Historical interventions and the archive of sexual dissidence

The first axis that emerges across these seven works is the recovery and critical analysis of historical traces of sexual dissidence. César Braga-Pinto’s Poses e posturas: Performances de gênero e sexualidade na literatura brasileira (1850–1950) offers a longue durée perspective on dissident sexualities in Brazil by examining how literature itself functioned as a site of the performance, representation, and contestation of gender and sexuality. Rather than relying exclusively on judicial or press archives, Braga-Pinto demonstrates how canonical and lesser-known texts staged bodily postures and erotic gestures that both reflected and unsettled national projects of modernity. Similarly, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes’s Translocas foregrounds the recent history of drag and trans performance in Puerto Rico, demonstrating how embodied practices serve as living archives of cultural memory. In Chilean contexts, Luciano Martínez’s Pedro Lemebel, belleza indómita situates Lemebel’s writing and life as a literary and political archive in which queer bodies inscribe their experiences into the broader narrative of national culture. Together, these works highlight how historical and cultural records of sexual dissidence—whether textual, performative, or archival—reveal continuities and ruptures across time, offering critical frameworks for understanding the genealogies of queer and trans Latin American studies.

Braga-Pinto’s work, like all the books discussed here, operates within the critical grammar that Sylvia Molloy articulated when she grouped Latin American fin-de-siècle sexual dissidences under the umbrella of the “epistemología del armario” (a concept describing the structuring of queer knowledge and visibility under heteronormative regimes).Footnote ² The turn of the century marked a redefinition of Brazil’s cultural and national politics, during which the perception of sexual dissidence played a key role in delineating the boundaries of heteronormativity. From the conceptualization of deviant femininity in the context of the Guerra da Tríplice Aliança (1864–1870), analyzed through the Brazilian novelist Joaquim Manuel de Macedo’s Mulheres de mantilha (1870), to the narrative use of the figure of the andrógino in the works of Coelho Neto (many of them underestimated and little known), who capitalized on the democratization of the printing press (the very technology that also attacked sexual dissidences) to introduce global modern discourses on gender fluidity, the book traces how literature registered and debated nonnormative identities. This genealogy culminates in the formulation of an imagined Brazilian dissident community, shaped by writers “parnasianos, simbolistas e decadentes,” who envisioned a cosmopolitan and transnational dissident movement around archetypes such as the suicida, crystallized in the writings of Raul Pompeia and Roberto Gomes.

Building on this genealogy, Braga-Pinto turns to the Brazilian reception of Oscar Wilde at the turn of the century, revisiting Sylvia Molloy’s insights to highlight how Wilde’s trials, sexuality, and aestheticism quickly circulated among local writers. Rather than a distant “mystique,” Wilde became a model for imitation, particularly through João do Rio, his most prominent Brazilian translator, emulator, and disciple. The introduction of Wildean decadentism offered Brazilian literature not only new aesthetic codes but also a vocabulary for articulating homosexual desire, which appeared as both a literary and a scientific object of fascination. Terms such as extravagância marked these emergent identities, situating dissident sexualities—often racialized—in a field of performance that both contested nineteenth-century criminal psychopathology and unsettled nationalist demands for authenticity and originality.Footnote ³

Finally, Braga-Pinto situates Mário de Andrade alongside Raul Pompeia and João do Rio as part of what he calls a “Holy Trinity” of Brazilian literature: the first and most significant writers who not only addressed male same-sex desire and affect in their works but also saw their own sexualities subjected to rumor, speculation, and insult. Rather than attempting to unearth a definitive truth about Mário’s orientation, Braga-Pinto interrogates the cultural operations that sought either to conceal any trace of homosexuality in his writings or, conversely, to “out” him retroactively. What emerges is less a biographical inquiry than an exploration of Andrade’s subtle and complex representations of masculinity and desire, where literature, theater, and social performance intersect to stage alternative possibilities of sexual expression.

If Braga-Pinto’s study traces the literary and cultural archives that registered sexual dissidence in Brazil’s fin-de-siècle, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes shifts the focus to contemporary Puerto Rico, where drag and trans performance emerge as living archives of queer memory and community. In Translocas, La Fountain-Stokes (who also performs as Lola von Miramar) offers a wide-ranging study of trans and drag representation across media, performance, literature, ethnography, and popular culture. The book’s central conceptual wager is the neologism transloca, which links the stigmatized figure of the loca—a term oscillating between insult and political recognition—to trans, drag, and queer practices in Puerto Rico and its diasporas. As La Fountain-Stokes explains, “Translocas, whether they are crazy women, effeminate homosexuals, drag queens, or transgender subjects, are too many things at once within a transgeographic and rhizomatic map that inhabits the tropics and expands from them” (2). This theoretical coinage allows him to analyze gender nonconformity as a disruptive force that unsettles cis-heteronormativity, racialization, and neoliberal capitalism—by refusing normative gender roles, labor expectations, and bodily discipline—and simultaneously foregrounds the precarious material conditions in which translocas live, perform, and often risk death.

The seven chapters of the book articulate a complex interdisciplinary methodology. The section on Nina Flowers situates drag performance within the circuits of neoliberal reality television, where linguistic difference and excess become both a source of empowerment and containment. Other chapters focus on Freddie Mercado’s “ultrabaroque assemblages” (113) and Javier Cardona’s drag performances that confront colonialism and racism through the aesthetics of the Afro-diasporic body. Violence and mortality, however, are never far from view: The murders of Jorge Steven López Mercado and the trap singer Kevin Fret illustrate the deadly costs of translocura when confronted by homophobia, transphobia, and structural poverty. For La Fountain-Stokes, these figures embody forms of knowledge—“translocas survive and carry on” (3)—that testify to the fragility and persistence of queer and trans life in Puerto Rico.

Finally, Translocas is also a deeply reflexive work, attentive to the author’s own position as scholar and performer, as seen in his discussion of Lola von Miramar, his performative alter ego. By reflecting on his own embodied experiences on stage, La Fountain-Stokes demonstrates how scholarly analysis and personal performance can mutually inform one another, offering a unique lens on trans and drag cultures. Beyond individual case studies, the book advances a translational and translinguistic methodology, attentive to code-switching, linguistic contamination, and the politics of naming. In doing so, it demonstrates how drag and trans performance function as archives of affect, memory, and critique—living repertoires that challenge disciplinary canons and methodological purism. At once erudite and accessible, La Fountain-Stokes’s work reimagines the cultural archive of sexual dissidence in Puerto Rico as both a site of vulnerability and a source of world-making potential.

Following the trajectory of historical and performative archives of sexual dissidence, Luciano Martínez turns to Chile, where Pedro Lemebel’s life and writing inscribe queer experiences into the national cultural memory, highlighting the intersections of literature, performance, and political critique. The book, edited by Luciano Martínez, offers an indispensable entry point into the unruly corpus of the Chilean writer and performer Pedro Lemebel. Comprising nineteen essays by scholars from Chile, the United States, and Europe, the collection embraces what Martínez frames as “errant” criticism: a transdisciplinary, exploratory approach that delights in analytical wandering and the pleasures of deviation. Rather than providing a linear or definitive account of Lemebel, the essays navigate his affective archive, his encounters with other creators such as Néstor Perlongher, a key Argentine poet-anthropologist of queer dissidence; José Donoso, the Chilean novelist whose work probes the psychic underside of authoritarianism; Gabriela Mistral, whose poetry and pedagogical writings have long invited queer and feminist rereadings; Diamela Eltit, a foundational voice of experimental literature and performance under dictatorship; and Pía Barros, a Chilean feminist writer and editor central to microfiction and collaborative publishing. Martínez guides readers through these textual pathways, offering annotations and commentary that encourage a form of “textual cruising,” by which one enters and exits the essays freely, embracing the elusiveness and indomitability of Lemebel’s work.Footnote ⁴

Structured in six sections, the volume addresses Lemebel’s voice, biography, performance, poetics, chronicles, and narrative itineraries. The essays illuminate his transdisciplinary practices, from performance and music to visual culture, as well as his investment in affective networks linking queer communities, feminist pedagogy, and popular memory. By foregrounding the “loca” as both a performative figure and a lens of critique, contributors highlight Lemebel’s continual negotiation of visibility, desire, and social critique. Martínez’s editorial framework, attentive to cross-hemispheric dialogues and errant trajectories, positions readers within the dynamics of Lemebel’s cultural and political archive, inviting them to experience the multiplicity, resonance, and critical vitality of his corpus.

Together, the works of Braga-Pinto, La Fountain-Stokes, and Martínez illuminate the myriad ways sexual dissidence is recorded, performed, and remembered across Latin America. Braga-Pinto traces the literary inscription of queer identities in fin-de-siècle Brazil, showing how texts staged bodies, desires, and transgressive gestures within broader cultural and national projects. La Fountain-Stokes turns to contemporary Puerto Rico, where drag and trans performances operate as living archives, carrying memory, affect, and critique through embodied practice. Martínez, in turn, maps the errant and transdisciplinary traces of Lemebel’s writing and life in Chile, inviting readers to navigate his corpus through a playful and critical “cruising” that foregrounds the indomitability of queer expression. Across these works, archives emerge not merely as repositories of the past but as vibrant, contested, and generative spaces where literature, performance, and scholarly engagement converge to reveal the persistence, creativity, and resistance of sexual dissidence in the region.

Across these three works, the authors’ intellectual projects and methodological commitments become clearer when read side by side. Braga-Pinto, a literary critic working with nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Brazilian print culture, reconstructs dissident genealogies by reading novels, chronicles, and periodical literature against the grain, treating literary form itself as an archive of gestures, postures, and desires. La Fountain-Stokes, in contrast, grounds his study of contemporary Puerto Rican drag and trans performers in a mixed methodology that combines ethnographic observation, performance analysis, media studies, and his own embodied practice as Lola von Miramar; his “living archives” emerge from stages, clubs, television sets, and community networks that often leave no stable material record. Martínez, as both editor and critic, maps the affective and political archive of Lemebel through a constellation of essays that draw on literary analysis, performance studies, and cultural history to illuminate the sociopolitical landscape of late-twentieth-century Chile. Taken together, these works show that researching sexual dissidence in Latin America requires stitching evidence from heterogeneous and sometimes precarious sources—texts, performances, testimonies, rumors, and ephemeral scenes—while understanding that the methodological challenges are themselves part of the histories of marginalization and creativity they seek to narrate.

Performance, collectivity, and aesthetic experimentation

Expanding on the archival and historical interventions explored in the first section, the next axis of analysis turns to the performative and collective dimensions of queer and trans cultural production. Fernanda Carvajal’s La convulsión coliza: Yeguas del Apocalipsis 1987–1997 and Cristián Opazo’s Rímel y gel: El teatro de las fiestas under explore how performance, theater, and visual culture function as spaces of experimentation, affective engagement, and community formation. In these works, art becomes a living archive in which gestures, staged events, and embodied practices carry memory, challenge normative structures, and generate new forms of resistance, extending the critical interventions of Latin American queer studies in recent years.

Carvajal constructs a narrative made with others, built from silences, rumors, and betrayals, organized through “disjointed temporalities” (8). These fragments coalesce around the lives and practices of artists who prioritized impact over archival permanence, creating a text that is necessarily collective yet attentive to the author’s own involvement. The book does not aim to reconstruct a hidden truth or an ascetic past; instead, it opens a space to enter the queer temporality of the Yeguas, where genres, species, and linear time dissolve.Footnote ⁵ As Carvajal explains, the “marica enunciation” (24) overflows prefabricated categories, demanding a sensitive engagement to apprehend the affective and ethical dimensions of these performances.

The title enacts the same process of appropriation and reclamation of insult that the Yeguas apply to their own collective identity. Carvajal emphasizes how the colonial legacies and the “bestializing apparatus” (59) continue to dehumanize everything that diverges from cis-heteronormative standards. Through the first chapters, the actions of Francisco Casas and Lemebel are brought into the present, highlighting performances that unsettled both audiences and temporal expectations. While some documentation can be found in the Yeguas archive, neither this nor Carvajal’s text functions as a fixed catalog; instead, performances are rendered through available information and by emphasizing the alliances necessary for the artistic and emotional survival of their protagonists. These transhistorical alliances allow a reappropriation of history, narrated through a collective and self-defined framework.

Carvajal traces how Casas and Lemebel became Yeguas within a network of contemporaries, with figures such as Carmen Berenguer, a poet and multimedia artist whose work interrogates gender, class, and urban marginality, and Nelly Richard, the cultural critic who theorized the Chilean Escena de Avanzada and its feminist, conceptual interventions, bridging times and protagonists. By foregrounding lateral and contingent relationships, the text challenges linear genealogies: “The Yeguas del Apocalipsis force the undoing of the idea of genealogy into a multidirectional promiscuity of connections and origins” (40). In emphasizing shared processes over fixed outcomes, the author invites readers to inhabit a “mode-yegua,” navigating the blurred boundaries between artist and work, past and present, affect and performance. The result is an affective reconstruction in which collective memory, ephemeral traces, and baroque excess create a reading experience that both disorients and illuminates, embodying the spirit of the Yeguas in every textual gesture.

Carvajal’s work foregrounds the interplay of temporality, collectivity, and the politics of embodiment, emphasizing how performances are inseparable from the social, historical, and emotional contexts in which they occur. Through the destabilization of linear chronology and the focus on lateral, contingent relationships, the narrative traces how Casas and Lemebel navigated the dangers of violence, marginalization, and colonial legacies, showing bodies and gestures functioning simultaneously as instruments of critique and survival. At the same time, the text highlights the ethical and affective labor required to produce and sustain these artistic practices, inviting readers to inhabit the precarious and exuberant temporality of the Yeguas.

Extending this approach, Carvajal situates the Yeguas del Apocalipsis within broader networks of transnational queer performance, tracing lines of influence and dialogue across Latin America and Europe. These engagements were not merely aesthetic; they constituted strategic interventions in political and social spheres, turning performances into acts of resistance, public critique, and affective pedagogy. In doing so, Carvajal presents the Yeguas as both local protagonists and interlocutors in continental conversations on sexual dissidence and artistic innovation.

Carvajal’s analysis is exemplified by the ways the Yeguas del Apocalipsis enacted sexuality as a site of political intervention, even amid uncertainty about the forms and directions that sexual politics might take. As she notes, the emergence of the Yeguas brought to the fore that sexuality is political even when we have no guarantee of the form or sign that politics will take when it comes to sex. Casas and Lemebel recognized from the outset that the alignment of homosexuality with radicalism is as contingent as its alignment with conservatism (112). Their interventions, though notable for the irreverent critique of underground leftist politics and for alliances with the struggle for justice for the disappeared, were part of a broader constellation of queer and artistic efforts. From the late 1970s, artists such as Carlos Leppe and Juan Domingo Dávila had already laid the groundwork for understanding homosexual desire as a form of social emancipation. By the mid-1980s, collectives like the lesbian-feminist Ayuquelén were active, and toward the late 1980s, early groups of homosexual activists began organizing around HIV prevention, eventually forming the Movimiento de Liberación e Integración Homosexual. In this context, Casas and Lemebel articulated a critical stance toward organized homosexual militancy and its “phalocratic discourse of homo-self-representation,” while also resisting closure into a fixed identity, emphasizing that “being homosexual guarantees nothing” (113). In highlighting these tensions, Carvajal positions the Yeguas not as isolated actors but as participants in a dynamic field of queer expression, where experimentation, affective networks, and political critique intersect to produce novel forms of cultural and social intervention.

The book also emphasizes affect, intimacy, and relationality as both method and subject. By attending to rumor, gossip, and ephemeral traces of action, Carvajal highlights the ethical labor of performance: Gestures and events sustain networks of care, solidarity, and memory. Performance, whether through laughter, excess, or provocation, generates new forms of knowledge and community, transforming the archive into a living practice that challenges disciplinary conventions while insisting on the inseparability of aesthetics, ethics, and politics.

This attention to relational and transhistorical dimensions naturally establishes a bridge to Opazo, whose Rímel y gel similarly foregrounds ephemeral, affective, and experimental practices as critical sites for understanding queer and trans cultural production in the underworld parties of Santiago during the civic-military dictatorship. Cristián Opazo’s Rímel y gel conjures a dissident youth navigating the underworld of Santiago under the civic-military dictatorship. In the abandoned warehouses-turned-pirate discotheques, these young artists create spaces of refuge, experimentation, and resistance. Opazo’s narrative deliberately blurs conventional boundaries, merging criticism and fiction, biography and autobiography, and essay, to enact what he terms a “deviated critical practice.” (32) By disobeying the linear, digestible discursive frameworks of the literary market, Rímel y gel foregrounds the ephemeral and performative as critical tools, showing how queer and trans bodies become instruments of survival, pedagogy, and aesthetic innovation in a context of censorship, violence, and social marginalization. In this way, the text enacts a “critical fiction” (41) that mirrors the improvisatory and relational strategies of its protagonists, transforming rumor, hearsay, and pirate archives into legitimate sources of cultural memory and political reflection.

Opazo emphasizes the ethical and pedagogical dimensions of these underground spaces. The Trolley, Garage Internacional, and Teatro Esmeralda emerge as sites where performance, desire, and community coalesce into a collective poetics of resistance. Through dance, fashion, and theatrical improvisation, young participants develop alternative masculinities and queer subjectivities while negotiating the authoritarian dictates of the dictatorship and the incomplete promises of the democratic transition. The text repeatedly underscores the interplay of ephemeral practice and lasting social impact: These performances constitute a “pioneer informal technical school” (73) that anticipates the consolidation of Chilean creative industries while cultivating networks of care and solidarity for those excluded from official recognition.

Rímel y gel situates itself within a broader genealogy of Chilean queer and trans cultural production, highlighting the continuities between the underground practices of the late twentieth century and the literary and performative trajectories of artists like Pedro Lemebel. The narrative insists that aesthetic and political experimentation are inseparable, teaching readers that form is itself a vehicle for critique and that ephemeral gestures—rímel and gel, rumor and improvisation—carry both affective and political weight. Opazo’s work, with its meticulous archival sensibility and intimate engagement with the ethics of fandom, models a form of queer historiography in which memory, pleasure, and resistance intersect, offering an indispensable contribution to Latin American queer studies under the shadow of the dictatorship and its lingering legacies.

Opazo further emphasizes the role of improvisation and informal pedagogy as central to queer and trans cultural production. Underground party theaters such as those at El Trolley and Matucana 19 became crucial spaces where young people could experiment with performance, fashion, and desire, navigating the social hierarchies, gendered expectations, and authoritarian restrictions of the era. These ephemeral gatherings were both educational and affective: participants learned through doing, improvising, and collectively shaping environments of care and solidarity. The emergence of these spaces coincided with the onset of the HIV pandemic, which in Chile reached its first confirmed cases in the mid-1980s and quickly generated fear, stigma, and the public perception of a “homosexual threat.” Against this backdrop, the new dances and club performances became acts of resistance, where makeup, eyeliner, and theatrical gestures functioned as tools of creative survival, turning the dance floor into a site of both pleasure and protest. Youth confronted the anxiety and precarity of the epidemic while inventing modes of expression that asserted desire in the face of marginalization. Beyond their immediate social and aesthetic effects, these practices produced relational knowledge, transmitting memory, critique, and cultural learning to peers and subsequent generations. In this way, Opazo shows how ephemeral, experimental, and affective practices constituted a living archive of queer and trans experience, preserving histories of survival, creativity, and community in the shadow of political and health crises.

In addition, Rímel y gel situates these underground practices within a continuum of Chilean queer and trans expression, linking ephemeral and experimental performance to the literary and archival legacies of figures such as Pedro Lemebel. Opazo highlights how these ephemeral spaces—warehouses, pirate clubs, and improvised performances—function as living archives, transmitting knowledge, affect, and social critique across generations. The text shows that archival practices are not limited to formal institutions; rather, they emerge through strategies of survival and self-fashioning, as seen in Lemebel’s iterative use of names and identities. As Opazo notes, the persona of the loca—gesturally a synecdoche of the travesti body—mutates its own proper name and obscures biographical traces, whether from vanity or practical necessity. The act of renaming, of ceremonial “refounding” of identity, functions as a strategy of survival inversely proportional to the social stigmas it addresses—class, ethnicity, seropositivity—and allows for navigation through exclusionary social and professional spheres. Lemebel’s alternating roles—the exonerated teacher, the itinerant paper vendor, the salaried chronicler in alternative press—demonstrate how ephemeral acts of self-fashioning, performative labor, and literary production can become archival in themselves, preserving memory, critique, and community knowledge. This approach reinforces a central theme in Latin American queer studies: that archives are active, relational, and performative sites where memory, resistance, and identity coalesce. In this way, Opazo offers a model for understanding how queer and trans communities construct worlds of possibility, creativity, and survival even under conditions of marginalization and political constraint.

Opazo’s discussion resonates with contemporary debates in Latin American queer studies regarding the nature and function of archives. Rather than treating archives as static collections of documents, photographs, or texts, he conceptualizes them as relational, performative, and affective spaces. The ephemeral sites he examines—warehouses, pirate clubs, improvised performances—function as living archives in which gestures, interactions, and communal events transmit knowledge, memory, and critique across time. This approach aligns with theoretical frameworks developed by scholars such as José Esteban Muñoz, who emphasizes queerness as a performative mode that produces futurity and alternative modes of sociality through affective and ephemeral practices, and Diana Taylor, whose notion of the repertoire highlights embodied, ephemeral knowledge as central to cultural memory.Footnote ⁶ By framing ephemeral spaces as archives, Opazo not only documents past practices but also demonstrates how queer and trans communities actively construct legacies of resistance and creativity. These archives, therefore, operate simultaneously as sites of historical preservation, pedagogical engagement, and political intervention, exemplifying how memory, identity, and aesthetic innovation are inseparable in the making of queer worlds.

Together, Carvajal and Opazo extend the critical interventions of Latin American queer studies in recent years, foregrounding the interplay of collective creation, ephemeral archives, and political dissent. Both works insist on the inseparability of aesthetic and social practice, inviting readers to inhabit the affective, performative, and historical dimensions of dissident lives. By attending to rumor, improvisation, and the ephemeral, these texts expand the boundaries of both literary and historical scholarship, demonstrating that the archives of queer and trans experience demand new methods, new ethics, and above all, a willingness to be unsettled, affected, and transformed.

Building on the archival and historical axis, Carvajal and Opazo explore queer and trans cultural production in specific sociopolitical contexts: Chile under dictatorship and its aftermath. Carvajal’s La convulsión coliza reconstructs the Yeguas del Apocalipsis through fragmented sources, rumor, and her own positionality, attending to lateral networks, affect, and ethical labor. Opazo’s Rímel y gel examines underground party theaters in Santiago as living archives, combining criticism, fiction, and ephemeral traces—including participant recollections and scarce documentation—to capture improvisation, pedagogy, and survival amid marginalization and censorship. Both authors demonstrate methodologies attuned to ephemeral, relational, and performative practices, showing that archives of queer and trans experience must account for context, contingency, and the ethical and affective dimensions of cultural work, especially when formal records are limited or nonexistent.

Transnationality, cosmopolitanism, and conceptual interventions

Recent scholarship in Latin American queer studies increasingly attends to transnational flows, cosmopolitan imaginaries, and conceptual experimentation. Within this framework, Carl Fischer’s Locas excepciones and Germán Garrido’s La Internacional del Pecado offer complementary perspectives on how sexual dissidence negotiates local, national, and global contexts. Fischer examines the Chilean path to sexual dissent, tracing queer and trans identities through historical repression and evolving social imaginaries, while Garrido explores cosmopolitan exchanges among figures such as Copi, Néstor Perlongher, and María Moreno, highlighting the circulation of aesthetics, ideas, and affect across borders. Together, these works underscore the importance of attending to both the specificity of local experiences and the dynamics of transnational networks, extending the critical interventions of Latin American queer studies in recent years.

Fischer’s Locas excepciones examines the concept of the loca excepción as a lens through which to read Chilean history, politics, and sexual dissidence. The term plays on the dual meaning of excepción: Under the dictatorship, it signaled the suspension of law and exercise of force, whereas in the neoliberal era, it connoted an exceptional economic model, the so-called Sanhattan. The loca excepción combines these political and social tensions with a queer historiographical perspective, centering on the loca as both an early, foundational model of sexual dissidence and a figure embedded in everyday life, a performer negotiating desire, danger, and social norms. By foregrounding this figure, Fischer challenges conventional narratives of personalism, governance, and economic power, showing how exceptionalism produces and polices gendered and sexualized bodies.

Fischer structures his analysis around artefacts—literary texts, performances, and cultural interventions—that act as critical instruments to reframe historical and social hierarchies. From the Reforma Agraria to contemporary postdictatorial Chile, he traces the circulation of queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming figures across literature and performance, revealing how they enact subtle and overt forms of resistance. Figures such as Lorenza Böttner and Carlos Leppe illustrate how queerness can destabilize binary logics of gender and desire, while exposing the persistence of class, racial, and heteronormative hierarchies. Fischer’s chronological approach—five chapters tracing the interplay of personalism, law, and art—demonstrates the methodological power of linking political, economic, and cultural analysis in a queer frame.

The book further illuminates the affective and corporeal dimensions of these intersections. Fischer reads everyday interactions and literary representations—from the ascent and descent of bodies on Santiago’s hills to intimate and transgressive encounters—as sites where power, desire, and social status collide. These embodied experiences, whether in historical fiction, memoir, or cultural reportage, reveal the ongoing visibility and vulnerability of bodies that transgress heteronormative and class-based expectations. By attending to the embodied, affective, and often illicit practices of queer subjects, Fischer reconfigures the archive of Chilean modernity, showing that sexual dissidence is inseparable from broader struggles over social hierarchy, urban space, and economic structures.

Extending this analysis, Fischer also foregrounds the relational and performative dimensions of the loca excepción. Beyond tracing historical trajectories, he emphasizes how affect, friendship, gossip, and rumor operate as mechanisms through which sexual dissidents navigate social networks and cultural circuits. The loca is not only a figure of resistance but also a relational agent, whose embodied practices and performative strategies enable the circulation of knowledge, desire, and critique across communities. In this sense, Fischer demonstrates that queer historiography requires attention not only to events and artefacts but also to affective economies and the ethical labor involved in sustaining collective memory.

In its final chapters, Locas excepciones presses the reader to confront persistent inequalities and the limits of progressive theory. Marginalized subjects—the trans, the fat, the poor, the racially marked—remain constrained by social, political, and economic forces, which highlights the incomplete reach of democratic inclusion. Fischer’s work is thus both a historiographical intervention and a conceptual provocation: It demonstrates how queerness, cosmopolitan circulation, and structural critique converge to destabilize established narratives, offering a multidimensional understanding of Chilean society in which sexual dissidence, social hierarchy, and historical memory intersect.

Building on Fischer’s attention to the intersections of personalism, power, and sexual dissidence in Chile, Garrido shifts the lens toward the transnational and cosmopolitan. While Fischer maps dissonant bodies and marginalized desires within the local and historical fabric of Chile, Garrido traces how queer literatures circulate across borders, forging connections that challenge national frameworks. His study invites reflection on how Latin American sexual dissidence not only is rooted in local contexts but also entangled in broader aesthetic, political, and cultural networks.

Garrido situates his analysis within the framework of a “portable homeland for sexual dissidents,” a concept introduced by María Moreno that defines a queer art of existential affirmation. This portable homeland spans from the microworlds of the closet to the cosmos imagined by Copi, encompassing both local neighborhoods and broader historical imaginaries. What emerges is a queer cosmos in which ways of inhabiting and forming community are central to the affirmation of minoritarian lives, operating counter to both the nation and normative geopolitical orders.

In La Internacional del Pecado, Garrido examines these deviations of cosmopolitanism as queer sociabilities that chart their own planetary coordinates, beyond national culture, territory, and heteropatriarchal norms. He emphasizes the circulation of these imaginaries through publications, fanzines, and other public infrastructures, revealing how literary and cultural ecologies intervene in and subvert prevailing social and political orders. Figures like María Moreno, along with Perlongher and Copi, exemplify these inventive strategies, showing how queer communities and their archival traces create alternative infrastructures of life and social belonging.

Garrido’s work contrasts these queer deviations with the declining forms of traditional cosmopolitanism, which were often tied to urban gay communities and emblematic lifestyles shaped by capitalist norms. By tracing these divergences, the book illuminates how queer actors have historically reimagined and remade cosmopolitan space, especially in moments when mainstream global imaginaries fail to provide inclusion or recognition. The queer cosmopolitics he charts are thus not abstract ideals but practical, lived interventions—strategies for inhabiting and constructing worlds that are more livable and vibrant than those imposed by conventional hierarchies.

Ultimately, Garrido demonstrates that thinking queerly about cosmopolitanism requires attention to both belonging and infrastructure. Through Copi, Perlongher, Moreno, and other key figures, the book shows how queer subjects generate alternative spaces and narratives, asserting their existence while navigating systemic exclusion. These “cosmopolitan deviations” highlight the ongoing work of inhabiting the world on one’s own terms, constructing worlds that are simultaneously rooted, mobile, and critically inventive.

Adding to this perspective, Garrido also emphasizes the material and archival dimensions of queer cosmopolitanism. Beyond aesthetic circulation, he attends to how publications, correspondence, and ephemeral objects sustain networks of knowledge and care across borders. By tracing these infrastructures, the book demonstrates that queer cosmopolitics are not merely imaginative but also tangible, linking bodies, texts, and affective networks. This approach underscores the intertwined nature of cultural production and social solidarity, highlighting how minoritarian communities create durable legacies despite systemic marginalization.

Fischer and Garrido examine sexual dissidence in Chile and across Latin America, attending to both local and transnational contexts. Fischer’s Locas excepciones analyzes the loca excepción through literature, performance, and ephemeral traces—including memoirs and cultural reportage—to reveal how queer and trans subjects navigate social hierarchies, affective networks, and everyday dangers under dictatorship and neoliberalism. Garrido’s La Internacional del Pecado traces cosmopolitan queer networks, highlighting figures such as Copi, Néstor Perlongher, and María Moreno, and showing how publications, correspondence, and other infrastructures sustain knowledge and community across borders. Both works combine historical, textual, and archival methods with attention to relationality and performance, demonstrating that queer and trans archives are not only material but also affective, ephemeral, and socially situated, especially when formal records are scarce.

They also foreground both local and transnational dimensions of sexual dissidence, combining close readings of texts and performances with archival and ethnographic research. Fischer’s Locas excepciones examines literature, memoir, and cultural reportage to identify queer and trans agents navigating Chilean social hierarchies, affective networks, and state violence, highlighting how ephemeral traces reveal practices of survival and critique. Garrido’s La Internacional del Pecado traces transnational queer networks through publications, correspondence, and cultural circulation, emphasizing figures such as Copi, Néstor Perlongher, and María Moreno as active participants in local and global queer politics. Together, these works demonstrate that rigorous literary and historical methodologies—attentive to both textual detail and the agency of dissident subjects—can reconstruct archives that are often ephemeral, relational, and politically generative.