Reframing Identities in Argentine Documentary Cinema: The Emergence of LGBT People as Political Subjects in Rosa Patria (Loza, 2008–2009) and Putos peronistas (Cesatti, 2011)

• Author: Guillermo Olivera
• Published date: 01 March 2021
• Date: 01 March 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X20907117
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X20907117

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 237, Vol. 48 No. 2, March 2021, 155–175

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20907117

© 2020 Latin American Perspectives

155

Reframing Identities in Argentine Documentary Cinema

The Emergence of LGBT People as Political Subjects in Rosa

Patria (Loza, 2008–2009) and Putos peronistas (Cesatti, 2011)

by

Guillermo Olivera

Translated by

Mariana Ortega-Breña

Using film semiotics, queer studies, and discourse theory as developed by Laclau, Mouffe,

and Žižek, an enunciative and rhetorical analysis of Rosa Patria (Pink Motherland)

(Santiago Loza, 2008–2009) and Putos peronistas, cumbia del sentimiento (Peronist

Faggots, Cumbia Feeling) (Rodolfo Cesatti, 2011) points to the changes in the political and

cinematic frames that have enabled the transformation of LGBT people into political

subjects in the context of the Argentine documentary of the twenty-first century. The

metaenunciative and metadiegetic marks made evident by reframing processes in audio-

visual texts can be read as a discursive transition from “element” to “moment” and as

cinematic-reflexive symbolization of the traumatic event posed by the dislocation or antag-

onism that institutes these identities in situated local contexts, contexts contemporary with

the struggles for diverse sexual citizenship that led to the promulgation of Argentina’s

Equal Marriage (2010) and Gender Identity (2012) Laws.

Utilizando herramientas de la semiótica del cine, la teoría queer y la teoría del discurso de

Laclau, Mouffe y Žižek, un análisis enunciativo y retórico de Rosa Patria (Santiago Loza,

2008 -2009) y Putos peronistas, cumbia del sentimiento (Rodolfo Cesatti, 2011) se con-

centra en cambios de marcos políticos y cinematográficos que hacen posible la transformación

de las personas LGBT en sujetos políticos en el documental argentino del siglo XXI. Esas

marcas metaenunciativas y metadiegéticas que los procesos de re-enmarque dejan en los textos

audiovisuales pueden leerse como pasaje discursivo de “elemento” a “momento” y como

simbolización cinematográfico-reflexiva del acontecimiento traumático de la dislocación o

antagonismo que instituye a dichas identidades en contextos locales situados, contextos con-

temporáneos a las luchas por una ciudadanía sexual diversa conducentes a la promulgación

de la Ley de Matrimonio Igualitario (2010) y la Ley de Identidad de Género (2012).

Keywords: Argentine documentary cinema, Sexuality and gender, Frames of intelligibility

and recognition, Intersectional identities, Sex-gender identity rhetoric

Guillermo Olivera is a semiotician (National University of Córdoba, Argentina) with a Ph.D. in

critical theory and cultural studies from the University of Nottingham (England) and a lecturer in

Latin American studies at the University of Stirling (Scotland). He taught at the Universities of

Nottingham and London (Queen Mary) after working as a researcher and profesor adjunto (associ-

ate/adjunct professor) of semiotics at the National University of Córdoba. He has published

articles, translations, annotations, and interviews on television, cinema, and visual culture, semi-

otics, political discourse, and LGBT identity politics. Mariana Ortega-Breña is a freelance transla-

tor based in Mexico City.

907117LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X20907117Latin American PerspectivesOlivera / Reframing Identities in Argentine Documentary Cinema

research-article2020

156 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

This paper explores the changes of frame brought about by the New

Argentine Cinema and the sociocultural and political conditions of post-default

Argentina in response to the rearticulation of subjects previously “minoritized”

(minorisiert [Schaffer, 2008]) and oppressed for their sex-gender condition and/

or for their sexuality. More specifically, I analyze two documentaries (Rosa

Patria [Santiago Loza, 2008–2009] and Putos peronistas, cumbia del sentimiento

[Rodolfo Cesatti, 2011]) and their use of cinematographic framing and refram-

ing of the subjects’ “right to the city” (Lefebvre, 1975 [1967]; Molano Camargo,

2016) and citizenship in both a spatial-urban and doubly political sense—in the

political sense, first, because these processes are analyzed in relation to their

processes of transformation into subjects of the public sphere, relevant to poli-

tics, and, secondly, because what is analyzed is the critical predicaments pro-

posed by these documentaries leading to demands for full citizenship in a

context of deep economic and institutional crisis, demands that eventually

resulted in the reactivation of sexual citizenship through the promulgation of

the Equal Marriage (2010) and Gender Identity (2012) Laws.

Both the urban space and the problematization of sexual self-identity within

the identity intersections of class, gender, and sexuality play a key role in these

documentaries, and these are the central aspects of my analysis. The main argu-

ment is that the emergence of situated LGBT identities (i.e., linked to specific

local and historical conditions) is recorded via the cinematic visibilization of per-

sonal and collective identification. In this regard, this paper is geared toward

Latin American contemporary theoretical-political debates on sexualities and

genders to be taken not in isolation but in the place they occupy along with other

conditions such as social class, ethnicity, age, nation/region, and political affinity,

as well as the roles that sexualities and genders occupy in the discursive and

material construction not only of experiences but of the identity categories them-

selves (e.g., French and Bliss, 2007). I particularly focus on the central place

acquired by both the category of “identity” and identity politics in Latin American

academic and political debates about sexualities and genders during recent

decades (French and Bliss, 2007: 22). Thus, we start from the specific meaning

that “queerness” acquires in such contexts, where said category indicates not

merely what is construed as “sexually odd,” unconventional, or “weird” or free-

floating becomings always in flux but situated identity/ies, given that identity

politics have always been central to how “queerness” has historically been con-

structed, particularly in the Argentine case.

These processes of collective identification and self-narration are political not

because they are social or because they reinforce or destabilize concrete identi-

ties that are already socially sedimented but because they radically institute new

identities: processes of identification are political not because of their content

but because they are in themselves “instituting acts” (Laclau, 1994: 4) situated at

the very foundation of any given, recognizable social identity. These processes

are analyzed, as previously mentioned, within a body of LGBT documentaries

of strong political imprint shot immediately before the promulgation of the

Equal Marriage (2010) and Gender Identity (2012) Laws during a historical

moment of intense debate regarding the social and legal recognition of these

subjects: in a manner that is both effective and transformative, Rosa Patria and

Putos peronistas, cumbia del sentimiento articulate sex-gender differences in a fash-

ion that is radically different from previous representations of LGBT subjects.1