Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America (review)

An attractive young Latin American man graces the cover of this excellent collection of essays that examines same-sex desire in Latin America and beyond during the twentieth century. He sits crouched on a tiled floor in shorts. His head rests tightly in his crossed arms as he stares into the camera. Bare walls and a partially opened window with slatted wooden shutters suggest that the photograph was taken in a decaying house or apartment in a tropical locale. The young man's gaze evokes sadness, seduction, mystery, and perhaps ambiguity. José Quiroga artfully plays with these and other manifestations of erotic desire that are embedded in the multiple identities and layered performances of men who engage in sexual relations with other men in Latin America and the diaspora.

Quiroga uses the mask as a metaphor for the complex process of negotiating sexuality in often-times hostile societies. He analyzes a cluster of Latin American authors, poets, and other producers of culture to explore the use of blurring, ambiguity, and invisibility as a conscious praxis of many homosexuals. In doing so, Quiroga challenges the reader to think beyond the tendency to universalize U.S.-based constructions of gay and lesbian identity, and to examine the ways in which Latin Americans and Latino/as have created survival strategies that are not necessarily predicated on a politics of "coming out." In analyzing representations of Latino and Latin American cultural expressions, icons, and gay artifacts in the United States, this work also considers the ways in which the exotic and erotic "other" becomes commercialized in a way that reifies notions of Latin American sexuality.

The term queer as employed by scholars of literature and cultural studies, has perhaps as many definitions as proponents. For some it signifies the collapse of sexual identities and categories. For others it represents the blurring of gendered representations. Building on the framework in which queerness implies strangeness or otherness, ambiguity, and the multivocality of sexualities, Quiroga maps the ways in which Latin American authors, from Mexican poet Xavier Villaurrutia to Cuban writer Virgilio Piñera, proclaimed their sexual desires in their works while at the same time leaving noted silences about their private lives, amorous adventures, and sexual predilections. Rather than seeing these literary figures as mere precursors who cleared a space for future generations by challenging social prejudice with their literary production, or as men and women who were unable to confront or accept their homosexuality, Quiroga contends that these authors chose to embody their work within the context of their own multiple identities. Ambiguity and masking may appear as means of escape, but they can also be strategies for belonging, bridging communities, and remaining a part of a society.

Lydia Cabrera's work on Afro-Cuban religion provides another site for examining variants of the concept of queer as employed by Quiroga. If revelation can bring dire consequences, performance becomes an important tool of protection. As a woman and a lesbian, Cabrera faced innumerable problems in marking her space as a writer and anthropologist within the context of the tumultuous political changes that took place in Cuba during the mid-twentieth century. Quiroga untangles the coded levels of performance in Cabrera's literary and anthropological production, revealing a strategy whereby her ambiguity as observer and author allowed her to capture and relate the religious practices of another "other," namely practitioners of Afro-Cuban religions. The syncretism of Afro-Cuban religions, and their marginal position in Cuban society during much of the twentieth century, produced a culture of both shared and hidden knowledge. The constant tension between concealment and revelation that shapes the day-to-day lives of those with transgressive sexual desires can at times also sharpen their ability to recognize strategies of camouflage and disclosure among others. In this respect...