Eroticized bodies and politicized desires
This material is also available in: Español Português
March 12th, 12 pm (EST) / 5 pm (GMT) / 9 am (PST)
To register for the Q&A session, please click here.
In recent years, there has been a significant expansion of studies around (post)pornograpy, experiences and activisms around sexual and gendered dissidence, and the intimacy and eroticization of mechanisms and representations of (postcolonial) power. In this vein, our panel seeks to rethink the obscene and its attendant libidinal politics as a conceptual space that activates the tensions between repulsion and seduction, pleasure and violence, the private and the public, and art and archiving. Some of the topics that this panel will address include: the role of techniques (of printing and dissemination); aesthetics and media in facilitating the merging of art and obscenity; the effects, echoes, and reverberations of archival interventions that center intimate materials and sexualized images of violence; the ethnopornographic construction of Otherness in cinematography, literature, and painting; and debates around the definition and performance of (post)porn in public spaces.
As part of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies online symposium series Pandemonio 2021, this panel interrogates the potentiality of obscenity and libidinal politics as a frame of questioning and activating forms of resistance. More concretely, the presentations will center on the interventions that problematize and undermine colonial practices of the subjection of bodies; heroic and monumental narratives around the construction of the Nation-state; and the intrinsic violence of the militarization of everyday life. The format of the panel will consist of, in the first place, a conversation uploaded to the Pandemonio website between Fernández-Galeano and Tortorici around their forthcoming special issue of JLACS, “Obscenity, Censorship, and Libidinal Politics in Latin America.” On March 12, 2021, each of the four panelists (Celleri, Franco, Ouedraogo, and Troconis) will present their respective multidisciplinary research on erotics and activism in literature, art, and performance (for approx. 10 min. each). These presentations will be followed by a 45-minute conversation among all the panelists and the organizers.
To register for the Q&A session, please click here.
Podcast:
Images mentioned in the podcast (in order):
By Zeb
By Javier
Participants:
María Celleri
Title: “‘Bésame por favor:’ Use of Obscenity to Denounce Violence in Incontables”
Bio: María Célleri is an Assistant Professor in Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She earned her PhD in Ethnic Studies from UC San Diego and Master’s degrees in Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies from Ohio State and Hispanic Languages & Literatures from Stony Brook University. Her current book project, Uncovering the Virgen del Panecillo: Quito’s (Neo)Colonial Urban Transformation & Decolonial Future Imaginaries examines the political and symbolic importance of the monument of the Virgen del Panecillo in a cultural research study of how public monuments come to represent and often reproduce national imaginations which are then mapped onto national territories. Her research interests include Latin America & Caribbean Studies (Andean Studies); decolonial feminisms; reproductive justice; urban studies; cultural studies.
Multimedia: PDF of Pedro Lemebel’s Los incontables (1986)
Robert Franco
Title: “Revolutionary Rumors: Obscenity, Censorship, and the Bisexual Erasure of Emiliano Zapata”
Bio: Robert Franco holds a PhD in Latin American History from Duke University. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. His book manuscript, tentatively titled Revolution in the Sheets: Sexuality and Tolerance in the Mexican Left, 1901-2001, examines the fraught – at times hostile – relationship of the Mexican Left toward issues of sex and sexuality.
Multimedia:
Inès Ouedraogo
Title: “Fuck the Fascism! María Basura’s Revenge on European Colonialism”
Bio: Inès Ouedraogo graduated in July 2020 with a PhD in Hispanic Cultures and Literatures as well as two graduate certificates in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and African Studies from Boston University. Her dissertation “Devouring the Patriarchy: Anthropornophagy and Pleasure Politics in Brazilian Pop Porn Festival” analyzes a selection of sexually explicit films screened at a Brazilian film festival in São Paulo in 2017 and blends cultural, gender and sexuality studies. Inès currently teaches introduction to Latin American & Caribbean literature at Suffolk University and a seminar on Love and Eroticism at Emerson College.
Multimedia:
Video link: https://vimeo.com/fuckthefascism
Irina R. Troconis
Title: “French Kissing the Idol: Erotic Iconoclash and Political Subversion in Deborah Castillo’s The Emancipatory Kiss”
Bio: Irina R. Troconis is Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University. She holds a PhD in Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures from New York University, and an MPhil Degree in Latin American Studies from the University of Cambridge (UK). Her areas of specialization include: Memory Studies, Venezuelan Studies, Politics and Performance, and Digital Humanities. She is currently working on her book project, titled Spectral Remains: The Politics of Memory in the Afterglow of Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution.
Multimedia: Link “El Beso Emancipador” (2013): https://vimeo.com/72136236
Zeb Tortorici
Bio: Zeb Tortorici is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University. His monograph, Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain (2018) received prizes from the AHA and the MLA, and he recently coedited Ethnopornography: Sexuality, Colonialism, and Archival Knowledge (2020) and Turning Archival: The Life of the Historical in Queer Studies (forthcoming, Duke 2022). His current research focuses on the archiving of the “obscene” in Latin America, from the eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth.
Javier Fernández-Galeano
Bio: Javier Fernandez Galeano is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Wesleyan University. His first book project traces transnational queer cultures and state policies in Argentina and Spain (1940s-1980s). His current research projects revolve around queer religiosity and erotic materials preserved at institutional and private archives. He has published in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, the Latin American Research Review, and Encrucijadas.
