablo Sutherland, Gloria Thiers, Carmen Berenguer, Gloria Careaga, Alejandro Brito, César Enríquez Cabaret, Violeta Barrientos, Sara Rondinel, Óscar Vega, Rosario Aquim, Elvira Espejo, Daniel Jones, Esteban Paulón, Osvaldo Bazán, Camilo Antillón, and Milú Vargas.
Introduction: Troubles and travels of the queer
Central questions:
What is queerness's place in Latin American culture and politics?
How did it become an academic, artistic, and intellectual object?
What meanings does "queer" acquire when translated into Latin American cultural codes?
This study focuses on queer as a geographically and culturally specific field regarding transgressive sexualities and body conceptions.
Queer encompasses political actions, academic agendas, artistic movements, and economic development, influencing policies, representations, aesthetics, and moral debates. Latin America's queer geography involves cultural dynamics shaped by practices, meanings, and sexuality policies inherent to the region's history.
The book examines how gender, sexuality, and body politics have been approached in Latin America, focusing on:
Queer criticism's contribution to Latin Americanist scholarship.
How queer theory transcends sex and gender studies, affecting cultural processes.
Embodiment, gendering, and sexualization of politics, norms, tastes, economy, and language.
Transgressive meaning production in contemporary Latin American culture through sex and bodies.
Inquiry into queer phenomena representation, definition, and constitution of cultural and political practices.
Recognition that deviant bodily practices existed before queer theory academia.
Construction of representations, actions, and methodologies to reveal obscured cultural history aspects.
Queer as understanding body politics, criticizing hegemonic culture, legal systems, and gender structure.
Queering as understanding the deviant as a historical change subject in cultural and political realms.
Study of representations/debates contention about body, sex, and gender in Latin America.
Queer as destabilization point, challenging order and fracturing what is considered natural or legitimate.
Queering as resignification process for conceptions/norms controlling the body in Latin American culture.
The specifics of the queer in Latin America:
a) Latin American queer studies in transnational dialogue, implying cultural translation politics.
b) Colonialism/decolonization tension is implicit in queer dissidences articulation.
c) Queerness has been associated with modernity in most twentieth-century debates on gender/sexuality.
d) Queer is a methodology of critical thinking that by deconstructing the gender system questions the foundations of the nation/state.
e) Neoliberal consumption/disposability machineries complicate body liberation and queer expressions processes.
Latin American queer studies undertaken in transnational dialogue, implying politics of cultural translation.
Analysis of scholarship from Latin America and abroad reveals contacts, influences, and contradictions.
Latin American sex–gender culture/politics construct from various cartographies/theoretical traditions.
Travel of queer concepts and practices occurs through gay/lesbian research, feminism, psychoanalysis, and sexology.
Latin Americanist queer scholars translocate discourses/practices between radical Western debates and Latin American population realities, exchanging ideas, politics, and representations.
Translocality characterizes Latin American dynamics, with people moving between localities and across borders.
Many authors/artists navigate transnational, translinguistic, transepistemological channels.
Translation performs a politics of mediation dealing with logic and rhetoric, including disruption and affect (Spivak).
The alterity implied in language demands affective equivalence. Rhetoricity reveals an alterity implied in the language, as a meaningful silence that demands an affective equivalence in the target language (Spivak 2012: 181).
“The relationship between logic and rhetoric, between grammar and rhetoric, is also a relationship between social logic, social reasonableness, and the disruptiveness of figuration in social practice” (186–187).
Rigid loyalty to the original translation was the intention of colonial discourse translation, where (Lavinas and Viteri 2016: 4).
The politics of translation prioritizes a liberating impulse from colonial precepts: decolonizing translation.
Translation works for a new discourse formation, addressing different challenges in translated contexts where sexual dissidents/gender-nonconforming subjects demand knowledge's liberating character.
Queer theory in Latin America views local troubles through intersectionality, linking sexuality and gender to economic determinants, religious constraints, racial exclusions, and political junctures.
Translation recognizes margins, exclusions, and oppressions.
In gender texts translation, eliciting a response is most important (Simon 1996: 7), contributing to knowledge and practices changes of the body.
Queer text translation has a politics implied in the translation itself, rearticulating the social and political meaning of the body, disrupting the gender system.
Cultural translation enriches hegemonic discourse by conglomerating meaning systems (Cutter 2005: 60).
Translating queer disrupts codifications and threatens the order of meanings.
Intervention of queer theory/representation reconsiders norms, definitions, tastes, and culture, following political, intellectual, and academic conversations after LGBT culture/politics and queer theory arrival in Latin America.
Ethnography, literature, and representation have produced knowledge of the nonhegemonic body.
The discriminatory origin trauma of the word queer stayed at home and was dressed as a field of study, a political position, an aesthetic proposal, and a lifestyle.
Works dealing with queer issues have focused on traumas, conflicts, and alternative subjectivities in Latin American societies.
The place of queer is located in transit, escaping meaning boundaries (Anzaldúa 1999: 71).
Trans morpheme implies displacement (from hegemonic gender system) and translation (from one meaning system to another), a poetics of normalcy disruption.
If the queer body experiences rhetoric in-between, it is in a state of translation itself.
Transnational/translocated conversation site, politics of translation (as politics), and in-between queer subject position confirm liminality of queer studies.
Building on what is found in translation is more productive than regretting what is missed.
Colonialism/decolonization is a tension implicit in the articulation of queer dissidences.
What queer theory does is unveiling forms of disidentification that are in place as the invisible threads of sexual colonialism.
Disidentification (Muñoz) is based on queer-of-color performance analysis: nonconfrontational but differentiated from gender–race structures through rhetorical strategies, enabling identities-in-difference (rejection of stereotype/positive resignification).
Mediating position is aimed at deconstructing the notion of identity, undermining exclusionary character and tendency to territoriality.
Identity-in-difference is a battleground of meaning, as cultural turmoil happens in the colonized queer representations/theories.
Colonization reduced all sex practices outside Catholic sanctions to sodomy (Horswell 2005: 15), dislocating fluid gender/sex conceptions, complicating pre-Columbian practices.
In transculturation, colonizers/colonized negotiated sex behavior rules and identities.
Although an asymmetric relationship, the sexuality of the colonized became an object of scrutiny, and other factors enabled clandestine practices of nonlegitimate sex.
This silenced/denied zone has been the focus of attention in Latin Americanist queer scholarship.
The exogenous place of theory enunciation indicates a new theoretical colonialism, assigning the Latin American subject the role of knowledge receptor produced in hegemonic centers, which establishes a circuit of enunciation and translation (Gramsci). However, some northern hemisphere studies are decolonizing.
US Latino/a scholars (Anzaldúa, Moraga, Muñoz) understand queer as the uncomfortable place in-between, the no-place, or the place of disidentification where migrants/people of color find their place.
The colonized occupy an unstable space as the site of their subjectification, becoming citizens with full rights rearticulated to be feasible.
Queer Latin American theory is articulated inside coloniality, with concepts within power centers and empire language; it represents the imperial knowledge's uncanny, dissident side of the metropolis.
Queer expressions are cornered in the realm of the abject for both colonizing and colonized cultures.
Rather, the cartography of the abject inhabits privilege outsides (being racialized, gendered, or sexualized) regardless of geographic location, with queer criticism translocal (King 2014).
Translocals are transmigrants in peripheral capitalism circuits, functioning as knowledge globalization agents and translators between metropolis/peripheral colonized cultures; this mediation risks political and cultural challenges of meanings traveling.
Queerness has been associated with modernity in most twentieth-century debates on gender/sexuality.
In visualizing diverse sexualities, which functions as an inscription of alternative forms of life in the national imaginaries, queer emerged as the other tongue, intervening into translated cultures but suspected as global north theory (modernity mark), in which translation plays a linguistic process (meaning crisis) key role.
Colonial anxiety contextualizes queer modernity arrival during modernismo, revolutionaries/queer intellectuals controversies in Mexico/Cuba, military persecution of sexual dissidents in the Southern Cone's Dirty War, and neoliberal human trafficking/sexual tourism system.
Queer thought and representations go through multiple resistance processes that result in alternative identities undertaking a politics of recognition, of liberation, and of rights establishment, and queer modernization foments an economy/aesthetic expressions/social participation forms.
This troubling moment of cultural translation of gender/sexuality liberating discourses and their contestations in Latin American culture contextualized the emergence of alternative identities that would be recognized as modern.
The modern history of sexual dissidence proceeds from state exclusion strategies toward gender/sexual dissidence inclusion within citizenship.
Queer is the avant-garde of modernization; queer represents foreign and colonialist influences; an important sector of creative and intellectual elite places the queer topic in the public scene as part of cosmopolitan universal culture; and queer politics, like feminism, places the body on the agenda of public concerns and constitutes one of the largest civil movements of our time.
This meaning formation of the queer as an expression of modernity describes a traveling culture. For Foucalt, this route of sexual knowledge goes from a nefarious sin to criminalization, medicalization, and a politics of identity and inclusion in citizenship.
Narratives of modernization as the incorporation of sexual dissidence transgress the traditional gender structure, advancing toward the paradise of freedom with nonhegemonic desires legitimacy, where the colonial and liberation agendas coincide in queer modernity.
LGBT activism came from metropolitan countries as a liberation movement; its exogenous character has been a point of rejection from nationalistic discourses, leading to the main subject of conversation in queer Latin Americanist scholarship concerning national identity.
The main struggle that queer modernity has to face is this rejection from the national identity, which leads to one of the main subjects of conversation in queer Latin Americanist scholarship.
Queer is a methodology of critical thinking that by deconstructing the gender system questions the foundations of the nation and the state.
Inscribing the queer in the national community is one of the main topics in sexual diversity national histories, providing evidence of a proscribed bodily culture compiled via stories, images, places, practices, and symbols pertaining to excluded communities, exposing what is obscene and incorporating the marginalized sexuality into the realm of citizenship.
Queer historiography proposes a reconfiguration of the national subject, medicalizing exclusion and criminalization as strategies of sexual dissidence control.
Approaches to sexual differences were through medical and criminalist treatises that aimed at public policies, compiling unique archives of bodily accounts for historians, which allows to understand how subjects were excluded, exclusion mechanisms, and cultural imaginaries forming remar