Disputes around sex and gender equality in contemporary Argentina

ALLIONE, GUADALUPE; AZARIAN FIDEL

A contracorriente: una revista de estudios latinoamericanos. Vol.20, Núm.3, Department of Foreign Languages and Literature

North Carolina State University

Año: 2024

1548-7083

In this work, we analyze the recent LGBT+ movement’s politicization process, around two important sex and gender equality claims: same sex marriage and gender identity. We support that these political conquests produced a new political temporality, marked by the recognition of sexual rights and public policies for the LGBT+ community. In addition, this cannot be understood without paying attention to the reactions and political articulations that arose in rejection of those claims of expansions of rights, and in defense of a neoliberal and conservative political order, reinforcing patriarchal, cis-heterosexual and sexist power logics. From our perspective, we currently attend to a new cycle of collective struggles and manifestations that give a renovated vigor to the historical demands of the Argentine LGBT+ movement. Our hypothesis is that this movement’s identity constituted itself from the political-militant interpellation that the kirchnerist movement made, with a rights discourse oriented by the values of equality and social justice. From our point of view, this interpellation was a condition of possibility for the emergence of a popular political subject that today has an exceptional national prominence. However, from other perspectives, these identification processes are read as cooptation and assimilation, in continuity with the neoliberal advance over feminisms and sexual diversities (Trebisacce, 2018; flores, 2019 & 2018; Mattio, 2019). From an anti-essentialist and relational perspective –framed in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Political Theory of Discourse (1993; 1987)- we argue those dominant interpretations of the feminist and LGBT+ movements in the local literature , offering a political-discursive analysis of the recent process of politicization of the Argentine LGBT+ movement. This theoretical-epistemological inscription requires us to give analytical centrality not only to the claims, actions and organizational modalities of LGBT+ organizations, but also to the different political traditions or languages that nurture them, in this way contributing to define their political actions’ limits and possibilities.