Gender, Sexuality, Film, and Media in Latin America: Challenging Representation and Structures

• Published date: 01 March 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20988718
• Author: Kristi M. Wilson,Clara Garavelli
• Date: 01 March 2021
• Subject Matter: Introduction

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X20988718

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 237, Vol. 48 No. 2, March 2021, 4–16

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20988718

© 2021 Latin American Perspectives

4

Gender, Sexuality, Film, and Media in Latin America

Challenging Representation and Structures

by

Kristi M. Wilson and Clara Garavelli

Latin America is a region of contradictions in terms of gender and sexual-

ity. While the United States failed to elect its first female president in 2016,

Latin America has seen more female presidents than any other part of the

world, starting with Isabel Perón in 1974 and continuing with a boom in

female political leaders between 1990 and 2018. While some, such as the anti-

Sandinista Violeta Chamorro in Nicaragua in 1990, represented a setback for

progressive forces, others symbolized their advance. Some made women’s

rights and gender equality a priority. Chile’s Michelle Bachelet worked to

legalize abortion against strong opposition. Under Cristina Fernández de

Kirchner’s leadership, in 2012 Argentina passed the most progressive gen-

der-identity law in the world, requiring doctors to provide free hormone

treatments and gender-reassignment surgery and allowing people to change

their gender on official documents even without surgery.1 Since then, many

laws to protect LGBTQ+ communities, among them equal marriage and

adoption, have been approved throughout the region. However, Latin

America is also home to 7 of the 10 countries with the highest rates of femi-

cide and one of the most precarious regions in terms of LGBTQ+ discrimina-

tion. While abortion still remains illegal in seven Latin American countries,

thanks to the powerful “Green Wave” feminist movement that began in

Argentina in 2018 and has spread to several other countries women stand

poised to win their battle (against the dual logics of Catholicism and patriar-

chy) for full reproductive rights over their bodies.2

In spite of persistent inequality and marginalization, women and LGBTQ+

communities have played a crucial, steady role in Latin American activism

and resistance movements in the wake of the human rights violations commit-

ted during the 1970s and 1980s. Women occupy a wide range of roles in the

power structures in contemporary Latin American democracies: as former

guerrilla combatants, grassroots organizers, political activists, legislators,

Kristi M. Wilson is director of the writing program at Soka University of America and a coordi-

nating editor of Latin American Perspectives. She is the coeditor (with Laura E. Ruberto) of Italian

Neorealism and Global Cinema (2007), coeditor (with Tomas Crowder-Taraborrelli) of Film and

Genocide (2012), and coeditor (with Antonio Traverso) of Political Documentary Cinema in Latin

America (2014). Clara Garavelli is director of studies of modern languages and lecturer in Latin

American studies at the University of Leicester (UK). She is the author of Video experimental

argentino contemporáneo (2014) and coeditor (with Alejandra Torres) of Poéticas del movimiento:

Acercamientos al cine y video experimental argentino (2015). The collective thanks them for organiz-

ing this issue.

988718LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X20988718Latin American PerspectivesWilson and Garavelli / Introduction

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