Translating the Queer. Body Politics and Trans-national Conversations by Héctor Domínguez Ruvalcaba (review)

Tackling the challenges Latin American and Hispanic studies in general face in regard to the wide and varied field of queer studies that has developed over the last decades, Domínguez Ruvalcaba's book is a critical intervention that recovers a transnational itinerary of queer academic production. Seeking to answer questions such as "what is the place of queerness in Latin America culture and politics? … What meanings does queer acquire in its translation into Latin American cultural codes?" (1), the text recovers a history of interventions that critically align queerness as a central object of study in Latin American studies, given its close ties to colonial systems of power, national forms of social organization and neoliberal economies. By understanding queerness as a politics of the body that "implies a criticism of the hegemonic culture, the legal system, and the gender structure" (2), Domínguez Ruvalcaba traces how academics in the field have generated transnational and hemispheric dialogues that allow processes of decolonization to be understood in the spheres of gender and sexuality, providing a methodology of critical thought that questions nation-states and furthermore, is highly engaged with thinking about neoliberal structures of bodily consumption and disposability. Focusing on the "nonhegemonic body, its politics, its aesthetics and its ethos," Latin American(ist) queer studies have focalized a "poetics of normalcy disruption" that reactivates transnational debates and perversely (re)generates archives, both authorized and transgressive (7).

Domínguez weaves a series of academic interventions during the last decades and rearticulates them into four incisive facets of the protean field that queer Latin American studies has become, to its political and ideological advantage. With a very strong chapter on queer decolonization that places queerness as starting with the "estrangement and condemnation of native sexual practices" (22), Domínguez (via Michael J. Horswell, Pete Sigal, Zeb Torterici, Noemí Quezada and Miano Borruso, among other historians and anthropologists), signals how close queerness is tied to hegemonic and violent colonial systems of power, and not contained in the native sexualities therein. This astute observation will reappear in later chapters and provides an academic approach that goes beyond the limits of queer studies, offering a critical lens with which to view indigeneity and living indigenous subjects; by historicizing queerness in this way, Domínguez assembles a critical understanding of current indigenous sexualities that have been transformed by and are transforming the coloniality of sex, allowing for approaches to indigenous subjects like the muxe that resist the sex/gender binary while reimposing hierarchical gender structures, as demonstrated in later chapters in the book. Simultaneously, this close reading of historical documents forefronts the silenced nonconforming bodies of colonial peoples, the visceral archives that Torterici proposes, and creates a genealogical assemblage that shines light onto current phenomenon being studied in anthropology, sociology, and literary and cultural studies.

In the chapter on the relation between queerness and the nation during the long nineteenth century, Domínguez recovers Antonio Cornejo Polar's (and others') "conflictive, uncomfortable notion of the mestizo" as a way of both troubling the past and connecting it to the current bodies that populate our nations (48). Just as "queer" in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries becomes both a negative marker of cultural colonialism as well as a positive signifier of democracy, queerness in the national founding moment, "located in the Europeanized and antinational elites" (56), becomes a mark of modernity as much as something that must be excluded, ejected or silenced through discretion. The study of these differing bodies is an act of queering the nation, revealing its contradictions grounded in the hegemonic understandings of gender and sexuality that place violence at its core. However, while Domínguez signals that during modernity "queerness has had a prominent role in transforming social life" and points towards archival work being currently done (91), his chapter focuses almost exclusively on male and (mostly) elite representations for this period. Studies by authors such...