The Reinvention of the Sexual: Radical Sexual Cultures, Politics, and Queer Marxism in Cold War Brazil and Cuba

Abstract

The Cold War in Latin America is marked as much by the spread of leftist revolutionary political organizations and Cuban-inspired guerrillas as by the emergence of radical sexual cultures and politics throughout the region. From Brazilian alternative media and activisms to Cuban painting, sex education, and cinema, in my thesis I study homosexual and gender and sexual non-normative intellectual and artistic production, forms of political action, sex education initiatives, and queer Marxist cultural and political practices in Brazil and Cuba between the 1970s and the early 1980s. In Chapter One, I examine the centrality that the critique of guerrilla sexual politics and socialist cisheteronormativity had in pioneering 1970s homosexual intellectual and cultural production in Brazil and Cuba. I build an archive for this chapter structured around the Brazilian homosexual newspaper Lampião da Esquina and the work of Cuban painter Servando Cabrera Moreno. In Chapter Two, I move on to an analysis of the actual existing alternative radical sexual politics emerging in the late 1970s in both countries and aiming to transform Brazilian and Cuban societies. My focus in this chapter is on a memoir written by Monika Krause, the head of the Cuban Sex Education Program, on the relationship between Cuba and East Germany in the field of sex education, and on the theoretical production and politics of the Homosexual Faction of the Brazilian Trotskyist organization Socialist Convergence. In Chapter Three, I examine why the interrogation of the relation between cisheteronormativity, racialization, and the production of labor took central stage in the formulations of rising black activists and artists in Brazil and Cuba. In this chapter, I focus on the early 1980s intellectual production of the Brazilian black homosexual activist group Adé Dúdu, and on One Way or Another, the posthumous feature-length film of Cuban revolutionary filmmaker Sara Gómez. Queer Marxism plays a double role in my thesis. It is the main field of research in which I situate my dissertation and an object of inquiry within my own archive. Above all, I show in my thesis that the questioning of continuities between twentieth-century socialist gender and sexual epistemologies and politics with bourgeois idealism, of patriarchal social reproduction, and of a racialized brand of cisheteronormativity structuring the division of labor weaves together my archive. Finally, I also argue that the liberationist-form of cultural and political action is not enough to trace the radical sexual cultures and politics of Latin America, nor the broader struggle for sexual freedom that overcame Cold War divisions between capital and twentieth-century socialism. Often informed by existing internationalist networks and shared political commitments, my argument is that a dematerialized consideration of gay liberationism fails to grasp how local dynamics of accumulation and dispossession and revolutionary challenges to them distinctively shaped the political imaginary of the radical sexual cultures and politics emerging in Cold War Latin America