Contenu du sommaire : Imaginaire et réalité dans les Amériques: mémoire, identité et politique sexuelle

The last Argentine military dictatorship (1976-1983) has been analyzed from multiple literary and artistic perspectives from the 1970s until the end of the 20thCentury. In this paper we are interested in analyzing novels which have been published during the 21stCentury by female writers who were born between 1950s and 1970s. We will focus on La casa de los conejos and Los pasajeros del Anna C, by Laura Alcoba, which were published initially in French and then translated into Spanish. We will also analyze La mujer en cuestión and Lengua madre, by María Teresa Andruetto, published in Córdoba, Argentina. They all are personal stories following a gender perspective, as well as using a reflective stance, thirty years after the historical events took place.

The presence of cross-dressing and androgyny in the works of contemporary Spanish American authors and visual artists Severo Sarduy, Pedro Lemebel, Eugenia Prado, Roberto Echavarren and Gloria Anzaldúa indicates changes in the perception and representation of identity as a cultural category. In their works, sometimes referred to as neoavantgarde or neobaroque, changing and unstable characters appear. The disturbing presence of these « transitive » or « nomadic subjects » points to the deconstruction and reformulation of fixed cultural categories such as gender, ethnicity, race and nationality. The analysis of these transgressive subjects helps to advance a theory of cultural identity based on the ambiguity of the cross-dresser and the androgyne, on their ever-changing appearances and games with otherness. This theory can be applied in the study of groups and subjects that emerge in the hybrid cultural context of postmodern America. It points to the presence of otherness within oneness, of alterity within identity. These subjects-characters represent a political and cultural resistance to the norms of the patriarchal and neocolonial system of values imposed by the neoliberal economic, cultural and media establishment. They are hybrid, transitive and transgressive subjects that form part of a multi- and transcultural, postmodern Latin America.

The conspicuous scarcity of gay characters and themes in Mexican cinema often has been interpreted in anthropological terms as a cultural effect of a machismo-inflected patriarchy. This paper puts forward an alternative interpretation based on the possible link between sexuality (including homosexuality) and nation image – both the image that Mexicans have formed of his own country and the image that Mexico has exported to other countries. Given the close connection that exists between patriarchy and Mexicanness it could be argued that cinematic attempts to introduce gay characters and themes in national cinema should necessarily be doomed. That is why the strategies used by Mexican directors in different historical times to introduce homosexual themes are particularly relevant. The fake homosexual in Modisto de señoras ; the closeted gay couple in Doña Herlinda y su hijo ; and the latent homosexual in Y tu mamá también represent different approaches to the gay theme, which always tests the limits of national tolerance.

This article studies the novel Sangre en el ojo (2012) (Blood in the Eye), by Chilean writer Lina Meruane. First, it argues about the distinction between resistance literature and resistance writing. As an example of the latter, the novel by Meruane presents a variety of narrative strategies or writing devices that contribute to create an ethics and aesthetics of resistance. The relevance of the body and in particular of the eyesight is highlighted. The novel allows us to think the possibility of a different gaze and visualization of reality ; one that breaks from the view/gaze imposed by the system/hegemony.

The novel Elena sabe de Claudia Piñeiro, trough the look and voice o fan old and sick women, wonders rivate and public institutions rerevening the certaimties that, finally, ends up in uncertainties.

One of the most important revolutionary social changes to have emerged alongside the Revolution was that affecting Cuban women. The end of 1980s and early 1990s represent a turning point in Cuban cinema and a departing point for a “revolutionary” approach to gender in Cuban filmography. From this perspective, this study will focus on two eloquently representative short films—Zoë (dir. Mario Crespo) and Adriana (dir. Mayra Segura) from the collective film Mujer transparente (1990), a five-part feature film made under the general direction of Humberto Solás. I have selected these two short films, directed by a man and a woman respectively, in order to demonstrate that a substantial number of films made by male directors, like those by female filmmakers, have direct and crucial implications for feminism.

This work explores the notion of capitalist economic exploitation and the sexual violence on which the system of patriarchal domination rests. It takes as an example the Latin American situation, and argues that sexual violence and the femicides have their roots in the very construction of race and gender of capitalist political economy. On the other hand, it presents Gloria Anzaldúa's mestiza or “hybrid identity” consciousness as a project of resistance and confrontation against such corporal and economic violence.

Starting from the premise that in order to interpret any work of cultural production, it is necessary to take into account performative metaphors and the reality that the work is attempting to describe, this article analyses, from a cultural studies point of view, the links between the characters' sexuality or desire and their attitudes towards political representation within the essentially panoptical environment of prison (as defined by Foucault). The text goes beyond the boundaries of class and sexuality while at the same time criticising the abuses of power in Argentina under the dictatorship, an esthetic reaction against the social trauma of the events. Given that the novel was published in 1975 and the film was produced in 1985, we see that the issues were highly topical : Puig had returned to Argentina in 1967 when Onganía was in power, but had been forced to leave again in 1973. He had already begun work on the novel before going into exile and had interviewed political prisoners freed by the Peronist government of Héctor Campora. The text was banned by the censors on the grounds that it corrupted the Nation, but ‘illegal' copies were in circulation and the book has come down through the years to help us ‘read the past' from a queer perspective.

This essay examines the processes of promoting and selling the cabaret of Mexican cinema in the period 1931 and 1950. Analyzes the beginning of the Mexican film industry to the theme of the cabaretera, and their representation is linked to the production models proposed by the United States. In this sense, this work shifts observed artistic content of the films to schematics and paradigmatic formulations of the representation. The result of this the woman body is reduced to basic signs to outline the same attitudes, movements, poses physical actions and dramatic structures of the films. In the process, the representation leaves to the cabaretera first like erotic and seduction schematization and then as an object for consumption goods easier in the field of development of mass culture. In this context the cabaretera body is trapped in a mode of female object. Forms of representation as a result of the staging director to highlight and assign new meanings to parts of the body. A construction fetishist film body image cinematography in the poster and stereotypes formulates the cabaretera stories.

Fiction occupies a privileged position in the task of building a memory. Argentine narrative written during or after the military dictatorship, proofs that horror and violence are not inexpressible, matter argued about the Shoá. Some women writers had told from the gender's subjectivity point of view a version about dictatorship. The ones who wrote during the 70's - Noemí Ulla, Angélica Gorodischer, Luisa Valenzuela and Griselda Gambaro - suffered censorship and prohibition, had to hide their writings or went to exile. Their femenine characters are victims of sexual violence, and their bodies suffered tortures, violations and sadistic treatments. We might say that these characters may be homologated with the Agambens' « homo sacer », « femina sacer » we may say, and with the « mussulman » of Auschwitz's concentration camp. Detention places are « exception » places where the victims sink in abjection. Obsessions, amnesia, loss of language, tortures and death - sometimes salvation - aren't expressed on these fiction writings with realism but with simbolic representations. The mentioned women writers use individual and colective memory in order to ask, criticize, remember, denounce and interpret state terrorism in order to avoid repetition. We hope these sexual abuses can be treated by justice as crimes aganist humanity.

The commercial Mexican press contributed to the construction of new sexual and gender identities by giving a voice to feminist militants and intellectuals on their editorial boards and granting them considerable freedom of expression. The role of these collaborators consisted in disseminating new ideas concerning women, gender relations, sexual education and family planning and confronting these issues with the political discourse. Our content analysis of a selection of articles culled from the most important Mexican newspapers of the 1970s (Novedades, El Universal, Unomásuno), will illustrate the strategies that were put in place by two feminist militant intellectuals, E. Urrutia and M. Lamas. On the one hand their strategies aimed to decipher the shortcomings of the official discourse relating to sexual policy under the presidencies of Luis Echeverría Álvarez and José Lopez Portillo, and on the other hand to propose feminist analysis of sexuality within cultural practices.

We approach the feminine character and its relations with the dictatorial power through three novels: Roa Bastos' Madama Sui, where the heroine is Stroessner's mistress, Tomás Eloy Martínez' Santa Evita, novel focused on Evita Perón, famous figure of Perón's dictatorship, and García Márquez' El otoño del patriarca. Women's relations with the dictators are based on submissiveness: submission to the absolute power, until its tragic and radical form, death. But beyond these generic relations exemplifying men's physical and social superiority upon women, the novelists are interested in the emergence of these fascinating feminine figures: through their iconic status, through the collective fantasies they created, the novels contemplate the way these feminine myths deeply linked with power were created.

Carmen Mondragón (1893-1978), popularly known as Nahui Olin, was an extraordinary Mexican artist who during the 1920s and 1930s produced very original paintings and poems. Even though Nahui is generally known as the beautiful muse who inspired some very iconic portraits to some of renowned Mexican artists of the Mexican Renaissance, the images that the female artist created of herself, a series of very provocative self-portraits in the nude, have not yet received the academic attention that they deserve.   Through a complete study of the historical context in which both groups of works were created, the visual analysis of the paintings in which Nahui is the object or the subject of the work, and a critical study of Nahui's literary production, in this paper I demonstrate that the female artist's self-portraits, were in part created as a way to counter-act and to refute, the image of her as an erotic symbol that the masculine gaze had constructed, and that the traditional historiography of Mexican art history has perpetuated later on.

The paper stems from an ethnographic study about identity construction through conversations among a group of high school students in Mexico City. The issue presented here intends to show how this group of friends experience gender relations in school and what do they think about flirting, dating and the experience of sexuality. Some of the important findings are: 1. A change of attitude of men and women in relationships. Girls say they feel free to test different relationships at the same time (behavior considered as typically « macho ») and to experience a sexuality detached from affection with no moral conflict and with a seeming acceptance from friends at school. Despite some traits still present from their traditional role, boys seem open to explore their emotions in the relationships they have. At the same time they seem less interested in a « genitality-centered » sexuality. 2. Based on the conversations they had, this group of friends gives the impression they live a denaturalization process of sexuality. This denaturalization process means they truly believe that being heterosexual is not the only way to live their sexuality, but bisexuality and homosexuality appear as other sexual practices equally valid and legitimate for these students.

Our study juxtaposes three characters. Jean Valjean in Les Miserables (1862) and Gwynplaine in The Man who Laughs (1869), by the French author Victor Hugo appear to have served as inspiration for the dichotomy and internal battle encountered by the third character Bento de Alburquerque Santiago (Bentinho), in Dom Casmurro (1899) by Machado de Assis. The three men bring to light evidence of strong social repression and reveal that moral commitment is stronger than sexual drive. This moral value limits the pleasure of a relationship between two persons, whether of the same sex, or two people outside of marriage. The society and its morality fulfill or deform these characters. In particular our study will focus on the character of Bentinho to characterize this aspect of literature produced in the second half of the 19th century.