Intensiones: Tensions in Queer Agency and Activism in Latino América

Intensiones: Tensions in Queer Agency and Activism in Latino América
Author(s): María Amelia Viteri

Source: Feminist Studies , Vol. 43, No. 2 (2017), pp. 405-417
Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc.
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María Amelia Viteri
Intensiones: Tensions in Queer

Agency and Activism
in Latino América
The following commentary traces the intellectual journey of a ded-

icated network of queer scholars from across the Americas who came
together to address the questions raised through the lens of lo queer/cuir,
a term I will explain ahead, and queer studies. Because the network was
constituted by one group of scholars from the United States and another
based in the global South, knowledge production and its asymmetries
were precisely at the center of our reflections.
In 2015, two initial workshops and working groups instigated respec-
tively by Marcia Ochoa (University of California, Santa Cruz) and María
Amelia Viteri (Universidad San Francisco de Quito and, at that time, Fac-
ultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, Ecuador) brought together
scholars from California and the Andes region of Latin America.
Marcia Ochoa, together with Kirstie Dorr (University of Califor-
nia, San Diego) and Deborah R. Vargas (University of California, River-
side), organized the Queer Hemisphere project, which aimed to reori-
ent queer studies and queer theory in the Américas along a hemispheric
axis.1 Queer Hemisphere seeks to create a conversation about queerness
1. Among those present at the first meeting, held at the University of Cali-
fornia, Santa Cruz, were Carlos Decena, Kirstie Dorr, Lawrence La Foun-
tain-Stokes, Marcia Ochoa, José Quiroga, Juana María Rodríguez, Marcelo
Spitzner, Deborah R. Vargas, Maria Célleri, Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, Lourdes
Martínez Echázabal, Giancarlo Cornejo Salinas, Salvador Vidal-Ortiz,
Feminist Studies 43, no. 2. © 2017 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 405

129.1.14.37 on Fri, 24 May 2019 17:00:47 UTC
406 María Amelia Viteri
and other forms of sexual alterity and sexual dissidence with scholars,
intellectuals, and cultural workers from across the Américas. In order
to have this conversation, Queer Hemisphere undertook a bibliography
project to address the asymmetrical politics of citation, language, and
knowledge production that often render minoritized queer scholars in
the United States and their counterparts throughout Latin America
invisible and unaccountable to each other. One important focus of the
first workshop was to create a genealogy of notions of lo cuir/queer as
they have been articulated and represented in Spanish and Portuguese;
notions that mostly have not been translated into English (and indeed,
are not always culturally translatable). While there is much to learn at
the hemispheric level, English language debates on queerness remain
hegemonic, and many rich texts from the region thus remain invisible in
the hegemonic Anglophone context of queer studies, as defined in aca-
demic institutions in the global North.
The second of the early working groups was organized initially by
Fernando Blanco and myself; the Queer/Cuir/Cuyr Américas Working
Group had a jump start at a 2015 workshop in Puerto Rico, with Latin
American and Latino activist scholars interested in the productive rela-
tionship between queer theory in its various iterations and cultural
agency and activism in the global South, especially in Latin America
(and in Latin American diasporic communities in the United States
and Europe). The network of queer scholars that brought this initia-
tive together along with Queer Hemisphere had its own beginnings and
momentums and they are described here without any specific linear-
ity or chronology, since our academic camaraderie and queer friendship
has been built across different spaces and with different temporalities.2
Christina León, Anahi Russo, Maylei Blackwell, Amy Lind, and Omise’eke
Tinsley.
2. The network includes the following: María Amelia Viteri, Arnaldo Cruz-
Malavé, Gabriela Arguedas Ramírez, Marisa Belausteguigoitia, Santiago
Castellanos, Diego Falconí, Licia Fiol-Matta, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes,
Amy Lind, Juliana Martínez, Lourdes Martínez-Echazábal, Yolanda
Martínez-San Miguel, Marcia Ochoa, Mario Pecheny, Joseph Pierce, Suyapa
Portillo, Rubén Ríos Ávila, Montserrat Sagot, Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, Carlos
Decena, Fernando Blanco, Susana Vargas, Hugo Benavides, and Claudia
Salazar.

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María Amelia Viteri 407
Fast forward to May 2016, when colleagues from both the global
South and global North came together before the Latin American Stud-
ies Association (LASA) conference in New York at an event sponsored by
Fordham University. As Marcia Ochoa and Amy Lind argued during our
afternoon workshop, placing heteronormativity at the center allows us
to cross-examine how heteronormativity feeds both socialist and capi-
talist regimes. By acknowledging the central role of heteronormativity,
we are paying close attention to epistemological notions: how knowledge
is produced and constructed as Anglocentric and Northern-centric and
how it circulates across the hemisphere.
Marcia Ochoa shared Queer Hemisphere’s bibliography project,
the aim of which is to promote the circulation of academic articles writ-
ten in English that, due to their high cost, are not accessible to universi-
ties and scholars outside the United States. Such an effort could also pro-
mote the circulation of writings, particularly those on queer theory/lo
cuir, in Spanish, Portuguese, and French that are not available in trans-
lation, as it did in the 2015 University of California, Santa Cruz, meeting.
Because much of this important material might not be considered aca-
demic, the project’s goal is to reverse knowledge hierarchies as we know
them, along with the structures that allow them to operate. That is to
say, as Joseph Pierce emphasized, the key to the work of the larger net-
work is how desire is thought of, and translated, throughout the Améri-
cas. The group also explored discord around queer agency and activism
in Latino América, identifying productive tensions and desentendimien-
tos (misunderstandings/shortcomings), which might lead to collabora-
tive projects that bring together theory and activism across the Améri-
cas in a creative way.
The term “lo queer/cuir”: some context

Lo queer as a destabilizing act and queer theory as a theoretical frame-
work are important distinctions that are helpful when analyzing het-
eronormative regimes, their genealogies, and ways of production.3 We
3. See Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, “Brown Writing Queer,” in Queer Brown Voices:

Personal Narratives of Latina/o LGBT Activism, ed. Uriel Quesada, Letitia
Gomez, and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015);
and María Amelia Viteri, José Fernando Serrano, and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz
“How Is Queer Thought of in Latin America?” ICONOS 39 (2011): 48.

129.1.14.37 on Fri, 24 May 2019 17:00:47 UTC
go cuir as in trastocar— to turn upside down, letting words act as terri-

tories and become sites for theory.4 The cui-r/cuy(r) comes from Diego
Falconí’s notion referencing playful Andean guinea pigs known as cuy
(plural cuis). Cuy(r) was a response by a group of Ecuadorian and Colom-
bian activists and artists who protested some potentially neocolonial
practices that surfaced during an international academic queer event
held in Quito in 2014. The term was used with the suffix r (cuy-r) as a
playful and defiant gesture to resignify language and point to the need to
understand sexual dissidence with and without queer theory.5
Cuy-r politics, which have evolved in different productions of art,
activism, and theory, are not conceived as part of a united project, but
as a series of responses to the arrival of queer politics in the Andean
region. Falconí has proposed the term entundamiento as one of the
possible translations to (mis)understand the verb “queering.” It comes
from the Tunda, a mythical character who lives on the Pacific coast of
Ecuador and Colombia among African-descendant cultures, which has
been important in the literature of both countries. La Tunda is a gender
ambiguous character that bewitches and changes the subjectivity of
youngsters through playful sexual tricks: entundamientos.
Falconí’s emphasis on the desentendimientos between “lo queer
anglo” and “lo queer latinoamericano,” juxtaposes the queer latinoameri-
cano onto its Anglo counterpart, which he views as already tainted with
coloniality. Desentendimientos also highlight tensions or misunderstand-
ings between Anglo-American and Latino American queerness as gen-
erative sites. This leads Falconí to use the cuy as a symbol to rethink
linear and hegemonic translations as well as a politics of desire, breaking
at the same time with the idea of a productive and heteronormative body.6
It should be evident by now that queer/cuir/cuy(r)/cui-r lives are
lives that, because of processes of racialization, sexuality, class, age,
4. María Amelia Viteri, Desbordes: Translating Racial, Ethnic, Sexual, and

Gender Identities across the Americas (SUNY Press: Albany, 2014).
5. The cuy is a promiscuous animal that is part of the culture of both Indig-
enous and mestizo rural populations. The cuy is often eaten in the Andes
(in fact, it was one of the few animal proteins consumed before the Span-
ish arrived), a practice which, since colonization, has been seen as “exotic”
or even “uncivilized” in Western eyes.
6. Diego Falconí, De las cenizas al texto. Literaturas andinas de las disidencias
sexuales (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 2016).

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disability, and gender, are now under heightened threat. Conservative

policies and actions have led to the reorganization of social and polit-
ical response by women, queers, camioneras, and others who lay claim
to the materiality of their bodies, fluids, voices, and skin pigmentation.7
Their bodies, feared by a nation-state project rooted in the Judeo-Chris-
tian moral code, have been made visible, thereby polluting political, judi-
cial, and ethical spaces, as eloquently expressed by Gabriela Arguedas
Ramírez at our workshop at Fordham University.
We have been assembling our queer affects into theories and
action through a variety of collaborations that take the form of texts.8
We assembled at the First International Interdisciplinary Queer Collo-
quium in Quito in 2013 followed by the fifth Queering Paradigms (QP5)
International Conference —Trastocando Paradigmas — which met in
the Andes in February 2014.9 The encounter between QP5 and los Andes
(the Andean region as a geopolitical space) illuminated the complex and
shifting entanglements between postcoloniality and religion, sexuality
and state sovereignty, bodies and ethnicities. Scholars-as-activists, art-
ists, and policy makers from around the world used these crossroads to
interrogate the unequal conditions presiding over theory-making and
knowledge production that result from North-South power imbalances.10
IntenSiones as a central analytic

IntenSiones was the guiding theme in our first collective workshop as the
officially constituted Queer/Cuir/Cuyr Américas Working Group. Inten-
Siones is also the way in which I frame this commentary on recent schol-
arly initiatives: as intentions — intenciones— but also as tensions. What
7. Camioneras literally refers to women truck drivers. It is mostly used to dis-

parage butch lesbian women and whoever else might fit the stereotype.
8. For example, Viteri, Serrano, and Vidal-Ortiz, “How Is Queer Thought of in
Latin America?”; Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, María Amelia Viteri, and José Fer-
nando Serrano Amaya, “Resignificaciones, prácticas y políticas queer en
América Latina: otra agenda de cambio social,” Revista Nómadas 41 (2014);
Diego Falconí, Santiago Castellanos, and María Amelia Viteri, Re-sentir lo
Queer in América Latina: Diálogos desde el Sur (Madrid: Egales, 2014).
9. Queering Paradigms is an academic-activist-artistic space engaged in resis-
tance and committed to intersectionality as a way forward to revisit and
rethink sexualities.
10. María Amelia Viteri and Manuela Lavinas Picq, eds., Queering Paradigms
V: Queering Narratives of Modernity (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2015).

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are we to do about intention with an s, as in its Spanish form? Is it pos-

sible to disentangle tension from intention? Should we surrender to ten-
sion instead of trying to dissolve it? Or resolve it and modify the inten-
tion through the practice of working with tension (as argued by Arnaldo
Cruz-Malavé and Rubén Ríos Ávila at our LASA-Lima workshop “Dis/
appearances: Knowledge/Practices and Discourses on the In/visibilities
and Representation of Dissident Sexualities”). Or, at best, aim for a rest-
less equilibrium? Tensions have been at the heart of both feminist and
queer theories from Monique Wittig to Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe
Moraga, to Judith Butler, as they have tackled the analysis of gender nor-
mativity.11 All of these authors have been instrumental in thinking about
asymmetries among categories built around the body, such as “woman”
and “female,” and have unevenly influenced thinking about lo queer in
Latin America and among Latinxs in the United States.
IntenSiones, as I use it here, highlights the colonialist structures
within knowledge production, calling attention to hegemonic significa-
tions of queer agency itself and actively working to dislodge colonialist
hierarchies that privilege sanitized expressions of identity at the expense
of the most precarious lives. These hierarchies exist within state for-
mations, including states that work to “protect” LGBT people with their
homonormative antidiscrimination policies, which simultaneously
murder or erase cuir bodies through colonialist queerphobic practices.12
InTensiones also refers to the tension between políticas secas (dry pol-
icies) and deseos mojados (wet desires): states that link LGBT rights to
modernity wrestle with new policies and laws, bringing homo/trans into
their liberal fold, while the most precarious lives and the most sabroso
provocative political imaginings remain outside this neoliberal brand of
modernity. These tensions could be rewritten as an opportunity to fur-
ther revisit normativity in both its hetero and homo regimes.
11. Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Beacon Press, 1992);
Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings
by Radical Women of Color (New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press,
1983); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,
(New York: Routledge, 1990).
12. Amy Lind and Christine Keating, “Navigating the Left Turn: Sexual Jus-
tice and the Citizen Revolution in Ecuador,” International Feminist Journal
of Politics 15, no. 4 (2013): 515–33.

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Inconmensurabilidad:
the dry and wet politics of sexuality
At the 2016 Queer/Cuir/Cuyr Américas workshop in New York, we mapped,
discussed, and illustrated not only how desire travels (including its var-
ious epistemologies and genealogies), but how bodies and territories
are loca-lizados as they incarnate and confront structural inequalities
based on assemblages of gender and sexuality with race, ethnicity, place
of origin, class, and migrant status.13 Mario Pecheny’s discussion on the
incommensurability between las políticas secas y las políticas mojadas
of sexuality and queer eroticism became one of the main frameworks
to guide our discussions.14 That is to say, how do the (dry) politics of
the state act over the (wet) politics of sexualities? Policies presuppose
specific limits, a field of intervention, measurable goals and processes,
evaluations of cost-effectiveness, and rational subjects capable of acting.
Besides, in democracy, policies need to be legitimated, that is, publicly
justified in terms of justice. Policies, then, dry and objectify subjects.
Sexuality, as a subjective practice, follows a different logic: its limits are
blurred, it is pervasive, its goals and processes are not easily measurable
and are sometimes ambivalent and opaque. In this way, rational sexuality
is an oxymoron, if not a contradiction. Legitimacy in the field of sexual-
ity relies less on fairness or majority rule, for example, than on a still-un-
defined “erotic justice.” Sexualities are wet, untamed. Having said this,
any policy, even the most gender-based, rights-based, queer-expressive
policy, is always violent because of its form, its instrumental logic, its
13. Loca is a feminine adjective in Spanish (as opposed to the masculine loco).
For an insight into the multiplicity of meanings the term takes in Span-
ish, see Viteri, Desbordes. Loca is also used to refer to effeminate gay men
and transgender women, as further illustrated by Marcia Ochoa as well as
by Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes in his discussion on the resemantization
of loca in the style of the Anglo-American “queer”: loca as maricón. See
Marcia Ochoa, “Perverse Citizenship: Divas, Marginality, and Participation
in ‘Localization,’” Women’s Studies Quarterly 36, nos. 3–4 (2008): 146–69;
and Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, “Trans/Bolero/Drag/Migration: Music,
Cultural Translation, and Diasporic Puerto Rican Theatricalities,” Women’s
Studies Quarterly 36, nos. 3–4 (2008): 190–209.
14. Mario Pecheny, “Political Agents or Vulnerable Victims? Framing Sexual
Rights as Sexual Health in Argentina,” in Handbook on Sexuality, Health and
Rights, ed. Peter Aggleton and Richard Parker (New York: Routledge 2010).

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objectifying nature. This includes what we could refer to as “good” poli-

cies regarding sexuality.
Incommensurability was also discussed in relation to the contra-
dictory logic of justice and law in the work of Gabriela Arguedas Ramírez
and Montserrat Sagot. Queer redistributive justice is a concept Argue-
das and Sagot are working on to refer to the materiality of queer bodies,
the material conditions of their existence, and their vulnerability, pro-
duced in the context of persistent oppression and exclusion. Race, sex-
uality, gender, class, migration status, age, and disability produce the
flesh and bone of the queer body whose life is at stake in those contexts
of multiple expressions of violence. Redistributive justice is a demand for
life, as these bodies are walking the line between life and death. Redis-
tributive justice will fail unless it embraces queer existence, not just in
terms of recognition or representation, but in terms of the social, eco-
nomic, and political conditions required for the queer body to live —
beyond just survival.
Paradoxes are also evident in the types of state cooptation and pink-
washing that have occurred in some countries. According to Lourdes
Martínez-Echazábal, the Cuban state has become the main promoter of
LGBT rights, thus disabling the emergence of independent LGBT activ-
isms and hindering the development of LGBT and queer communities
throughout the island.15 In relation to this, Arguedas emphasized the
importance of a queer redistributive logic linked to a feminist project,
in which gender and sexuality are not compartmentalized categories but
rather intertwined.
Our 2016 session not only considered dissatisfaction as a positive
dimension of activism — a productive force that can foster common goals,
as Santiago Castellanos proposed in his comments — but also came to
see pleasure as an incentive for joint action, through Suyapa Portillo’s
history of LGBT activism in the movement for immigrant rights in Los
Angeles. We also explored the tensions produced by treating dissatisfac-
tion and desire as positive assets of LGBT activism, while still maintain-
ing the sense of urgency with which we must respond to the increase
of violence against LGBT bodies and subjects, and in particular against
15. Lourdes Martínez-Echazábal, at the Queer/Cuir/Cuyr Américas Working

Group workshop, Latin American Studies Association conference, Ford-
ham University, New York, May 2016.

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trans people and travestís throughout the Américas.16 Using a queer fem-
inist methodology, Gabriela Arguedas Ramírez and Monserrat Sagot left
us an indelible image of Costa Rican travestís besieged by gangs, while
living with the bullets from police still lodged in their bodies.
The New York event led to new projects and had a lasting and pos-
itive impact on how we positioned ourselves as a group and as a set of
diverse internal networks. Crucial questions continue to emerge: What
divergent routes mark translations of queer politics and theory to differ-
ent American vernaculars? What distinctive histories and memories of
struggles and claims invoke these translations? What new intersections
with race and coloniality does this process promote? We took, and con-
tinue to take, these questions into account for our programming in 2017
and beyond.
From inconmensurabilidad to dis/appearances

and precariousness
Following the concepts and questions that were raised at our gather-
ing at the 2016 LASA event at Fordham University, the Queer/Cuir/Cuyr
Américas Working Group presented two workshops at the LASA con-
ference held in Lima in April 2017. The first, “Dis/appearances: Knowl-
edge/Practices and Discourses on the In/visibilities and Representation
of Dissident Sexualities,” analyzed that which dis/appears in tragedies
such as the one which took place in Orlando, Florida, on the early morn-
ing of June 12, 2016, at Pulse nightclub.17
In the context of this aggression that sought the disappearance of a
space of encounter for dissident sexualities, we wanted to point out how
queer people engage in cultural and political representation, reimagine
public policies, and create spaces and strategies for relationships, con-
nections, and communication. At the same time, we sought to examine
16. Travestí as a category in Spanish has been redefined in Latin America as a

way to encompass gender identities and confront colonial representations.
As such, it is seen as a politically powerful category. In contrast, transves-
tite in English is typically understood and used in a pejorative way, com-
monly understood as men who cross-dress and/or use a feminine aesthetic.
17. The session was organized by María Amelia Viteri; the chair was Salvador
Vidal-Ortiz; and the participants were Marisa Belausteguigoitia, Arnaldo
Cruz-Malavé, Montserrat Sagot, Mario Pecheny, María Amelia Viteri, and
Lourdes Martínez-Echazábal, with Licia Fiol-Matta as discussant.

129.1.14.37 on Fri, 24 May 2019 17:00:47 UTC
the context of loss and risk: What appears and disappears through that
which was experienced in Orlando and in so many other places through-
out the Américas? In Guatemala, for instance, where Indigenous girls
locked in an orphanage called Hogar Seguro (safe home) were burnt to
death while protesting their sexual abuse at the hands of the administra-
tors and teachers, another marginalized group of people being treated
with the same violent logic as are those who are queer.18 How are invis-
ibility and hypervisibility produced? How are the dis/appearances and
the scars that they leave — from such suppositions as “they must have
done something” or “it must be for some reason”— registered in his-
tory? Montserrat Sagot concluded that it is the state that needs to be held
accountable, whether it is through action or omission, for the multiple
forms of violence, injustice, and vanishing that cuir bodies face.
As a group, our diverse positionalities continue to create a multi-
disciplinary dialogue that widens the spectrum of ways in which schol-
ars, activists, and practitioners conceive of theory and praxis, the dis/
appearances in the Américas and the consequent dis/possessions and
repositioning in the exercise of dissident sexualities.
The second workshop, titled “Precariousness, Existence, and Resis-
tance in Latin America: Exercises in Corporal Justice,” addressed how
living in precarity is already a form of resistance.19 The community of
survival is a community of resistance. Its existence is a rebellion against
a policy of death that condemns or exploits it. The atrocious cruelty
that we see daily through femicide and hate crimes against transpeo-
ple and against gay people and immigrants conveys a Foucauldian san-
itation policy that goes hand in hand with what Boaventura de Sousa
Santos calls “social fascism” (an authoritarian and nationalistic form
of government). The members of the panel made visible the co-relation
18. News on atrocities that occur in Latin America circulate differently than
those that take place in the United States or Europe. Lengthy stories about
each of the assassinated men and women at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando,
Florida, were disseminated by the media — from hobbies to careers and
families. This is in stark contrast with the case of impoverished girls assas-
sinated at the orphanage in Ciudad de Guatemala, where their stories were
not told.
19. The organizer and chair was Gabriela Arguedas Ramírez. Marcia Ochoa,
Carlos Zelaya, Juliana Martinez, Gabriela Arguedas Ramírez, Diego Fal-
coní, Alexandra Rodríguez, and Kirstie Dorr were presenters.

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between precarious bodies, such as those of women, trans and gay

people, with conservative, heterocentered groups, across multiple geog-
raphies: Carlos Zelada highlighted Peruvian President Fujimori disman-
tling hate crimes as a legal category that could be prosecuted; Gabri-
ela Arguedas Ramírez discussed Costa Rican Catholic and evangelical
communities uniting to fight sexual and reproductive rights, as well as
incidents of violence against trans communities proliferating in post-
coup Honduras; and Juliana Martínez focussed on new heterocentered
Colombian political agreements that are threatening social well-being
in that country.
Acknowledging this pervasive violence, the Queer/Cuir/Cuyr Work-
ing Group also organized and sponsored a panel for a LASA pre-confer-
ence in Lima. Planned in collaboration with the Sexualities Section of
LASA, the pre-conference offered perspectives from and dialogues
between transwomen activists from Argentina and Peru: Alma Fernán-
dez, from the Bachillerato Popular Trans Mocha Celis in Buenos Aires;
Miluska Luzquiños Tafur, Peruvian trans expert for Pathfinder Inter-
national; and Jana Villayzan Aguilar from Red TRANS, based in Lima.
The panel, titled “Activisms, Movements and Militancias Trans Latino-
americanas,” actively and productively confronted the meanings around
“femininity” and the category of “woman” as based exclusively in biol-
ogy and the instances where biological determinism further discrimi-
nates against transwomen.20 The panel also provided a succinct balance
between first-person stories told by activists and the challenges to the
tenets of social science and public health inquiry that treat transwomen
only as subjects of study, not producers of knowledge.
Against this background, it’s imperative to express ethical indigna-
tion, insisting on a civil ethic, an ethic that breaks from the Judeo-Chris-
tian codes of natural and moral rights, supporting a coming together of
precarious communities that require and demand corporal justice.
By way of conclusion
Based on our work together, and our rhyzomatic collaborations, we argue
that it is crucial not to lose sight of the violence of neoliberalism and
20. The panel was organized by Salvador Vidal-Ortiz and María Amelia Viteri
and moderated by Juliana Martinez.

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the global commodification of subjectivities. We must develop our meth-

odologies to understand how people of different statuses (class, gender,
ethnicity, sexuality, migrant status, among others) pursue processes of
knowledge making and sharing, as well as survival.
The second part of our 2017 workshop in Lima provided illustra-
tive examples of this methodological approach. Yolanda Martínez-San
Miguel and Marisa Belausteguigoitia shared a collaborative project,
between Rutgers University and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma
de México, that seeks to promote research and citation tools that will
broaden the archives and, thus, queer the North-South hierarchies of
academic knowledge. Salvador Vidal-Ortiz and Juliana Martinez talked
about how, in the Américas, “queer houses” allow new kinship rela-
tions, particularly among transgender people, that “home” does not.21
Finally, Licia Fiol-Matta and Marcia Ochoa alerted us to the ways tra-
ditional Latin American and pedagogical interventions (whether queer
or not) might reestablish a series of (undesired) hierarchies, as in the
multiple ways in which knowledge circulates unevenly.22 In this sense,
tension, incommensurability, and discrepancy characterize the trans-
lation of queer to vernacular activism, as reported in Lawrence La
Fountain-Stokes’s writings on the Caribbean translocal and the Afri-
can-American “quare.” 23
The discussions from Puerto Rico to New York to Lima and all the
many other cities in and through which we are materially or affectively
engaged have emphasized the idea that art is not redemption and that
human rights are not synonymous with justice. Instead, as suggested
by Fernando Blanco, we need to rethink how we have been interpellat-
ing the state; that is to say, we need to avoid legitimizing an institution
(the state) that excludes what it deems as “abject citizens.” For the same
21. See Chandan Reddy, “Home, Houses, Non-Identities: Paris Is Burning,”

in Burning Down the House: Recycling Domesticity, ed. Rosemary George
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 355–79; and Doreen Massey, Space,
Place and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
22. Ochoa, “Perverse Citizenship.”
23. La Fountain-Stokes, “Trans/Bolero/Drag/Migration”; Lawrence La Foun-
tain-Stokes, “Sobre translocas, sinvergüenzas, malas malas y otras disiden-
cias sexuales,” 80grados, June 10, 2016. See also E. Patrick Johnson, “‘Quare’
Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know about Queer Studies I Learned from
My Grandmother,” Text and Performance Quarterly 21, no. 1 (2001): 1–25.

129.1.14.37 on Fri, 24 May 2019 17:00:47 UTC
reason, it’s important to dislodge or desinstalar historical narratives that

legitimize the state’s role in justice, which often act as referential frame-
works in legal claims; for example, those associated with transitional
justice and human rights narratives in contexts of armed conflict.
Maybe this is the activism that we committed ourselves to even
before we united as the Queer/Cuir/Cuyr Américas Working Group, a
paradoxical activism, a perennial state of restlessness in which the inten-
Siones emerge from the tensions, when the proposals emanate— as Mario
Pecheny argued — from the incommensurability between the políticas
secas and políticas mojadas; what Hollibauth and Moraga refer to as
deseos mojados.24 Thinking cuir as well as thinking cuir feminista con-
fronts any type of gender, sexual, racial, and/or ethnic determinism. We
look forward to further pushing these questions and undertaking more
analysis and action as we organize toward LASA 2018 in Barcelona, and
as we think of the Queer/Cuy-r/Feminista Working Group as truly queer
(in the sense of being malleable, movable, and transdisciplinary), placing
movement and displacement, relocation and dislocation at the center of
the process of stitching together our collective/community.
Acknowledgments
While the essay reflects my own thinking, it is a multivocal text that has ben-
efited from the comments of a wider group of scholars, including Salvador
Vidal-Ortiz, who provided feedback and insightful revisions, and Lawrence
La-Fountain-Stokes, Lourdes Martínez-Echazábal, Gabriela Arguedas Ramírez,
Montserrat Sagot, Diego Falconí, Fernando Blanco, Mario Pecheny, Arnaldo
Cruz-Malavé, Amy Lind, and Suyapa Portillo who gave further comments.
Thanks to the Feminist Studies editors for the thoughtful comments on this essay.
24. Amber Hollibaugh and Cherríe Moraga, “What We’re Rolling in Bed With —
Sexual Silences in Feminism: A Conversation toward Ending Them,” Here-
sies 12 (1981).

129.1.14.37 on Fri, 24 May 2019 17:00:47 UTC

Intensiones: Tensions in Queer Agency and Activism in Latino América

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