‘On the Shores of Politics’: La Raulito’s (dis)figurations

Abstract

This article offers a contribution to an under-researched aspect of the history of Argentine cinema, namely that of LGBT visibility. It argues that even though there was no affirmative LGBT identity discourse in the country’s film theory and practice of the 1960s and 1970s, there was indeed an onscreen indirect inclusion of the non-heteronormative. It offers a close reading of cross-dressing, mobility and space in La Raulito/Little Raoul (Murúa 1974–5), through the analysis of performative figures regulated by the order of abjection. Departing from other critical readings of the character’s identity as ‘socially inassimilable’, ‘ambiguous’ or ‘undefined’, it contends that she is a site of ‘passage across gender and sexuality’ that is regulated by incommensurability and undecidability – double exclusion and double participation – rather than gender ambivalence or polysemy. On the one hand, it argues that drag subverts the very intelligibility of the protagonist’s identity by breaking the (hetero) normative continuity sex/gender and identity/gender performance. On the other hand, it focuses on how the sexual abjection of lesbianism itself as ‘lived unintelligibility’ operates as proscription and erasure rather than prohibition or repression. In this sense, it constitutes a case study of how the historico-filmic frames of intelligibility of the period abject and unname sexuality (lesbian childhood/adolescence) through gender (i.e., through the socially visible/framable forms of gender inversion and gender crossing for social survival as intelligible cultural configurations).