Affect, Gender and Sexuality in Latin America. (Gender, Development and Social Change)

Abstract

In the book Affect, Gender and Sexuality in Latin America, edited by Cecilia Macón, Mariela Solana and Nayla Luz Vacarezza, the authors rehearse and think about gender and sexualities in Latin America through a particular approach: affects and emotions . Regarding this focus, I highlight three of the several challenges mentioned in its introduction: 1) the need to break down the reason/passion distinction in order to think cognition/feelings/emotions together, as well as the intimate relationship between affects and politics to try to understand their incommensurability; 2) the desire to deconstruct north-south relations and the circulation, translation and appropriation of theoretical proposals from the global north, revealing that it is not a pure mimetic gesture or simple application to the "local" but a translocal and multispatial exercise that interrupts the logics of authenticity or purity in the production of knowledge and which attempts a singular gesture: that of revealing in transvestism and putting in tone with our also impure inventions; and 3) the relevance of thinking, from the gaze of affections, in a context of feminist and neo-fascist advances that dispute the political, the gender order and the keys to sexualities, antagonisms that require a gaze that knows how to read and sniff out the rhythms, atmospheres and aesthetics of temporary configurations and diverse materials to problematize our times. I dwell on three marvelous elements of the book and that allude to these challenges: 1) the immanent relationship between temporalities and materialities; 2) methodologies (or games) and aesthetics; and 3) the knots of power.