"Between Utopian Longings and Everyday Failures": Imagining a Latin American Cuir Future

Abstract

At present, the figure of the muxe occupies a queer position trapped between narratives of death and life that reaffirm both a notion of straight time and a state of coloniality. Through Guadalupe (2012), a graphic novel by the Brazilian poet Angélica Freitas and the cartoonist Odyr Bernardi, and the Mexican film Carmín tropical (2014) by Rigoberto Perezcano, I explore the possibility of a Latin American queer future that envisions other emancipatory models that do not reproduce hegemonic western LGBTQ identity politics. I argue that the possibility for this Latin American queer future lies in understanding queerness as a decolonial project that is always-already imbricated in a process of translation, linked to questions of temporality and space. I analyze the figure of the muxe as an outcome of strange temporalities and space—that is, as a result of puzzling past, present and future in a single moment of time. This allows me to detach the muxe from identity and to explore how their positionality could potentially help defuse a binary (male) hierarchy implicit in the state of coloniality through a queer temporality that ultimately could lead to what I call a cuir Latin American future.