Queer Spectacles in Fin-De-Siècle Latin America: Graduate Conference & Workshop

Join us for this graduate conference & workshop where presenters explore critical debates concerned with understanding the meaning and applications of queerness and discuss a range of approaches to counter-sexual formations, racial imaginaries, cognition, and political mobilizations.

Focusing on the lettered production of fin-de-siècle Latin America and the Caribbean, students will investigate the somatic constructions of the «perverse» in diverse cultural experiments, including novels, plays, crónicas, and clinical studies.

The recent appeal and success of queer theory as a critical epistemology in the social sciences and humanities lies in its deconstruction and reorientation of gendered and sexualized codes rooted in colonial taxonomies of difference. The queer project has shown how nineteenth-century Western medical science produced binary systems of corporeal classification— male/female; man/woman; heterosexual/homosexual; able/crippled; civilized/colonial— to deprive non-normative forms of life of full human status and fix a modern conception of humanity in the figure of Man. Queer studies enable the desedimentation of heteronormativity, Humanity, and whiteness by taking into account the stories of dissident subjects who refused to comply with the prevailing definition of the «normal» in the history of liberal humanism.

Program for the Event

11:10 am – 11:20 am. Introduction, by Dr. Carlos G. Halaburda

11:20 am – 11:50 am. Panel 1. Contesting Models of Masculinity

• Rodrigo Lichtle Ventosa, “La estatua de sal (1979), de Salvador Novo: la construcción del sujeto como espectáculo queer”
• Brenda Odria Loayza, “Queerness and Miscegenation in Bom-Crioulo (1895)”

11:50 am – 12:40 pm. Panel 2. Shared Histories of Deviance: Queerness, Disability, Monstrosity

• Julie Poapst, “Hipólito’s Blind Desires: Sexuality and Disability in Santa (1903)”
• Margarita Cifuentes, “Gaditana Queer: Female Masculinity and Monstrosity in Santa (1903)”
• Daniela Galluzzo, “Monster Maternities: Queerness and Reproduction in Doña Bárbara (1929) and Mimí (1898)”

12:40 pm – 1: 20 pm. Panel 3. Medical Inscriptions of Queerness

• Isidora Cortés-Monroy Gazitúa,  “The Empty Womb: Writing Illness and Gender in Cabrera-Malo’s Mimí (1898)”
• Kristina Stajic, “Los espacios queer en Gracia plena (1919) de José González Castillo y Alberto Weisbach”
• Claudia Vásquez-Caicedo Rainero, “Los placeres de combatir la inmoralidad: sexualidad queer y dramaturgia en las revistas argentinas Bambalinas y La escena”

1:20 pm – 1:30 pm. Closing Remarks.