Sexualities in Latin America and the Caribbean

by

Justin Perez, Florence E. Babb

• LAST REVIEWED: 20 February 2024
• LAST MODIFIED: 20 February 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199766581-0140

Introduction

As elsewhere around the globe, diverse sexual practices, expressions, and subjectivities are found throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. During the last several decades, scholars and activists have come to view sexuality as critical to our understanding of difference and inequality across societies and through time. Like gender and race, sexuality is generally understood to be historically and culturally constructed, rather than as an essential and unchanging feature of human societies. Because attention to sexuality emerged principally from those concerned that heteronormative sexuality had been taken for granted, and non-heteronormative sexuality had been viewed as deviant or as playing a minor part in Latin America and the Caribbean, recent sexuality scholarship has more often examined underrepresented groups, including diverse and non-normative sexual orientations and gender identities. In what follows, themes taken up include Foundational Works and Overviews; Anthologies; Journals; Historical Approaches; Literary Studies; Culture and Society; Lesbian Identities and Experience; Gay Men’s Identities and Experiences; Queer Lives and Sexualities; Trans and Travesti Experiences and Gender Non-conformity; Sex Work and Sex Tourism; HIV/AIDS, Sexual Health, and Reproductive Politics; Sexual Citizenship and Social Movements; and Transnationalism, Migration, and Diaspora. A number of the works included here could be cross-referenced in several sections. There is broad coverage of over four decades of scholarship. It is important to note that, over four decades, the language and categories for sexual orientation and gender identity have evolved, in society and in scholarship. Over time, categories once considered derogatory or offensive have been re-appropriated, while other terms that were once widely used have fallen out of favor. Changes in terminology speak to the dynamic and ever-evolving nature of the field. For the purposes of this article, the vocabulary and terminology of the reviewed work is used. Furthermore, it is worth noting that full-length monographs are privileged over articles, and there is an emphasis on English-language scholarship, and greater inclusion of scholarship in the humanistic social sciences, cultural studies, and history than from literature and the arts. Likewise, while a greater number of works examine men’s lives than women’s lives, this trend reflects the more public lives of men as well as the state of research, which for the case of LGBT studies traditionally gave more attention to gay men than to lesbian, bisexual, and trans experience and communities. For related works on women and gender in postcolonial Latin America, see the separate Oxford Bibliographies article on Gender in Postcolonial Latin America.

Foundational Works and Overviews

The following selections offer a broad overview of sexuality in Latin America, synthesize several subfields, and provide a useful foundation for further reading. Wade 2009 is broadest in scope, introducing readers to the importance of race and sexuality in the region. Nesvig 2001 synthesizes historical and social scientific approaches to male homosexuality in Latin America, from the colonial period to 2000. Landes 1940 and Anzaldúa 1987 are both foundational texts: the former is a prescient analysis of non-normative sexualities, covering themes that continue to be relevant in contemporary scholarship, and the latter is a classic work by a feminist of color who theorizes the US-Mexico borderlands and its meanings for those living in intersectional space. Foster 1991 outlines foundational themes relevant to gay and lesbian studies through a discussion of regional literature. Cornejo Salinas, et al. 2020 offers an insightful analysis of the emergence of LGBT studies in the region, in spite of little institutionalized infrastructure in some national contexts.

• Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands, La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987.

  Classical work embraced by feminists, Chicana/o studies scholars, and queer activists for its poetic and passionate engagement with questions of gender, race, sexuality, and nation. In writing about the US-Mexican borderlands, Anzaldúa is particularly eloquent regarding the competing communities in which queer individuals of color find themselves in the Latina/o diaspora.

• Cornejo Salinas, Giancarlo, Juliana Martínez, and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz. “LGBT Studies without LGBT Studies: Mapping Alternative Pathways in Peru and Colombia.” Journal of Homosexuality 67.3 (2020): 417–434.

  DOI: 10.1080/00918369.2018.1534411

  Overview of the trajectories of LGBT and queer studies scholarship in two Latin American contexts where, at the time of publication, no institutionalized LGBT studies programs existed. Through the case studies of Peru and Colombia, the authors examine the crucial role of LGBT activism and the practices and strategies activists and scholars engage in despite antagonism from religious sectors.

• Foster, David William. Gay and Lesbian Themes in Latin American Writing. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991.

  Pioneering, foundational work of cultural criticism discussing Latin American literature that takes up LGBT issues. Foster aims to shed light on the Latin American region through his essays focusing mainly on Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. Charted a needed course for further exploration and helped launch this area of inquiry.

• Landes, Ruth. “A Cult Matriarchate and Male Homosexuality.” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 35.3 (1940): 386–397.

  DOI: 10.1037/h0061971

  Based on anthropologist Ruth Landes’ ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Salvador, Brazil in 1938–1939, this brief article examines the role that “passive” homosexuals played in candomblé practices. Though not frequently cited, this is an exemplary, and prescient, piece of scholarship attentive to race, spirituality, gender, and class, which continue to be pertinent themes in contemporary sexuality studies.

• Nesvig, Martin. “The Complicated Terrain of Latin American Homosexuality.” Hispanic American Historical Review 81.3–4 (2001): 689–729.

  Comprehensive historiographical review of male homosexuality in Latin America. Nesvig reviews the historiography of the Spanish colonial period, colonial Brazil, and provides a critical discussion on social scientific work on the topic through the twentieth century.

• Wade, Peter. Race and Sex in Latin America. London: Pluto, 2009.

  Pioneering source theorizing about the commingling of sexuality, gender, and race in Latin America, past and present and offering a broad overview of dynamics of power. Attention to afrodescendant and indigenous women viewed as “other” to dominant sectors; sex tourism; state regulation of sexuality; reproductive and sexual health; and sexual and racial landscapes in social movements.