Argentine Intimacies

Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890−1910

Joseph M. Pierce

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781438476827, 9781438476810
• eBook ISBN: 9781438476834
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Revisits a foundational moment in Argentine history to demonstrate how the crisis of modernity opened up new possibilities for imagining kinship otherwise.

Winner of the 2020 Best Book in the Nineteenth Century Award presented by the Nineteenth Century Section of the Latin American Studies Association

As Argentina rose to political and economic prominence at the turn of the twentieth century, debates about the family, as an ideological structure and set of lived relationships, took center stage in efforts to shape the modern nation. In Argentine Intimacies, Joseph M. Pierce draws on queer studies, Latin American studies, and literary and cultural studies to consider the significance of one family in particular during this period of intense social change: Carlos, Julia, Delfina, and Alejandro Bunge. One of Argentina's foremost intellectual and elite families, the Bunges have had a profound impact on Argentina's national culture and on Latin American understandings of education, race, gender, and sexual norms. They also left behind a vast archive of fiction, essays, scientific treatises, economic programs, and pedagogical texts, as well as diaries, memoirs, and photography. Argentine Intimacies explores the breadth of their writing to reflect on the intersections of intimacy, desire, and nationalism, and to expand our conception of queer kinship. Approaching kinship as an interface of relational dispositions, Pierce reveals the queerness at the heart of the modern family. Queerness emerges not as an alternative to traditional values so much as a defining feature of the state project of modernization.

cHaPteR oNe

CARLOS OCTAVIO BUNGE

QUEER DESIRE AND FAMILY FICTIONS

“Usted no es hombre para estas cosas” (“You are not a man for these things”; cited in Cárdenas and Payá Familia 214). That is how the presiding medical officer at Argentina’s Escuela Naval Militar (Naval Academy) diagnosed Carlos Octavio Bunge, then fifteen years old, when he was interned for suffering a nervous breakdown in 1890. His father, Octavio, had sent him there after being expelled from the prestigious Colegio del Salvador (College of Our Savior) for insubordination.1 He was supposed to learn discipline, to obey, to calm his rebellious nature. But the rigors of military life proved too much for the young man. He hated having to wake up early and, what is more, the other cadets made fun of him for writing poetry to pass the time. He was not there to scribble verses, but to become a man, and he had failed to prove himself as a man. In letters to his mother from those months, he would describe himself in a state of existential crisis. He did not know who he was, or what he was supposed to be. But he did know that he was not like the other cadets, “not a man for these things.” More than simply marking him as unfit for military life, it is a diagnosis that marks him as queer.

Perhaps because of this failure, he would dedicate himself to discovering the inner workings of Argentine society, its history, and its psychology over the course of his life. He would go on to become a prolific and celebrated social scientist, even if today he appears a minor figure. The desire to prevent or correct social maladies was a touchstone in Bunge’s work, which ranged from the social sciences to jurisprudence to fiction and pedagogy. Along with other positivist intellectuals he was committed to ordering a world in flux. The intense modernization of the turn of the century led to class conflict and political revolutions, new forms of living and loving, new bodies to classify, new (and old) desires to name. He studied law at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (University of Buenos Aires) and upon graduating in 1898 was contracted by the municipal government of Buenos Aires to write a report on European school systems. Crossing the Atlantic for the first time, in 1899 he arrived in Southampton and spent time in both London and Oxford. He relished the dinners in Hyde Park as well as conversations with the students and the tutors, who were celebrities of the British intellectual world. Outside of Argentina, he found an environment that was more open to his interests and perhaps more accepting of his ambivalences. He would write in red ink from Oxford, “varios son los casos en que he tenido aquí lo que llama Thackeray ‘a romantical friendship at first sight’ ” (“on several occasions I have had here what Thackeray calls ‘a romantical friendship at first sight’ ”; cited in Cárdenas and Payá Familia 328). These friendships were brief but intense, and, as I show in chapter 3, punctuated by a series of self-portraits that he had commissioned—evidence of his desire to belong and to be remembered—and which he distributed as mementos upon his departure. Bunge continued to Germany and later Spain, where he met and sought guidance from Miguel de Unamuno, who had published his important essay on the Spanish national character En torno al casticismo only four years earlier (1895).2

To Argentina Bunge returned triumphant, brimming with confidence and sporting the latest fashions. He published his findings under the title El espíritu de la educación (The Spirit of Education) a probing inquiry into the connections between racial mixing, history, and pedagogy, which was well received in his homeland. His contemporaries celebrated his brilliance and his charm. A precocious talent, Bunge was offered a position at the Universidad de Buenos Aires where he taught literature, law, and education. Tireless, in 1903 he would publish two book-length essays, Nuestra América: Ensayo de psicología social (Our America: Essay of Social Psychology) and Principios de psicología individual y social (Principles of Individual and Social Psychology), in addition to two novels, La novela de la sangre (The Novel of Blood) and Xarcas Silenciario (Xarcas the Silent). By all accounts, he was a new force to be reckoned with among Argentina’s elite.3 The enigmatic young man took the Argentine intellectual world by storm at the turn of the century.

Manuel Gálvez, a prolific novelist and memoirist—who would become Bunge’s brother-in-law in 1910 upon marrying Delfina Bunge—narrates this moment as contradictory for Carlos Octavio:

Su fecundidad, su talento, la originalidad de su espíritu y la novedad de sus ideas, inquietaban en el mundo de la alta sociedad y en el de las letras. Agréguese con todo esto, un singular tipo de hombre del Norte, una distinción aristocrática, cierto dandismo en el vestir y un temperamento rebelde y agresivo, y se comprenderá que, durante algunos años, Carlos Octavio Bunge fuese “un caso.”

His fecundity, his talent, the originality of his spirit and the novelty of his ideas, disquieted in the world of high society and in that of literature. Add to all of that, a singular type of Northern man, an aristocratic distinction, a certain dandyism of dress, and a rebellious and aggressive temperament, and one will understand that, for a few years, Carlos Octavio Bunge was “a case.” (Gálvez, Recuerdos 1: 283)

In this view, it is Bunge’s physical presence, in addition to his ideas, that disturbs the Porteño elite.4 Not only his application of innovative methodologies, but also his “spirit.” Gálvez recalls the residual effects of Bunge’s “temperament” more than the content of his intellectual production; he seems to have been more struck by Bunge’s “dandified” fashion sense and “aggressive” personality than by his writing. Here, Bunge is a mystifying presence to be contemplated, studied, and perhaps avoided. He belongs to the elite by virtue of his family background and his Germanic lineage, but he remains “a case.” Many of the central contradictions of Bunge’s life are present in this description. He was quite obviously a talented writer, yet there was something indecipherable about him, something felt but impossible to say.

The insinuation present in Gálvez’s memoir, as well as in contemporary accounts of Bunge’s life, is that of a man tormented by an inner strife.5 This unrest, as it is often described, served to inspire his copious and often frenetic scholarly production, and prompted his oscillation between patriotic celebrations of argentinidad (Argentineness) and a disheartened ambivalence regarding the national project of modernization. For example, contemporary historian Osvaldo Bazán portrays Bunge as “la luz intelectual de principios de siglo XX, el niño mimado que tenía a su disposición los teatros, las revistas y el Estado para difundir su pensamiento, el más bello de los pensadores de la elite” (“the intellectual light of the early twentieth century, the coddled child who had at his disposal the theaters, the magazines, and the State to disseminate his thought, the most beautiful man of the intellectual elite”; 158). The fact that Bunge’s position as a member of the elite granted him access and opportunities is not the point, however, as Bazán concludes: “[Bunge] no salió jamás de un armario que él mismo ayudó a construir” (“[Bunge] never came out of a closet that he himself helped to build”; 158). Bazán describes him as a closeted homosexual who could not find the courage to “come out”—who in fact contributed to entrenching homophobic discourses and institutions at the turn of the century. Disappointed, Bazán once more diagnoses Bunge, but this time through the lens of contemporary gay and lesbian studies.

I have no interest in discovering the truth of Bunge’s sexuality. I am, however, drawn to his queerness because it speaks to the contradictory ways in which gender, sexuality, and kinship were understood and enacted at the turn of the century in Argentina. I mean this in three specific ways. First, Bunge’s physical presence, mannerisms, and lifelong bachelorhood, in addition to family lore, have led historians and cultural critics to tether him to the indecipherability, the unstableness, of what we now call queer, at least in the Anglophone academe. He may or may not have been “homosexual” but he was certainly thought of—both in 1900 and the twenty-first century—as raro (strange, queer). Second, and more importantly, his work, and in particular his fiction, is rife with narratives that posit, at times favorably, the failure of heteronormative romance. These texts reveal turn-of-the-century anxieties over gender roles, family stability, and sexuality. That is, his creative work questions just what it means to maintain the hegemonic sexual economy on which upper-class society depended. Third, his fiction queers the turn of the century literary canon in Argentina with its refusal to provide normative answers to these cultural anxieties, instead oscillating between a nostalgic yearning for a premodern past and a speculative projection of what modes of gender performance, sexuality, and kinship will emerge in the new century. The queerness of his work is not found in its portrayal of sexual acts or in constructing sexually dissident characters, not in its allegorical renderings of social decline, but in the way it provides a mode of questioning gender norms, how it depends on romantic failure, and is itself a space that yearns for and gestures toward erotic attachments that consistently evade classification.

In this chapter I explore how Bunge’s writing, rather than his presumed identity, does not fit normative understandings of sexuality. To grapple with these contradictions, I focus on two of Bunge’s most important works of fiction: his most widely read novel, La novela de la sangre (1903) and the short story collection, Thespis (1907). Both hinge on modeling romantic attachments for a public, in Bunge’s view, that needed to be educated in the art of proper romance. And yet, these texts also question the possibility, indeed the desirability, of just such a model. Even though Bunge traffics in narratives of heterosexual romance, his texts, as I demonstrate, actually undermine the viability of normative sexuality. His narratives consistently reject, fail, or disavow their place in this plot of heteronormativity. My central claim in this chapter is that by paying attention to these moments of failure and rejection we can uncover a different Bunge, a man who is not simply a “case” or a “closeted homosexual” but a complex writer whose work allows us to rethink the relationships between queerness, desire, and narratives of national belonging.

FAMILY ROMANCE AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY

Before turning to Bunge’s fiction, it is important to contextualize the narration of family ties and romantic attachments in the fiction of the turn of the century. As noted in the Introduction, since the colonial period, and especially over the course of the nineteenth century, the patriarchal criollo family has served as the central organizing principle of Latin American societies. Rooted in Catholic doctrine and concerned with the biological reproduction of ideal national subjects, a wide range of social actors began to question the family model starting in the 1870s. This period witnessed the reorganization of urban space as conventillos (tenement houses) were carved out of upper-class homes left vacant in the old Colonial center, and the elite began to move toward more “hygienic” neighborhoods of Belgrano and Palermo. Social norms were changing as well, with Socialists and Anarchists proposing radical new ways of living and organizing the economy, threatening the very class structures on which upper-class hegemony was built. And women began to move into the public sphere, asserting the right to education, work, equal treatment under the law, and eventually to vote. Cultural expressions, too, from literature to theater to music harnessed this anxiety over the increasing cosmopolitanism of the turn of the century. In particular, naturalist literature provided a crucial forum for these debates.

By the 1880s authors had begun to question earlier forms of allegorical representation of family unity, and to diagnose, treat, and attempt to eliminate nonreproductive sexualities as modes of feeling and being that did not contribute to the national cause. Novelists from what would come to be known as the Generation of 1880 such as Eugenio Cambaceres, Francisco Sicardi, and Julián Martel narrated nonnormative bodies and desires as aberrations that would debilitate the national stock.6 It is here that queer practices and dissident sexualities become explicitly treated as a threat to the nation. Creative writers and scientists alike began to see “degenerate” bodies and desires as anathema to the concept of the nation as family. If at mid-century the family model served an allegorical function to model national unity, as Sommer argues, at the turn of the century, it was more frequently used as a metonymical representation of illness. Following Nouzeilles, in the literature of the turn of the century, “la familia fue el espacio en el que convergieron el interés político, la vigilancia higienista y el saber eugenésico. Motor de la reproducción biológica y moral, la institución familiar conectaba el cuerpo individual y el organismo social al mismo tiempo que regulaba las fronteras entre lo privado y lo publico” (“the family was the space in which political interest, hygienic disciplining and eugenic knowledge converged. As a motor of biological and moral reproduction, the family institution connected the individual body and the social organism at the same time as it regulated the borders between public and private”; 41). Here the crisis of modernity is a crisis of family—what family means, how it is to be maintained, what dangers are posed to it both within national boundaries and from abroad. This is a chain of social anxiety that threatened to derail the positivist belief in progress and social advancement through science, and which endangered the reproductive demands of the nation. Particularly salient for Argentina, though not exclusively so, turn-of-the-century narratives supported and were often directly linked to the politics of blanqueamiento (racial whitening).7 As historian Donna Guy has shown, high rates of child abandonment and illegitimate births, in addition to legalized prostitution and the specter of la trata de blancas (white slavery) all contributed to the notion—particularly for the elite—that in spite of Argentina’s relative economic clout, modernization had come at the expense of the familial stability of its colonial past (Sex and Danger 37–44).

It is in this context that the Bunge’s novels matter. Members of the upper class sought to maintain hegemony by promoting an idealized notion of family life linked to domesticity, social hygiene, and patriotism. The complicity between medicine, the disciplining of bodies, and the entrenchment of a traditional model of kinship, sheds light on the role of literary representation at the service of the national project. While Bunge’s fiction questions how the nation comes to depend on heteronormative romance, it is not politically progressive. He directly participates in the scientific racism of the turn of the century.8 His novels locate ethnically dubious subjects (such as gauchos and Italians) along a spectrum of racial degeneracy that he saw as contrary to the promise of Argentina’s future as a white nation. Bunge’s racism is plainly evident in his expository, scientific writing, described in detail in chapter 5, and his fiction also has a decidedly white supremacist basis. In studying it I am by no means condoning this racism. On the contrary, in order to understand the racism that was central not only to Bunge’s work, but to turn-of-the-century literature as a whole, we need to be able to examine the interlocking threads of kinship, desire, and the body (as raced, sexed, and gendered) that emerge as they are framed by the family romance. The anxieties of Argentine modernity are essentially played out through the body, and the definitional indeterminacy of Mestizo (mixed-race), queer, and working-class bodies plays a crucial role in the national project and its ideologies. Bunge’s white supremacy may be par for the course among the Argentine elite, but by situating these discourses of race, gender, sexuality, and family in context and in dialogue, we can better understand how power is enacted through the corporal imaginaries of the late nineteenth century, imaginaries that still hold sway in contemporary debates on immigration, nationalism, and culture.

Bunge’s fiction is a site of conflicting desires and attachments. If we are to consider not simply the representational value of normative kinship in his work, but also the types of desires that emerge in his writing, then the way that his characters belong becomes crucial. This is because Bunge’s narratives serve as an important archive for rethinking the relationship between blood, intimacy, and the structures of kinship. His fiction is invested in proposing models of filiation and futurity, and yet, these models are vexed by a constant sense of inadequacy and failure. His work dwells on characters who desire to contribute to the successful future of the national project (which is one of racial whitening, capitalist expansion, and cultural homogenization), but who also relate queerly to others, to the state, and to its demand for reproductive futurity. This is not to say that Bunge proposes an alternative queer family to the models of national romance that predominate in the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. As I make clear in the Introduction, I am not seeking out kinship formations that diverge from the norm, but rather those that reveal how the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction The Bunge Family: Queerness, Kinship, and Modernity
• Chapter One Carlos Octavio Bunge: Queer Desire and Family Fictions
• Chapter Two Sisters Writing, Sisters Reading: The Diaries of Julia and Delfina Bunge
• Chapter Three Spectral Desires: Queering the Family Album
• Chapter Four Family Pedagogy: The Institutionalization of Kinship
• Chapter Five National Essays, Home Economics: The Argentine Oligarchy in Decline
• Epilogue Toward a Queer Latin American Studies
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Back Cover