The Avowal of Difference: Queer Latino American Narratives by Ben Sifuentes-Jáuregui (review)

The Avowal of Difference is constructed around José Quiroga’s influential assertion, in his 2000 monograph Tropics of Desire that the concept of gay cultural production is inadequate and, indeed, misleading for a Caribbean society that is not neatly divided, either ideologically or legally, into a neatly juxtaposed heterosexuality vs. homosexuality. The same can probably be said of Latin America and, perhaps, the world as a whole, at least as an opening gambit in decentering Western European/Anglo-American parameters of sexuality. However, since the latter realms are the centers of research on and publication about so-called homosexuality, worldwide encyclopedic coverage driven by probably only locally coherent categories has held sway in the massive explosion of bibliography about sexuality in recent decades. It is, therefore, no surprise to find that two of the three Library of Congress subject tracings for Sifuentes-Jáuregui’s book are “Homosexuality in literature” and “Gays in literature,” the first a reference to the comprehensive sociocultural phenomenon at issue; the second an indexing of the specific social subjects of that phenomenon. The Library of Congress only uses queer as a modifier – e.g., “Queer theory,” a central postulate of which is, precisely, the questionability of both “homosexuality” and “gay” as identitarian or classificational terms.

Quiroga’s point – and therefore Sifuentes-Jáuregui’s more detailed analyses – are that there is a continuity in sexual behavior that renders binary assignments rather meaningless. Moreover, when one engages in a calculus of sexual acts (e.g., sodomy literally understood) vs. ways of being in the world (e.g., performing fairy), things may get too complicated for transparent tracking. So much of the historically recoverable queer cultural production in Latin America has little to do with “gay issues” and speaks, really, more pertinently to significantly different cultural forces at play. This becomes true when one examines the relationship in Latin America of indigenous sexualities to modern life (often very present and potentially integral to it), as opposed to native American sexualities in the United States (confined to the reservation or to urban margins, with virtually no visibility: indeed the U.S. missionary movement did its best right up to the present day to obliterate traces of the berdache, the two-spirited, and intimate homosociality). Is it any wonder, then, that, at least in literature and the arts, U.S. scholars may have some trouble understanding the presence of indigenous sexuality in Latin America, often lumping it in with the internationalizing urban gay (e.g., as can happen with the muxes of Juchitán).

Latin American has worked under the aegis of three overlappling sexual ideologies, at least as the so-called homoaffective is concerned (let us agree here on the extreme usefulness of this Brazilian adjective). The first is the strictly reproductive model enforced by the Inquisition, where any act not conducive to reproduction (even among putative heterosexuals) is deviant. The second is the so-called Mediterranean model, which antedates the Judeo-Christian identification of the sodomite, in which the bearer of the phallus (the patriarchal authority) confirms phallic status by resorting to intercourse with everything not considered phallic: women, non-phallic men, children, and the beasts of field and forest, including lesser-than-human slaves; such intercourse can rarely be condemned, usually only when it makes a mistake of who is non-phallic. Finally, there is the public health model whereby deviation from the Judeo-Christian model of reproductive sex is imbricated with the socially deviant, the mentally and criminally impaired, and the corporally degenerate, often with political implications.

Discussions of a potential bibliography of “homosexuality in literature” for Latin America often mixes and matches these categories, and this should not be surprising because of the complexity of human behavior and the likelihood that any fully-rounded literary character is going to be much more than any one casebook example. Thus, Puig’s Molina is much more concerned with performing gender than in engaging in...