The homocapitalist politics of queer tourism: global LGBTQ+ activism, queer travel, and other queer mobilities in Buenos Aires, Argentina

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article sheds ethnographic light on the homocapitalist politics of queer tourism in Argentina. Tracing the growing incorporation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ+) inclusion into the country’s tourist offer as a “global brand,” it interrogates how different forms of access to queer mobility, liberation, and privilege unfold across different “zones of encounter” within the landscape of queer tourism in Buenos Aires. I suggest that while homocapitalist investments in queer tourism strongly resonate with an entrepreneurial class of global(ized) elite LGBTQ+ activists and small business owners who are able to “sell liberation” by forging partnerships with tourism authorities and corporations, their effects are more ambivalent for those who are unable and/or unwilling to appropriate the products and processes of globalization in pursuit of their own goals. These tensions come to the fore in the city’s LGBTQ+ nightlife, where encounters between local sexualities and the mobile subjectivities of Global North LGBTQ+ tourists take place against the backdrop of global economic crisis, economic precarity, and inequalities within lesbian, gay, bisexual, travesti, trans, transexual, and intersex (LGBTTTI) communities.