This thesis offers an assessment of the influence, importance and impact of a body of films from the mid 1970s to date that, it argues, constitute a Latin American Queer Cinema. It is divided into two sections. The first aims to articulate a theorisation of three main issues surrounding homosexuality in different Latin American societies: the first chapter analyses notions of gender and sexuality that are paramount in the construction of such identities for queer subjects in Latin America. The second chapter deals with issues of male effeminacy, how the stereotype of the maricon has become synonymous with homosexuality in the popular imaginary, and how it might be reclaimed as authentic. Chapter three analyses issues of masculine homosexuality in a series of films in which the main protagonists do not correspond to this stereotype -- the closet and passing are studied as are notions of hetero-patriarchy and masculinity. Chapter four focuses on the relationship between mestizo identity and homosexuality, gay identity and the race-class nexus, technologies of the body, and gay youth identities. The second main section analyses cinematic representations of the transvestite experience and how the figure of the transvestite has been utilised in cinema as an instrument to not only contest heteronormativity, but also to refine the different dimensions of sexuality that mainstream culture understands as related to biological sex. Chapter five studies issues of transvestism in Cuba in terms of both the geographical spaces in which trans subjects and their identities operate, and also the way that camp, as a queer strategy, is reappropriated by such subjects for political/politicised ends. Chapter six moves the argument to the Mexican Isthmus and explores the way that trans subjects are considered to have a third gender identity separate from the biological man/woman. Finally chapter seven explores cross-dressing and transvestism in fiction cinema and how such films try to challenge notions of trans identity and even queer identity, but ultimately fail to achieve this as they all seem to subscribe to notions of gender and sexuality as understood and assimilated within heteronormativity.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:526979 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Subero, Gustavo |
| Publisher | University of Manchester |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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