Translating the Queer by Héctor Domínguez Ruvalcaba

Author:Héctor Domínguez Ruvalcaba
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783602957
Publisher: Zed Books
Published: 2016-10-25T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

Beyond LGBT struggles: Trans politics and neoliberal sex

This chapter addresses cultural and political expressions that emerged on the margins of mainstream LGBT interests. Beyond the agendas of liberation and rights of gays and lesbians, stigmatizations and discriminations motivate resistant political identities, whose diverse expressions in the public sphere allow us to think on queer Latin American culture as a source of novel proposals of subjectivities that challenge the cultural and political establishment. Such is the case with the transsexual, transgender, and intersex groups, whose expressions demand identity recognition, as a specific gender delimitation, in contrast to the heterosexism expressed in laws and social codes. The trans identity challenges the very foundations of the gender system, and this terror can trigger fierce homophobic crimes. But, in their struggle, the trans not only demand recognition but also criticize the heteronormative political system. The trans identity is one of the most dynamic stages from which to “queer” the hegemonic culture. In this chapter I discuss how trans subjects have intervened in the public sphere but also how market forces have recolonized queerness, finding in the representations of subaltern queer bodies new challenges to queer politics. This means the subaltern, or the monster that has been secluded to the margin, can finally speak. It is the monster that tells a political truth that necessarily takes the public discussion to the matter of the body as a field of ideological disputes. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (1996: 4) reminds us that the monster reveals and warns—prophetic actions that can be traced back to the oracles of ancient Greece and the dements referred to in Michel Foucault’s History of Madness (2006: 210).

But, on the other hand, corporeal practices also have to be understood in the context of neoliberal colonial oppression of peripheral bodies. To objectify the colonized body is to alienate it in favor of the colonizing order of meaning. This is the zone of bodies that are troubled as result of colonization. In this chapter, I aim to discuss the mechanism by which the queer subject in the colonial and modern systems becomes a monster to be feared and punished, a scapegoat that has to be sacrificed or otherwise has to be resignified as bodily merchandise in the context of a neoliberal economy. The consumption of the colonial body as a commodity in the present times re-enacts the colonization of the native. The peripheral neoliberal environment has to be understood as the emergence of underground queer job markets for the unemployed masses serving global tourism. The objectification of the body, its production (meaning the process of becoming a product), and its consumption constitute new forms of slavery and the disposability of the body—issues that queer academic conversations, activism, and the arts are addressing as their new challenges for reflection and action.

Trans talk

Several instances on the continent show that gay and lesbian mainstream agendas differ from and sometimes ignore those of trans and intersex populations. While same-sex civil unions have gradually been legalized in Argentine cities and provinces (Buenos Aires, 2002; Río Negro, 2003; Villa Carlos Paz, 2009; etc.

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