This symposium will reflect on the new--but not very new--surge of critiques of "gender ideology" in Latin America. Invited guests include scholars and activists in areas of human rights, Afro-diasporic performance, trans and travesti activism, aesthetics and politics.

The event will be in English and Spanish, and simultaneous translation will be provided.

“Back to the Party: Affects, Relationships and Encounters”

Denilson will consider Nicolas Bourriaud’s suggestion that art should be a state of encounter. and will try to read Bailão (“Ball”) (2009), by Marcelo Caetano from the perspective of affects, relationships, and encounters, passing from aesthetics to ethics, that stage ways of life.

"Gender Ideology, religious fundamentalism and democracy in Latin America"

In this presentation, Arguedas-Ramírez will interrogate the role played by the rhetorical construct known as “gender ideology” in the global backlash against gender and sexual politics; and, more broadly, its role against the secular State and the basic elements of democracy in Latin America.

"Vienen por mí / They’re Coming for Me"

Despite ongoing violence against and institutional marginalization of the transgender, travesti, and transsexual community in Chile, the past several decades have witnessed a dramatic proliferation of countercultural artistic production, activism, and public engagement by sexo-dissident subjects. In Vienen por mí, Claudia Rodríguez reflects on these decades of political and artistic activism, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the silencing of travesti voices, and the lingering normativity of Chilean politics. This autobiographical performance links particular moments in the artist’s life to geo-spatial constructions of Chile and the capital, Santiago, and the persistence of a libidinal economy that seeks to treat trans and travesti bodies as “dolls for men who hate women”.

Gabriela Arguedas-Ramírez is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women`s Studies at the Universidad de Costa Rica. She has published articles about the bioethics and biolaw, obstetric power, religious fundamentalism and sexual rights. In 2015 she presented the results of her research on obstetric violence in a thematic audience for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights  (IACHR).

Denilson Lopes is Associate Professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ)/ CAPES.  Author of Afetos, Experiências e Encontros com Filmes Brasileiros Contemporâneos (2016), No Coração do Mundo: Paisagens Transculturais (2012), A Delicadeza: Estética, Experiência e Paisagens (2007), O Homem que Amava Rapazes e Outros Ensaios (2002) and Nós os Mortos: Melancolia e Neo-Barroco(1999). He is currently visiting scholar at Columbia University.

Claudia Rodríguez is a Chilean travesti activist who writes, performs, and gives public readings of her poetry in a range of settings, both in and outside of Chile. Her work promotes the idea that transgender, travesti, and transsexual Latin American activisms, in all their diversity, avail themselves of communicative strategies, artistic practices, and political organizing as methods of personal and social transformation. She is the author of numerous fanzines and self-published materials, including the poetry collection Cuerpos para odiar (2013-14), which was adapted for stage in 2015 under the same name (Dir. Ernesto Orellana), in 2016 she published Dramas pobres with Ediciones del intersticio, and in 2019 has been touring the autobiographical performance, Vienen por mí. 

Joseph M. Pierce is Assistant Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University. His book, Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890-1910, is forthcoming from SUNY Press. He is co-editor with Fernando A. Blanco and Mario Pecheny of Derechos Sexuales en el Sur: Políticas del amor y escrituras disidentes  (2018, Editorial Cuarto Propio), and his work has been published recently in Critical Ethnic Studies,  Taller de Letras,  Revista Hispánica Moderna,  Biography, and  QED, and has also been featured in Indian Country Today. He is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.