Attuning to “Low Voices”: <i>Maricas</i> Speaks Volumes

In Javier Fernández-Galeano's meticulously researched Maricas: Queer Cultures and State Violence in Argentina and Spain, 1942 – 1982, the introductory chapter offers a striking quote that establishes the interpretive stance of this historical work, elaborately layered with queer and trans archives: “As the Spanish author Juan Gil-Albert put it in 1955, ‘Speaking in a low voice is still speaking, but only to those who have an alert ear.’ Listening to that low voice, we might encounter veiled messages in holy cards, photographs, films, and even police records and suicide letters” (xxv). Moving to attune readers to these coded frequencies, Fernández-Galeano not only decrypts the value of nontraditional archives, such as folk music fan letters, aesthetic fashion cyphers, and testimony from defendants’ mothers, but also the rich yet underexplored elements of more conventional resources, such as state records that captured the extensive medical and legal oppression of gender and sexual nonconformity in mid-to-late-twentieth-century Argentina and Spain. Through dynamic transnational and comparative analysis of these documents, typically viewed as tools that reinforced criminalizing and pathologizing narratives, the book argues that their true potential lies in identifying how their “low voices” have been inadvertently embedded within them, thereby rereading them as records of resilience that speak volumes.In a brief introduction entitled “Marica Politics?,” Fernández-Galeano sets up the book's central argument that archives of the marica—a term historically used in Spanish-speaking contexts to describe individuals assigned male at birth who adopt feminized subjectivities through variable practices of sexuality, situational gender expression, coded speech, and relationships with masculine men—must be recognized as foundational to broader queer and trans historical imaginaries (xv). This intervention structures the book's thematic arc, which unfolds across six chapters divided into three segments: “Anti-Marica Discourse and Praxis,” “The Erotics of Masculinity,” and “Marica Politics.” The interrogative within the title is therefore invaluable insofar as it positions the author alongside a growing body of work in global queer and trans studies that refuses essentialist modes of categorizing and translating sexual and gendered variance, particularly when “historical records intimate epistemological modes other than current taxonomies” (xxviii). Thus, while acknowledging the lexical imperialism of producing this rich work in English, of note is the author's commitment to using and providing guiding definitions to identity categories not always easily understood by the anglophone reader, such as entendidos, chongos, michés, taxiboys, chaperos, bujarrones, locas, and travestis. This framing is especially important given the book's historical scope (1940s – 1980s), which precedes the frequently usurping, anglophone flows of gay or trans that substantially increased thereafter, while not dissecting it from these genealogies entirely. Embracing the uncertainties that he gleans from the archive, Fernández-Galeano instead “traces tensions and overlaps between maricas’ lived experiences and an array of taxonomies” both global and local, which therefore necessitates, as he argues, a flexible approach to interpreting and discerning their subjectivity (xxviii). In paying attention to the attitudes and experiences of “nonelite actors” such as soldiers, low-income and rural folk, prisoners, and more, the monograph reveals the multi-faceted ways in which maricas have resisted being neatly squared within historical narratives of both gender and sexuality (xxix). Through creative archival analysis that demonstrates how maricas positioned themselves in the world through a recasting of vernacular, behaviors, and diverse spiritual and institutional iconographies that were often used to oppress them, Fernández-Galeano makes the compelling case for discerning marica not only as a potent critical lens of examination but also as a way for approaching the creation of cultural life.The creative and exhaustive archive from which the monograph draws is one of its greatest strengths, as it emboldens the author to trace the various ways in which the marica subject has been self-fashioned, in addition to how it has been socially constructed and disparaged to different ends by medical, judicial, and social authorities from varying positions of power. In this sense, its transnational comparative method is also one of its most compelling contributions, as it highlights the dynamic interflows between Argentina and Spain over the course of six chapters.It is fitting then, that the book's chronological structure and opening chapters fundamentally anchor us in a sophisticated understanding of a developing state and societal “anti-marica discourse” that permeates the rest of the period of focus. Homing in on the production of scientific and legal knowledge that concomitantly maps experiences of cross-Atlantic sexile, the monograph first identifies the core influence of positivist and eugenicist ideologies used by criminologists and psychoanalysts in both regions that reveal fascinating overlaps in how both nations wielded rhetoric of social danger theory to justify the intertwinement of sexual violence, forensic praxis, and confinement. But in drawing attention to specific legal and medical apparatuses of power, such as those exemplified by the Classification Institute in Argentina and Vagrancy Laws from Francoist Spain, Maricas lays the groundwork for its future echoes into other more subtle, fragmented archives. Two impactful examples from the monograph include the veiled misogyny behind the entendidos’ romanticization of the virile, masculine homosexual, who attempted to distance himself from the effeminate, hypersexualized marica throughout the 1940s to the 1960s, as well as the voyeuristic and disciplinary role of the military officers that orchestrated a binaristic model of passive/active sexual cultures, which reified sexual dominance, violence, and the eroticization of power throughout the 1960s to the 1980s. As a “Marica Politics” emerges in the text's final section, it draws from prisoner testimonies and memoirs that further solidify their agency, namely through a fashioning of aesthetic and performative modes that resisted rigid models of masculinity, even while in confinement. Overall, whether embodied through coded language that refuses the surveillance of their private lives or deployed through explicitly erotic and campy enticement, Maricas underscores what Néstor Perlongher knew best: Resistance against authoritarian power cannot solely be understood through street protest and corporeal sacrifice but rather is often found in the quotidian strategies that undermine the underlying principles of state violence—namely, the pursuit of pleasure and joy.This book will undoubtedly appeal to readers interested in transnational queer and trans/travesti studies and Latin American studies, as well as those interested in the history of sexuality and approaching the archive through refreshing, creative methodologies. By traversing the sociopolitical landscapes of these two nations and connecting their unique modes of resistance under repressive contexts, Maricas underscores the creative and robust ways that queer cultures continue to materialize and persist, even amidst the looming specters of criminalization and control.