Translating the Queer

Body Politics and Transnational Conversations

Héctor Domínguez Ruvalcaba

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783602957
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de género

What does it mean to queer a concept? If queerness is a notion that implies a destabilization of the normativity of the body, then all cultural systems contain zones of discomfort relevant to queer studies. What then might we make of such zones when the use of the term queer itself has transcended the fields of sex and gender, becoming a metaphor for addressing such cultural phenomena as hybridization, resignification, and subversion? Further still, what should we make of it when so many people are reluctant to use the term queer, because they view it as theoretical colonialism, or a concept that loses its specificity when applied to a culture that signifies and uses the body differently? Translating the Queer focuses on the dissemination of queer knowledge, concepts, and representations throughout Latin America, a migration that has been accompanied by concomitant processes of translation, adaptation, and epistemological resistance.

CHAPTER 1

Queer decolonization

The theoretical contributions to the studies of the colonial Latin American queer—or the queering of the colonial—in the conversations of Latin Americanist academia can be summarized as follows: a) queerness in Latin America is seen as a process of cultural translation whereby the multiplicity of pre-Columbian erotic practices is reduced to a normativized system of sexuality as a political strategy of control of bodies (or a biopolitics); b) colonizers deem nonreproductive sexualities sinful and condemnable/punishable, which in turn enables the emergence of hybrid, underground sexual practices that constitute an archive of the abject; c) indigenous third-sex theory reveals the conflict between a Western binary gender system and the three-sex system of some Amerindians, exposing homophobia as a colonial strategy; d) and a queer decolonizing proposal would aim not necessarily to reconstruct a native ancestral sex–gender system but rather to dismantle coloniality and disrupt its exclusionary and violent effects. In this chapter, my objective is to review some of the key ideas that have oriented discussions on the queer implications of coloniality.

Coloniality and queerness: A discursive invasion

Since the 1990s, several academic discussions have developed around the postcolonial condition of Latin America, mainly animated by readings of subalternist South Asian scholars but, more importantly, by the questions that emerged after the end of the Cold War and the advent of neoliberalism. Marxism, psychoanalysis, and structuralism were well established as the prevalent theoretical frameworks in the humanities and social sciences for understanding Latin American realities during the Cold War period. However, new questions emerged after what Jorge Castañeda (1993) calls the disarmament of the utopia. Long-term agendas (such as psychoanalysis, Marxism, and structuralism) that had informed the capitalism–socialism contradiction now began to address questions of gender and sexuality, along with race, disability, and other minority issues in Latin America. By the end of 1980s, studies on gender, sexuality, racial issues, youth cultures, and migrations had taken hold in academic environments with increasing levels of transnational exchange, paving the way toward a transdisciplinary, transnational, and subalternist mode of knowledge production. The epistemic turn from class struggle and alienation to an axis based on the colonial brought about the inclusion of questions about the subject, the body, and multiculturalism in Latin Americanist research agendas. Contradictions and differences between exogenous cultures are deepened in times of neoliberal politics and global reconfigurations of markets and cultures.

Two events relating to bodies ignited the prominent academic incursion into the study of sexuality: the increasing number of serial killings of women in the continent made gender studies and feminist activism intensify their presence and influence in the public sphere, and the AIDS pandemic activated discussions on sexual identity and homophobic violence. These two immediate emergencies precipitated several forums that gathered academics from Latin American, European, and US universities, and those present began a transnational exchange addressing issues under postcolonial and subalternist theoretical reconfigurations. Unlike conventional disciplinary approaches, the emergent academic discourse was inclined to interrogate rather than to give answers, to deconstruct rather than to make assertions, and to cross disciplines rather than to narrow its work under a single disciplinary field.

It was then a palatable enterprise to review and ultimately to rewrite the history of the continent by returning to the literary, cultural, and historical canon. Critics searched in the canon for the keys to Latin America’s colonial condition, the formation of the nation, the construction of repressive apparatuses, and the archeology of pleasures and perversions. The colonial condition, or coloniality, refers to the persistence of contradictions and forms of domination in multicultural, postcolonial societies, regardless of institutional and government changes (Quijano 2000). Sexual domination is one of the most significant forms of colonial interaction between colonizers and colonized. To name just one example, the trope of rape appears in various analyses as a foundational narrative of the mestizo culture.1 What we might call a coloniality of sex, following Aníbal Quijano’s (2000) notion of coloniality, refers to the punishment of difference as a way of correcting gender expressions and sexual practices. Sexuality, then, seems to be at the center of a multifaceted violence that includes physical pain, fear, exclusion, invisibility, moral condemnation, and even death. Colonial biopolitics has developed a complex bureaucracy, punishment techniques, and a discursive apparatus aimed at devaluing the colonized body. We cannot conceive of a Latin American sex–gender system without considering the traces of trauma left on colonized bodies; their painful expression would nurture a specific sensibility in the popular arts, as Mexican American scholar Laura Gutiérrez (2010) asserts in her work on the Mexican artist Astrid Hadad’s performance (4).

The relation between the queer and the colonial can be seen as a question of transculturation of the body through the public policy of the colonial state. To subject sex to strict codes of mandatory heterosexuality is a colonizing action. Queerness is found in the interstices of cultural differences, the gaps left in translation. In the first place, queerness is not what describes the nonreproductive sexual practices admitted or tolerated in the native cultures of America; instead, I want to argue that queerness starts with the estrangement and condemnation of native sexual cultures, making criminal and sinful practices that used to be sinless. To expel, to condemn, to render invisible, and finally to proclaim their extermination ultimately engenders a zone of proscription, a zone defined by the unspeakable act of the body, which becomes abject. Queer people are noncitizens, they must cause revulsion, and their rejection is deemed pious, official, and mandatory.

If sexuality is not to be mentioned, it cannot be found in the archives, or only in the form of condemnation. Otherwise, there is not any category in the colonial archives that refers to the proscribed sexualities. The methodology of constructing knowledge of that which is unclassified consists of collecting the textual fragments spread all around the literature of and about Latin America, and interpreting the silences wherever sexual infractions are suggested. A careful rereading of the canonized works of literature and history and the review of legal codes, confessional manuals, and criminal archives are the routes scholars have taken to trace that zone of the colonial abject or what we call the colonial queer.

Queer colonial and translation

The queer colonial subject was formed as the result of a cultural process of translation in which native sexual conceptions were reduced to Christian rule. American historian Pete Sigal’s (2007) essay “Queer Nahuatl: Sahagún’s Faggots and Sodomites, Lesbians and Hermaphrodites” offers a keen analysis of the translation process deployed in the Florentine Codex. Bernardino de Sahagún’s translation team—which included children of the Nahua nobility educated in the Franciscan school of Tlatelolco—drew and wrote this text in the late sixteenth century in New Spain (Mexico) (Sigal 2007: 10). The collaborative bilingual project includes illustrations, Latinized Nahuatl text, and a Spanish translation of that text. The codex itself shows the steps of the translation process, from pictograms to a Latin-alphabet Nahuatl transcription (a step that effectively reduces a multilayered graphic text to a word or phrase), and from the Latinized Nahuatl text to the Spanish version (a second step that simplifies the Amerindians’ multiple sexual practices to the execratory term “nefarious sin,” reinforcing the binary configuration of Europe’s moral system).

Sigal’s analysis focuses on how the criteria that organize the Nahuatl-into-Spanish translation are governed by the religious need to repress sexual practices. Sahagún and his team decided what to say and what to keep silenced according to religious and political interests. One result of this strategy is that we often find the retelling of Indian stories within a Judeo-Christian mythology. The colonial practice of translation reinvents the Indian world (even the word “Indian” is a colonial invention, a simplification of a multifarious and complex world) and controls the archive of the defeated civilization by pursuing specific political goals. For instance, several stories reported by the friars and conquerors from different regions of Latin America coincide to tell the disgraces of giant sodomites who were extinguished by plagues before the Spaniards came (Bazán 2004: 64–66). The fact that the same biblical-resembling plot appears in the Spanish narratives of very different geographical regions shows how far colonial translation can go toward displacing local cultural memory, forging a convenient past for the colonizers. Translation is a twofold process—a disarticulation and a rearticulation of a cultural text. It is a writing, a political process whereby the system of meanings and values that would control colonial society is strategically resemanticized, enacting an erasure of a native sexual culture in order to force it into a restrictive mandatory heterosexuality.

By using the concept of “authorial filter,” Sigal (2007) applies a methodology of reading the process of translation in order to uncover the process of colonization of sexuality (13). Sigal underscores two forms of sexually colonizing translation: the reduction of a variety of sexual practices to the words sodomita (sodomite) and puto (faggot) and the change in affective value the Spanish words hold when compared to the original Nahuatl. To illustrate the latter, the word xochihua, which in Nahuatl would mean literally “the flower bearer,” in the Florentine Codex was translated as puto (faggot). Native categories are silenced and subsumed to the colonizer’s categories. Colonizing translation is an act of epistemic violence that affects the very foundation of the meaning system. The violent effect of this translation consists of placing the body under a scrutinizing discipline imposed by the colonizer as a form of political control.

However, this violent subjugation to a discipline meets resistance in the cultural response to colonization. According to Sigal (2007), the fact that the concept of sin did not have any equivalence in the Nahua cultural system prevented the strategies for disciplining the body from neatly acculturating Amerindian sexuality; instead, a hybrid sexual system was created, one that still survives today in many indigenous and mestizo communities (13). Although Sigal does not offer further details about how this hybridity happens or where we can go to find instances of it, I would like to take his insight as a point of departure to argue that, by overcoming the constraints of the disciplinary/punitive framework with this hybridity, colonized sexuality is a place of identity formation. This identity emerges, then, in the interstices of the clash between a diversity of race, ethnicity, gender, and moral systems. Proscribed sexual practices become secret and residual. Their documentation in the criminal archives of the church and in civil government allows scholars to collect textual fragments about instances of sexual dissidence under colonial repression.

In his analysis of queer transculturation throughout different periods of colonial writing in the Andes, Michael Horswell (2005) asserts that the transcultured writers who produced the colonial indigenous accounts of pre-Columbian cultures occupy a queer space, as read in his comment on the seventeenth-century historian Santacruz Pachacuti:

His singular narrative is barely intelligible to an uninitiated reader of Andean colonial writings by newly converted indigenous historians, whose language, style, and world view can be characterized as queer, that is, as eccentric to the Spanish metropolis’ official histories and suspicious of even his indigenous contemporaries’ versions of history. His text is queer in another sense of the word, that is, as it applies to what I consider to be the “subaltern knowledge” cryptically transmitted by the author in this text, knowledge that challenges his contemporaries’ versions of Inca history, mythology, and, especially, Andean gender and sexual cultures. (140)

Horswell locates the queer colonial in the interstices of cultures and languages. Based on these assertions we can argue that the very process of cultural translation is in fact a queer process because of its refusal to adhere to the imperial dogma of sex and gender and because of its self-conscious suspicions regarding misrepresenting native gender culture. This in-between space recalls the queer bordering space of Gloria Anzaldúa (1999), in which identity consists of a continuous performance of translation itself. Horswell notes that the logic of these queer cultural liminal spaces is characterized by its eccentricity and its suspicion of misrepresentation. The narratives by Andean Christianized indigenous writers to which Horswell refers detail the role of an...