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11 Itineraries of Latin American Lesbian Insubordination norma mogrovejo When you live on the border, people walk through you; the wind steals your voice; you’re a she-burro, an ox, a scapegoat, the harbinger of a new race, half and half — both woman and man, and neither—a new gender. —Gloria Anzaldúa The lesbian movement came to Latin America in two ways: first, in the case of Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Puerto Rico, through the gay struggle influenced by the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion in the United States. In Chile, Peru, the Dominican Republic, and Costa Rica the lesbian struggle emerged in the second half of the 1970s, thanks to the influence of the Latin American feminist movement and its conferences. Because of similarities in their circumstances, Latin American lesbians have maintained strategic alliances—sometimes close and other times contentious—with the gay, transgendered, and bisexual movement, which I call “sexual dissidence.”1 Along the itinerary of this struggle, two kinds of demands emerge, the symbolic and the material, embodied in three currents: (1) equal rights, or the moment of universality; (2) difference and the rejection of the masculine symbolic order; and (3) shifting identities.2 The Early Days Throughout Latin America, the 1960s and 1970s were particularly violent, with the outbreak of many social and political conflicts. An embryonic civil society sometimes responded by forming guerrilla groups seeking the violent overthrow of authoritarian regimes to set up better, more egalitarian, and just living conditions. Other sectors of society such as workers, women, homosexuals, young people, and shantytown dwellers responded by building social movements to achieve change. Although the idea of the revolution as a single act, a transformation of epic proportions , was very seductive, year after year its actual result, the supposed socialist utopia, was increasingly questioned. Most social movements actually set their sights on more short-term goals—sometimes material and sometimes symbolic of their relationship to those in power—and worked from inside the institutions. That is why they demanded democratic rights and respect for human rights simultaneously. 187 The Equal Rights Current Politically motivated repression, persecution, and forced disappearances also touched gay milieus. Police raids and arbitrary arrests not only violated the right to mobility and individuality but also discouraged mobilization.3 Together with police blackmail, the threat of a scandal-mongering press could be fatal for people’s families and jobs. Thus, the gay movement included its own demands around sexuality as part of a general protest against political repression. For many activists the demand had to be equal rights with heterosexuals. Thus, the quest for recognition as subjects was accompanied by public appearances, statements to the media, leafleting, denunciations, organizing, or marches to raise their demands and analyses of antigay discrimination.4 For many sectors of civil society, including gays, the transition to democracy in countries just coming out from under military dictatorships and the political reforms created to strengthen burgeoning democracies were rays of hope for a change from the persecution and social exclusion they had experienced. Democracy brought with it the concept of legal equality, which lesbians and gay men considered an ethical ideal. Inspired by feminist thinking about equality—that of suffragists and existentialist feminists—they sought to win a place in history by becoming part of the logic and the values of the dominant nation-state rationality. The state had previously denied them citizenship status and now they demanded it recognize them as persons with equal rights. Celia Amorós analyzes the private/public duality and uses the demand for equality and the concept of universality as an ethical reference point to define the subject: all human beings are equal because they share rational structures and intersubjectivity. She thinks that the morality of the law lies in its validity for all rational subjects. But the issue at the time was how it was possible to make men and women equal if thousands of years of socialization had marked substantial differences between them (1994, 14, 26, 55). Equally, given open exclusion and discrimination, the question for implementing public policies would be how to make lesbians, gays, transgendered people, bisexuals, and other dissident identities be treated as equal to heterosexuals when the essentialist supposition of dissidence as abnormal still prevails. In the first stage of the organization and consolidation of the movement’s discourse through its initial public activities, it formulated its first symbolic demands for inclusion and equality. In the next stage, these demands transformed into legislative changes to...

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