GLR May-June 2025

organizer Malva Solís, who arrived in Buenos Aires in 1943 in search of queer and trans femme possibility, recounts routine in cidents of police harassment and arrest in her memoir Mi recorda torio . By 1948, she and her friends formed the short-lived mutual aid group Maricas Unidas Argentinas (Argentine Queers United), which distributed funds and resources to those imprisoned for their illicit sexualities and gendered embodiments. Out of these experiences of imprisonment, they invented a form of queer argot knownas carrilche in an attempt to communicate without draw ing the attention of undercover police. To write of the ribald excitement many found in lusting after agents of the state without opening out toward the paradoxes of these desires would be to neglect the enduring violence that these histories prefigure. Amid the early rise of Peronism around mid century, hygienist campaigns led to large-scale arrests, including the apprehension of 100 “ amorales ” (“immorals”) in 1954. The coups d’état and military regimes that marked the 1960s and ’70s further compounded state violence against queer citizens. These conditions gave rise to the formation, in 1971, of the Frente de Liberación Homosexual (Homosexual Liberation Front, or FLH ), a largely leftist, horizontal coalition that linked the oppression of sexual and gender dissidents to larger critiques of imperialism, capitalism, the military, and the state. As articulated in a single issue newspaper published in 1973, the collective set out to “achieve the end of our persecution, both in customs and when they take state form, as in the case of anti-homosexual police edicts.” Still today, the violent apparatuses of the carceral state continue to imperil queer life in Argentina, as in the gruesome murder of Sofía Fernández, a linguistics professor and trans woman, by a group of police officers in 2023. The preeminent scholars Santiago Joaquín Insausti and Pablo Ben have recently put forward that, in present-day Argentina, “public opinion has come to imagine hostility against LGBT peo ple as alien to Argentine culture and circumscribed to an excep tional dictatorial period between 1976 and 1983.” They connect this pretense of sexual tolerance, which erases experiences of po litical violence both leading up to and in the wake of dictatorial rule, to the nation’s perpetual self-likening to European liberal ism, and thus a means of reinforcing an idealized image of white ness. But the enduring history of anti-queer oppression demands a confrontation with the institutions that carry out compulsory regimes of sexuality and gender and, to that end, gay artists’ fas cination with those who deliver their blows. From there, Larco and Ballvé Piñero’s parallel histories of image-making render ex plicit the paradoxes of desire and fantasy, of those longings deemed ill-suited and unfit. R EFERENCES Demaría, Gonzalo. Cacería . Buenos Aires: Planeta, 2020. Demaría, Gonzalo, Claudio Larrea, and Jesse Rothbard. “‘Los Cuerpos del Delito.’” Revista de Estudios y Políticas de Género 10 (April 2024): 255–71. Insausti, Santiago Joaquín and Pablo Ben. “Homonationalism, LGBT desaparecidos , and the politics of queer memory in Ar gentina.” Memory Studies 16, no. 1 (February 2023): 66–84. Schneider, Jeffrey. Uniform Fantasies: Soldiers, Sex, and Queer Eman cipation in Imperial Germany . Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023. Stanley, Eric A. and Nat Smith, eds. Captive Genders: Trans Embodi ment and the Prison Industrial Complex , 2nd ed. AK Press, 2015. May–June 2025

v ty ve ears Celebrating Se enty-Five Y s

BY NIK h The Dad Rock T

KO STRATIS oman hat Made Me a W

BY MEG Why Alanis M

AN VOLPERT Morissette Matters

ng reamin ing, Lounging, and Day The Politics of Slack dr ndolence Revolting I

ransLat in Queer and Tr

re inxCultur

ALEZ BY MARCOS GONS

s ess ess.com | @utexaspr www.utexaspr s texas pres university of

35