Queer Issues in Contemporary Latin American Cinema

Preface

Preface This book is the fourth in a series dealing with Latin American film. Contemporary Argentine Cinema (1994) examined Argentine filmmaking since the return to constitutional democracy in 1983 and was therefore focused on films that dealt with issues of redemocratization in that country: the abuse of power, authoritarianism, sexual rights, women’s issues, and the relationship between current events and national history. Gender and Society in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema (1999) dealt with Brazilian films produced, with one exception, after the return to constitutional democracy in that country in 1985, although I was principally interested in framing the discussion in terms of gender. Hence the volume is organized in three large blocks: masculinist focuses, feminist focuses, and same-sex focuses. This organization was not so much to highlight the fact that Brazilian film deals with issues of gender, sexuality , and sexual transgression—it does so no more than the films of other nations, even if this constellation is part of national mythmaking for tourist purposes. Rather, I was interested in intersecting gender issues and filmmaking because there was not yet any monographic study on Latin American film from this perspective. Feminist theory has seen the development, in part through its intellectual inspiration, first of queer studies, which question the gender categories held in place by the heteronormative patriarchy, and subsequently , masculinist studies, which both question the assumption of the universal categories of the masculine/nonmasculine binary (a primary viii Queer Issues in Contemporary Latin American Cinema contribution of feminism) and the normalization of the masculine (a primary contribution of queer studies). Specifically, I was interested in how the changes in Brazilian society were allegorized in primarily gendered narratives with the return to democracy, the critical analysis that redemocratization brought with it of the two decades of tyranny, and the empowerment of previously repressed and oppressed social groups (along one axis, women and queers). The allegories tended to focus on love stories—or at least stories in which gender is foregrounded—that had much to say about sociopolitical arrangements of social power and legitimacy. Concomitantly, I was interested in how gender—the foregrounding of a man’s or a woman’s body—could be particularly effective as a strategy of semiosis in a film. Mexico City in Contemporary Mexican Cinema (2001) delineates the intersect of film and urban studies, in this case of Mexico City, the world’s most populous megalopolis. Unlike Argentina and Brazil, Mexico did not experience neofascist tyranny, and therefore there is no sociohistorically significant dividing point for this study. However, the study takes advantage of the international attention paid to Mexican film in the 1990s and the fact that recent decades have shown, in the Mexican imaginary, a definitive shift toward the urban. Consequently, with a handful of exceptions, the films examined in the study are from the 1990s; all of them, if not direct interpretations of the urban experience, are set in Mexico City, and the city is in some way an integral part of each film’s narrative. Even if the stories are not explicitly urban tales, the city intervenes in the experience of the film’s protagonist; even if the physical attributes of the city are not specifically foregrounded, the story would make little sense if it were transposed to a provincial or rural setting. These films underscore the extent to which so much of contemporary —one might say postmodern—Latin American reality has become urban: the migratory patterns in much of Latin America are toward the city; national identity means to a large extent having an urban consciousness ; and the most significant filmmaking is set in the city. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores perros (2000), which became available in video after this study was completed and thus is not included in it, is a perfect example of what I am talking about. It is built around three tales of the city involving three social classes and interlocking, overlapping, and conflicting experiences in a precariously shared urban landscape. Gender is, of course, an issue of urban life, and the city is where both feminist and lesbigay movements have prospered. As a consequence, several of the films in this study continue the gender focus of Gender and Society in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema. ix Preface Queer Issues in Contemporary Latin American Filmmaking, the volume at hand, corresponds to the previous studies in a number of...