Journal of Language and Sexuality - Volume 5, Issue 2, 2016

This special issue examines how the fluid historicity of peripheral sexualities are driven by their dynamic transformations, displacements, and reformulations throughout history, having been produced, interrogated by, and represented through discourses of colonialism, slavery, imperialism, and more recently are shaped by the forces of globalization and migration, among other influences. Scholars foster new critical dialogues on the artistic, literary, and linguistic forms through which these sexualities have been articulated and on the new centers that peripheral sexualities often establish in the evolution of human sexuality, societal norms, and creative uses of language. The studies demonstrate how intersections of sexualities and ideologies form critiques of normativity, whether that normativity be heteronormativity, homonationalism(s), or other orthodoxies linguistically tied to sexualities. Central to the explorations in this volume is an attention to how language is deployed in multiple media and genres, from visual and performance pieces that disrupt and reaffirm traditional colonial relationships, to politically engaged literature that grapples with questions of identity, agency, and memory, to subversive films that question revolutionary paradigms or reimagine them for a postnational world. These studies focus on examples from Spain, Peru, Cuba, Bolivia, and Puerto Rico that engage the dynamics of periphery and center, national and transnational, and the liminal spaces mediating between these polarities, all spaces constituted by language and sexuality.

The traditional reading of Julia de Burgos’s (1914–1953) poem “Río Grande de Loíza” positions the river as a male lover. An ecofeminist reading yields a very different reading and raises other questions about the gendered and sexual message circulating within the poem. In my reading, the river becomes a fluid, lyrical mirror reflecting the poet’s quest for transnational and transsexual freedom unbound by female corporeality. Burgos invokes the river as a non-human Other interlocutor in order to deconstruct both the geographic and political boundaries imposed by US colonial hegemony and the sexual ones foisted by patriarchal-oriented Puerto Rican nationalists who viewed sexuality as heteronormative. By the 1930s, landscapes had been appropriated as symbols of the fatherland and a distinct Puerto Rican identity. Burgos’s language establishes instead a fluvial proto-feminist discourse of empowerment by imagining multiple sites of corporeal pleasure that transcend national barriers and offers alternative poetic fluid sexualities.

Giménez Bartlett’s novel recovers the historical figure of La Pastora, who was represented by Franco’s discourse as a diabolic monster. La Pastora is an intersex person, and she also is a maquis (guerrilla). It is this double level of marginalization as intersex and maquis that is to be studied in this essay. Through the analysis of La Pastora’s character, memoria histórica and sexual identity will be uncovered as central to Giménez Bartlett’s novel since they reveal as well as denounce the lack of space for the “other” stories of the Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship. At the same time, Donde nadie te encuentre lays bare the issue of marginalization and repression in Franco’s Spain of non-normative gender and sexual identities — “dissident identities” as Raquel Osborne (2012) calls them — of any identity that does not conform to the models of sexuality imposed by Francoist discourse.

Working with the theoretical notions of “homonationalism” (Puar 2013) and “pinkwashing” (Schulman 2011, 2012, Spade 2013) and using as a case study two photographic series by contemporary Spanish gay photographer David Trullo, I illuminate the complex situation in which contemporary queer Spanish visual artists must produce their work: they resist homonationalism and homonormativity at the same time that they must work within the very frames of homonationalism and homonormativity to fund, produce, and disseminate their particularly subversive queer politics. In analyzing Trullo’s series, Alterhistory: Una historia verdadera (2010) — a gay and lesbian, homonormative rewriting of late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century photographic couple portraiture — I argue that he simultaneously makes visible and performatively embodies new LGBTQ visibilities and histories in Spain where they were previously erased through a queer manipulation of photographic language, specifically by altering what Roland Barthes has called photography’s “connotation procedures.” Also, I analyze Trullo’s Inca: 20 perfiles peruanos sin filtro (2009), a critique of neo-colonial Spanish enterprises in Latin America and Peru’s racism towards its queer indigenous population, which the artist produced while accompanying an exhibition promoting same-sex marriage funded by the AECID (Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo). I conclude that Trullo intervenes in and complicates public debates about LGBTQ rights, visibility, embodiment, and the politics of neo-liberal commodification of progressive rights

This article explicates the discursive strategies deployed by the curator of the Museo travesti de Perú (2008), philosopher, activist, and artist Giuseppe Campuzano (1969–2013), to explore theoretical intersections of national identity and globalization(s) and to appreciate a testimonial, Neo-Baroque, peripheral aesthetic that challenges and “decolonizes” the cultural history of peripheral genders and sexualities in Latin American countries like Peru. Through an analysis of the museum’s visual codes in its works of art and a discursive interpretation of the narratives framing those pieces, this essay demonstrates how the Museo travesti is an exaltation of difference and a critical agent for a citizenship of inclusion — a testimonial agent that activates and circulates works of art in order to not only promote knowledge of reality, but to transform that reality through effects of decolonization from the national periphery.

Lucha libre, a form of exhibition wrestling, has recently gained popularity in Bolivia, thanks to mixed-gender matches featuring traditionally-dressed women known as the cholitas luchadoras. Within their matches, the act of kissing is often used as a form of humiliating an opponent. This article explores the convergence of eroticism and humiliation in these kisses as an entry point for a broader understanding of the deployment of power in the Bolivian context. Taking both the symbolic language of bodies in the ring and audience discourses about that action, I explore how associations between humiliation and demasculinization may reinforce the potency of masculinity as a position of power. Further, seeing the chola as representative of the Bolivian nation helps us to understand the ways that humiliation works as a recognizable trope for Bolivian audiences, lending import to these seemingly superficial performances.

Given that the production of sexual subjects is inextricably bound to language, theorists Lee Edelman and Jasbir Puar investigate the imbrication of the sexual subject in discourses of the Child (Edelman 2004) and the nation-state (Puar 2007). Through an interdisciplinary lens, this essay builds on their conceptual frameworks in its examination of homoerotics and the figure of the Child in Cuban cultural production. Of interest is how peripheral verbal and visual language challenge discourses that fold the sexual subject and the Child into the good of the nation and the coherence of the social order. In Edelman’s argument (2004: 3), the Child and queerness are held apart: the Child is bound to futurity given that the “political order […] returns to the Child as the image of the future it intends” and queerness figures “the place of the social order’s death drive.” The queer poetics of the peripheral language examined in this essay revise the trajectory of Child to “true man,” creating new space for movement of the queer subject and the Child in the political field.