Queerness and Disability in Latin American Literature and Culture, 1880-1930

Undergraduate / Graduate

With the rise of Latin American modernity, LGBTQ and crip populations were portrayed in literature, medical science, and visual culture as deviant. The discursive mechanisms to produce truths about bodies as normative or perverse, real or unreal, fit or disabled not only achieved authority in medicine, but also in numerous platforms where ableist heteronormativity was sedimented as a hegemonic way of life. Literature, theater, museums, the modern press, and the visual arts became semiotic territories for the production of racial, gender, sex, and psychophysical difference. But queer/crip/trans* and critical race theory have offered tools to critique the sexual hegemony and ableism of such patriarchal-colonial mindset. This graduate course introduces students to such debates in new Latin American critical studies, with a global perspective. Focusing on the cultural production of modern Latin America and the Caribbean, students will investigate and critique the somatic constructions of the so-called "deviant" in excerpts from novels, plays, chronicles, early films, and clinical studies. Texts by José Tomás de Cuéllar, Luis Montané Dardé, Leonidio Ribeiro, Eduardo Castrejón, Adolfo Caminha, Augusto D'Halmar, Rómulo Gallegos, José González Castillo, Elías Castelnuovo, Teresa de La Parra, Bernardo Arias Trujillo, Francisco de Veyga, Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta, among others.