Introduction (original) (raw)

2021, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies

We could trace the origins of this special issue in multiple ways, but we begin this introduction by recognizing two encuentros that took place in May 2015. One, Queer Hemisphere / América Queer, was a two-day conference held at the University of California, Santa Cruz and organized by Marcia Ochoa, Deborah Vargas, and Kirstie Dorr. The other was a breakfast meeting convened by María Amelia Viteri and Fernando Blanco during the Latin American Studies Association congress held in San Juan, Puerto Rico. These encuentros, along with earlier versions in Brazil and Ecuador, provided the impetus for the formation of the Cuir Américas Working Group, or, in Spanish, Grupo de Trabajo Feminista/Queer/Cuir. This constellation of people, in turn, has provided both the affective and the intellectual support that has made this special issue possible (cf. Viteri 2017). This publication is not the singular manifestation of a particular moment or agenda. Rather, it emerged from a long history of conversations, meetings, and reflections about the circulation of queer theory, its privileging of certain languages and bodies, its epistemological underpinnings, and yet the embodied encounters through which lo cuir has been at once an emancipatory promise and a method of subjugation for the peoples of Abya Yala / Latin America. We could also trace a genealogy of queer theory's circulation in Latin America. But such an exercise would not only replicate the very epistemological framing that we seek to question here; it would also lend credence to the idea that GLQ 27:3