We Don't Need Another Hero: Queering Representations of Dissident Sexualities from the Recent Argentine Past

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present a view of the contributions that literary representations can offer to our understanding of the past, particularly in relation to subjects who occupied marginal positions in the time and place under study. Using as an example the case of queer subjects during the past military regime in Argentina (1976-1983), I will consider how their narratives are affected by some of the more recurrent tropes in historiographical representations, and how their approach through literature can serve as an invitation to multiply the potential of (his)stories about our past. To achieve this purpose, the paper starts by reviewing the notions of “normal” or “professional” historiography, following contemporary theorists and philosophers of history. Then it moves on to incorporate some of the contributions that a queer perspective can offer to historiography, focusing particularly on the notions of agency, spatiality, temporality, identities and methodology. As case studies or examples, I will refer mainly to three (hi)stories that illustrate the lives of queer subjects during that period: Mi recordatorio (My Remembrance), by Malva (2011), El diablo en el pelo (The Devil in the Hair) (2003), by Roberto Echavarren, and La brasa en la mano (Embers in the Hand) (1983), by Oscar Hermes Villordo. By way of conclusion, I will defend not a replacement or disdain of “normal” historiography, but the multiplication, broadening and dislocation of sources and resources for the representation of the past: various subjects, forms, contents and dynamics between one and the other, for the queering of historiography, and of history itself.