Translating the Queer: Body Politics and Transnational Conversations by Héctor Domínguez Ruvalcaba (review)

Latin American queer and gender studies, literature, film, and the arts coalesce in Héctor Domínguez Ruvalcaba's monograph, Translating the Queer: Body Politics and Transnational Conversations. Over the course of an introduction, four chapters, and a concise conclusion, Domínguez Ruvalcaba explores queerness in Latin America through concepts of translation, the body, identity, and the colonial nation. For Domínguez Ruvalcaba, there is epistemic and activist promise in queer translation as "a political process that involves the recognition of the margins, exclusions, abjection, and oppressions of alternative bodies" (5). The book endeavors to chart Latin American queer translations in history, knowledge, and representation and envisions translation as a queer decolonizing project.

Chapter 1, "Queer Decolonization," is concerned with the queer colonial subject. The author asserts that in the colonial era, translation—literally from native languages to Spanish—served as a means of biopolitical and discursive control by reducing indigenous sexual diversity into rigid European Christian frameworks. This "coloniality of sex," simultaneously disciplined native subjects through brutal bodily and epistemic violence and reified the colonial regime's authority (21). However, this repressive framework also created an underground in which remnants of the precolonial culture endured. These rebellious subjects left fragments of what Domínguez Ruvalcaba, following Zeb Tortorici, calls the "visceral archive," or scraps of precolonial sexual diversity found in places such as disciplinary records of resistant, deviant bodies (30). The queer work of decolonizing sex now, Domínguez Ruvalcaba argues, is to draw on the visceral archive not to reestablish a pre-Columbian sex system, but rather to restructure subjectivity formed inside coloniality by exposing and dismantling the ideologies behind its persisting discourses and biopolitics.

In Chapter 2, "Queerness and the Nation in Peripheral Modernity," Domínguez Ruvalcaba explains that whereas in the colonial era Christian theology was explicitly used as justification for the regulation of sexual deviants, in postindependence liberal Latin American states, the same systems of gender and sexual surveillance manifest through nationalist, medical, and criminological discourses. This Catholic ethic and spirit of colonialism continue to shape public policies as they articulate a national identity that rests in part on the acknowledgement and repudiation of sexual others; as the author puts it, queerness becomes "the negative projection of the national self" (67). However, there is also a paradox in the modern nation: despite its exclusionary apparatuses, queerness is a common, if not central, element of contemporary Latin American cultural production. In a sweeping review of cultural events, literature, arts, and aesthetics across Latin America, Domínguez Ruvalcaba demonstrates how the "visible silences" of queerness resist the nation's exclusion and bring sexual difference from periphery to center (75). This is Domínguez Ruvalcaba's project of "queering the nation," which "looks for traces of concealed desires and finds there is a rich source of rhetorical inventions that can be used in an aesthetic strategy to introduce what is deemed abject in the very cultural production of the lettered city" (91). Domínguez Ruvalcaba sees this as a crucial method of queer resistance.

"LGBT Politics in Culture" begins with a brief history of LGBT activism in the 1960s and 1970s across countries such as Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Cuba, and Nicaragua. Domínguez Ruvalcaba emphasizes the need to understand Latin American LGBT activism not as an extension of North American civil rights efforts, but rather, within the context of its political and symbolic landscape. In particular, he teases out the tensions and ties between LGBT movements and the concomitant leftist revolutionary politics that surged at the time, noting, for example, that "While in Argentina and Mexico a queer resignification of revolution anchored LGBT activism to the leftist utopia, mainstream socialism in Cuba forced sexual diversity into a position against revolutionary ideology" (100). Although debate over identity politics in relation to Marxist revolutionary efforts is hardly new, here Domínguez Ruvalcaba usefully contextualizes it within the contours of Latin...