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 (Murua 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...