Ángeles Vicente’s 1911 sapphic scandals: queer intermedia and transatlantic gender history

Abstract

ABSTRACT Ángeles Vicente (1878–1918) was a Spanish-born author who lived most of her life in Argentina. Starting in 1907, she was a prolific author and released several important texts during the Spanish Silver Age (1898–1936). In 1911, she was involved in several scandals, related to gender and sexuality, which received extensive coverage at the time of their occurrence. This paper explores Vicente’s scandals in 1911, drawing on the methodology of queer intermedia, to explore networks of queer world-building at the dawn of identarian politics related to sexual orientation and gender expression. Using the past as a resource to explore potential futures, we argue that understanding the lives and work from queer figures of past eras, particularly in different cultural and social locations, is vital to creating a robust knowledge of the universe of possibilities that accompany gender and sexual non-normativity.