The Gender and Sexuality Turn

ROBERT MC KEE IRWIN; MÓNICA SZURMUK

New Approaches to Latin American Studies: Culture and Power

Routledge

Lugar: Nueva York; Año: 2017; p. 223 - 237

In "The Gender and Sexuality Turn," Robert Irwin and Mónica Szurmuk posit that new theoretical approaches to gender and sexuality, a growing participation of women and an increasing visibility of sexual diversity in the academy, and the changing attitudes of a new generation led to a major shift in the treatment of gender and sexuality both in the Latin American academy and among Latin Americanists in the global north. The essay lays out how this shift played out in the late 1990s and early 2000s, focusing on the work of several key figures including Sylvia Molloy, Marta Lamas, Carlos Monsiváis, Nelly Richard, and Heloísa Buarque de Hollanda. It also looks at more recent decolonial trends that in the United States bring theories of intersectionality and especially race to bear on theories of gender and sexuality under the rubric of what has come to be known as queer of color critique, and in Latin America articulate autochthonous perspectives on these issues through the development of "la teoría cuir" or theories of sexual dissidence. In both cases, contemporary theorists build on the thinking of pioneering (pre-Judith Butler) scholars such as Gloria Anzaldúa (in the United States) and Néstor Perlongher (in Latin America) to address problematics of race, transgenderism, rights, and bio- and necro-politics in a changing landscape in which many questions that were unthinkable in the 1980s (e.g., same-sex marriage) have become mainstream even as state violence has intensified against disenfranchised women and sexually diverse populations.