UC Riverside

Subcultural Politics examines the presence of minoritarian subjectivities under socio-cultural transitions, the dissemination of HIV/AIDS, and heteronormative assemblages. In this transnational study, I trace how, on the one hand, political and cultural changes in Latin America resulted in progressive and modernizing projects, and, on the other hand, they also produced new subjectivities found at the threshold of life and death. Engaging with visual culture, literary production, and critical theory, I argue that a politics of embodiment is congealed at the intersection of neoliberal state reforms, the dissemination of HIV, and juridical laws that fail to account for minoritarian identities. Three specific vectors of difference, virality, indigeneity and transsexuality, I suggest, unpack the paradoxical transitions and structures of Chilean and Mexican national imaginaries. Chapter 1 dissects the dissemination of HIV in Chile and analyzes the complicit relationship between the state and neoliberal reforms. In Chapter 2, I propose a reading through Jacques Rancière’s idea of the political and Judith Butler’s contention of corporeal (un)intelligibility suggesting that Mexican discourse in the 90s produced a new subjectivity—the contaminated transvestite—that renders visible the limits of Mexican political representation. Further, in Chapter 3, I postulate an alliance of queer studies and indigenous studies that operates at a distance but which also unravels hegemonic assemblages of power imprinted since coloniality in present Mexico. Finally, in Chapter 4, I contend that the transsexual body makes visible the relationship between law and language in Chilean society showing how the sexualized other is expulsed from historical narratives and inflicted, symbolically and materially, by linguistic violence.