Turn-of-the-Century Buenos Aires: A Capital of Queer Spectacles

Abstract

In turn-of-the-century Buenos Aires, a series of literary works written by members of high society depicted a range of minority subjects as sexually ‘deviant’. This queered literary mapping took place in the portrayals of private and public spaces of the city in the context of modernisation and changes in the nation’s demographic composition. The arrival of transatlantic immigrants generated a nativist drive to protect intimate milieus from an impending sense of being invaded by a foreign presence. Aristocratic space was fictionalised as besieged territory. While most critics of fin-de-siècle Argentine literature focus on the discursive analysis of the trope of degeneration, this chapter proposes a spatial analysis of ‘deviance’ that shows how urban architecture became a cultural laboratory for exploring issues of race, gender, sexuality and social status. I argue that the literary making of heteronormative space depended on the queering of ‘outsider’ figures, particularly regarding stereotypical portrayals of European immigrants, especially Spaniards, Italians and Jews. Four texts are considered: La Bolsa (The Stock Market, 1891) by Julián Martel, En la sangre (In the Blood, 1887) by Eugenio Cambaceres, ‘De cepa criolla’ (Criollo Lineage, 1884) by Miguel Cané and ‘Buenos Aires tenebroso: ladrones vestidos de mujer’ (Gothic Buenos Aires: Thieves Dressed like Women, 1912) by Juan José de Soiza Reilly.