Argentine, Mexican, and Guatemalan Photography: Feminist, Queer, and Post-Masculinist Perspectives

9. Guille and Belinda: A Protolesbian Arcadian Romance

106 T he dossier of photographs by Alessandra Sanguinetti entitled Las aventuras de Guille y Belinda y el enigmático significado de sus sueños (2007; The adventures of Guille and Belinda and the enigmatic meaning of their dreams),1 on the two young female playmates Guillermina (shortened to the sexually ambiguous Guille; Guillermina is the feminine form of the male name Guillermo) and Belinda, is, at the very least, a protolesbian romance story.2 It is a romance story set in the provincial Argentine heartland, legendarily the Arcadian paradise of Argentine national and Creole/nativist values, and the stronghold of the paradigm of heteronormative values as embedded in the gaucho and his descendants, the rural farmhands and their bosses. It is a love story that involves two young women who are cousins, one a conventionally attractive country sweetheart and one an obese woman of the sort destined to be a combination of a social outcast and an object of sexual exploitation: to the degree that the obese woman is less likely, conventionally, to be anyone’s sweetheart, she is consigned to be an object of sexual abuse precisely because she belongs to no man. – 9 – guille and belinda A Protolesbian Arcadian Romance ◆ ◆ ◆ 107 – alessandra sanguinetti: guille and belinda – I do not mean to imply that Guille could not find a husband in the setting of rural Argentina (where, in fact, she might be prized for her heft); rather, in this story she plays the outcast who finds love with her cousin Belinda, and the two of them enact a family unit with child that is a fantasy , a dream, in terms of the likely sociological profile of the Argentine family as evidenced by the rural heartland.3 Indeed, one of the immediately significant features of Sanguinetti’s dossier is the focus on the rural setting, in a medium that has in Argentina been relentlessly urban and is likely only to be displayed in an urban setting of gallery photography.4 The rural subjects of these photographs are likely to see themselves portrayed in the published dossier, but not in images hung in a gallery in their own rural setting. I make this point because a significant dimension of Sanguinetti’s narrative is the turning away from the urban setting as quintessential for contemporary love stories , particularly those that involve the transgression of traditional heteronormative values. Certainly, much that is nonheteronormative occurs in the countryside: as has often been observed, if Saint Thomas Aquinas had spent more time on a farm, he would have realized that there is nothing theologically natural about the primacy of heterosexuality, and that the animals of nature he believed to model heteronormativity just as much engage in modeling the “sodomy” he considered to be theologically unnatural. Concomitantly, there is no reason to believe that the other animals of the fields, those of a human kind, adhered to compulsory heteronormativity any more than their nonhuman animals did. It’s just that, with the exception of a smattering of narratives and a smattering of critical readings of canonical texts (such as Geirola’s queer reading of the urtext of gaucho cultural narrative, the Martín Fierro [1872, 1879]), one associates with Argentine literature, as with the bulk of Western narrative , the emergence of a queer consciousness, one involving as legitimate same-sex marriages,5 in an intransigently urban context. The social movements , in the face of a homophobic dictatorship (1976–1983) that echoed overall homophobic sentiment in Argentina, began as urban phenomena, the marches and other protest manifestations are urban phenomena, the out gay culture that flourished after the return to constitutional democracy in 1983 is an urban phenomenon, the by-now vast queer cultural record (especially in film and television) is an urban phenomenon, and the research and teaching on queer theory/issues/culture are an urban phenomenon .6 To be sure, it is reasonable to assume that nonheteronormative love is taking place in all sorts of human spaces in Argentina. However , the primacy of the urban matrix in the national imaginary (“God is 108 – argentine, mexican, and guatemalan photography – everywhere, but he only holds office hours in Buenos Aires”) has always been an erosional threat to that other prime of national(ist) culture, the transcendent meaning of the heartland. As much as Argentina, perhaps more out of ideological inertia than real conviction, holds onto the icon of the heartland...