Queering Time in Latin America: The Gendered Afterlives of Dictatorship in 21st Century Literature and Visual Culture

In Latin America in recent years, the specter of dictatorship has emerged at the center of electoral and non-electoral political disputes, upsetting the state-sponsored narrative of the postdictatorship as a time linked to peace, stability, and progress. In her 2002 book Los trabajos de la memoria, Argentine sociologist Elizabeth Jelin expressed this eloquently, saying that “abrir los diarios de Argentina, Uruguay, Chile o Brasil en el año 2000 puede asemejarse, en algún sentido, a transitar por un túnel del tiempo,” in reference to the memory of military regimes conjured both in the struggle for justice and ongoing state violence in twenty-first century Latin America (35). Such conjuring of the dictatorship has been particularly potent and visible in both misogynist discourse and practices, as well as in feminist struggles and queer collective organizing. Indeed, events like the 2019-2020 protests in Chile known as the estallido social, in which many women called for a change to the constitution implemented by Pinochet; the use of headscarves first used by the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in pro-abortion marches known as the marea verde; the election of Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro in 2018, who, in 2016 voted in favor of impeaching Brazil’s first woman President in honor of the man who tortured her as a political prisoner; and the recent election of Javier Milei in Argentina who, in a presidential debate, referred to crimes like torture and rape as “excesos,” a term used by the Junta in 1977, all point to how gender is key to understanding the entanglements between authoritarianism past and present. Situated within this context, this dissertation examines representations of gender violence and resistance in twenty-first century literary and visual cultures in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay. This project explores the following questions: Firstly, in what ways can the shared experience of women, LGBTQ, Black, and Indigenous people contribute to a reframing of definitions like dictatorship and postdictatorship? Secondly, how can queer theories of time further the work of dictatorship memory? Through literary and cultural analyses informed by queer and feminist theory, this dissertation argues that these works that portray violence against “feminized” populations question state-sponsored temporalities of progress by queering time. That is, they portray, through varied visual and literary devices and forms, temporalities in which past and present merge, characters depart from clock time or time travel, and ghosts emerge from the past. By doing so, these works unravel the authoritarian homogenization of time that has constructed sequential, national histories that attempt to discursively contain violence to the dictatorship past, concealing ongoing forms of gender violence and long-term alliances and struggles against such violence.