Maricas: Queer Cultures and State Violence in Argentina and Spain, 1942–1982

Maricas Javier FernÁndez-Galeano explores the erotic lives and legal battles of Argentine and Spanish gender- and sexually nonconforming people between the 1940s and 1980s, challenging state repression and sexual violence through alternative models of identification. It incorporates non-elite actors and demonstrates the many ways queer communities and individuals fought against violence, rejected pathologization, and contested imposed, denigrating categorization.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 342 pages
Publication date: 01 June 2024
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press

Javier FernÁndez-Galeano's Maricas: Erotic Lives and Legal Battles of Argentine and Spanish Gender- and Sexually Nonconforming People explores the erotic lives and legal struggles of Argentine and Spanish gender- and sexually nonconforming individuals who carved out their own spaces in metropolitan and rural cultures between the 1940s and the 1980s. In both countries, agents of the state, judiciary, and medical communities employed "social danger" theory to measure individuals' latent criminality, conflating sexual and gender nonconformity with legal transgression. Argentine and Spanish queer and trans communities rejected this mode of external categorization and constructed alternative models of identification that remediated state repression and sexual violence through the pursuit of the sublime, be it erotic, religious, or cultural. Drawing on Catholicism and camp cultures that stretched across the Atlantic, these communities constructed alternative models of identification that remediated state repression and sexual violence through the pursuit of the sublime, be it erotic, religious, or cultural. The first English-language monograph on the history of twentieth-century state policies and queer cultures in Argentina and Spain, Maricas demonstrates the many ways queer communities and individuals in Argentina and Spain fought against violence, rejected pathologization, and contested imposed, denigrating categorization. The book incorporates non-elite actors, including working-class and rural populations, recruits, prisoners, folk music fans, and defendants' mothers, among others.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781496239556