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Reviewed by:
  • Despite All Adversities: Spanish-American Queer Cinema by Andrés Lema-Hincapié and Debra A. Castillo
  • Herbert Brant
Lema-Hincapié, Andrés, and Debra A. Castillo. Despite All Adversities: Spanish-American Queer Cinema. Albany: State U of New York P, 2015. Pp. 320. ISBN 978-1-43845-911-0.

There can be little doubt that Spanish-American cinema has made significant contributions to the world’s understanding of LGBTIQ issues by means of a growing list of films that give voice and image to the socio-cultural, psychological, and artistic realities of non-heteronormative people in Hispanic America. Groundbreaking films such as Ripstein’s El lugar sin límites (1977), Bemberg’s Señora de nadie (1982), and Hermosillo’s Doña Herlinda y su hijo (1985), as well as more contemporary works like Hernández’s Mil nubes de paz cercan el cielo (2004), Berneri’s Un año sin amor (2005), and Puenzo’s XXY (2007) have deservedly sparked the interest of audiences, scholars, and artists beyond the borders of the countries where they were first distributed. As a result, a book that brings together a collection of critical essays on seventeen different Spanish-American films that treat LGBTIQ topics is not only timely, but also of significant value for scholars and researchers. Despite All Adversities: Spanish-American Queer Cinema is an important volume of essays, highly recommended, but as I will indicate later, not without several weaknesses.

The editors have created a handsome volume of essays by some of the most well-respected experts in the discipline—David William Foster, Paul Julian Smith, Daniel Balderston, Chris Perriam, and Dieter Ingenschay—, as well as by scholars less familiar to some readers. The studies focus on a variety of films dating from the late 1960s to the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, made by directors from Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, and Argentina. The essay chapters are grouped in four broad categories that assist in providing a thematic context for the reader: “Queer Subjectivity, Desire, and Eroticism,” “Gay Authorship—Queer Agency and Spectatorship,” “Bisexuality Experiences and Lesbian Identities,” and “Queer Relations with Families, Government, and Nation.” The volume concludes with several very useful indices of names, concepts and titles.

Despite some exceptional works of scholarship which anchor most sections with at least one powerful study, the overall quality of the volume is noticeably weakened by its introductory essay. In some volumes with contributions by various authors, the introduction itself can be a strong and impactful piece of writing (Lillian Manzor-Coats’s introduction to Foster’s Latin American Writers on Gay and Lesbian Themes is an excellent example that jumps immediately to mind). But the introduction for Despite All Adversities fails to provide a clear and precise definition of the parameters of the collection, or the foundational concepts and assumptions that bind the contributions together—what the editors consider “queer” in cinematic terms, for example. Beyond the lack of a well-articulated grounding for the collection, the introduction is further marred by a number of rather inexplicable errors of fact, such as identifying Manuel Puig as a Spanish writer (9), or Leonardo Sbaraglia as a Spanish actor (12), and an unacceptably high number of linguistic, stylistic, and typographical errors, some of which appear to be the result of a less than competent translation of the text from Spanish to English.

Related to the issue of translation of the original Spanish versions of the introduction and several of the essays, I think that it is important to comment on the editors’ unfortunate decision to publish a volume on Spanish-American queer film exclusively in English. The editors note that the original idea for the volume came about as a result of one of them teaching a course on queer cinema for advanced undergraduate students, and that the edited volume, therefore, serves the need for a textbook, explicitly intended for use by students in “courses on Spanish-American [End Page 479] cinema, as well as survey courses on Latin American literature and culture” (5). As much as one might understand an editorial decision to make a newly edited book more accessible to as wide...

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