Contradictory Heterofaggeneity as a Critical Cuy(r) Tool in Andean Academic Studies

Diego Falconí Travéz (bio) and Robin Myers (bio)

A Brief Theoretical Chronicle of Cuy(r)ness

In 2013, the conference Queering Paradigms V: Queering Narratives of Modernity was held in Quito. This was the second time an international academic discussion of queerness had come to Ecuador. In 2012, two colleagues and I coordinated the colloquium Rethinking Queerness in Latin America, attended by academics and activists largely from Ecuador and the Andean region. This second gathering, held under the auspices of Queering Paradigms, one of the most prestigious international conferences in the field of queer studies, involved a more international call for participation: academics, activists, and artists from the Global North joined their peers in the Global South, sparking a productive conversation on queerness within the Andean perimeter. The 2013 conference was undoubtedly rich in terms of the discussions and working networks forged there. Looking back on this experience, however, the most important part of the colloquium was how it interrogated and sought to translate queer theories and practice generated in response to certain events observed in the asymmetries produced by unequal global geopolitics.

Indeed, even before the event was organized, certain neocolonial tensions with the leadership became more explicit during the conference, in two different ways.² The first took place at the inaugural event: Heide Fulton, attaché to the Embassy of the United States, underscored and paraphrased the US commitment to civil liberties, particularly those of “sexual minorities,” and emphasized that this historical defense of their human rights ought to be a model for Latin America to follow. This homonationalist (Puar) “facelift”³ by the US government—justified by USAID sponsorship of the conference—transpired before an audience dedicated to the subject of gender, as well as to its intersections with class, ethnicity, and coloniality; that is, a discourse of diverse, critical knowledge. Fulton’s words constituted a new link in the long chain of US backdoor politics, which has long treated Latin America with condescension and with the desire for control. Thus, despite the US government’s constant and ongoing violations of millions of Latin American people’s rights (including those of sexo-dissident people, and including the rights to movement, personal safety, freedom of expression, a healthy and balanced environment, etc.), a representative of that very government effectively “pinkwashed” realpolitik agendas that are by no means external to academic activity. As for the second occurrence, despite organizational efforts to foment horizontal dialogues in the conference by launching a broad and diverse call for papers (Viteri, Testimony),⁴ several participants complained that certain people from the activist sphere who could have dialogued with queerness had not been invited.⁵ There were other complaints about preferential treatment of established queer artists and activists from the Global North over their lesser-known contemporaries from the South, who were offered neither the necessary technical access nor the same reception. Some participants, then, were offended by a double standard, which seemed to differentiate the queer from the Latin American fag/dyke/travesti in measuring the centrality of their exhibition. In this way, the queer discussion in 2013 Latin America sparked interesting alliances and knowledge-exchanges to numerous ends (including to challenge the state’s cis/homo/lesbo/transphobia).⁶ That said, it also produced hierarchical, subjugating practices that revived old and new fears about queer theory once again: a theory “without any program for political action” (Lauretis); a depolitizing theory (Mogrovejo); an “academic fad” (Sancho); a renovated link in the colonial chain (Lugones); a theory that cannot culturally translate either the US resistance that prompted it or the resignification of the insult “queer” in Spanish (Epps).

Given this new paradox of queer politics, now within the explosive Andean region, the reaction of an activist group engaged with artistic and educational processes enabled a crucial exercise of loca-lización, which could be translated as loca-lization (Ochoa).⁷ In it, globalizing impositions were met with local practices that enunciated, in turn, a localized knowledge—without renouncing a strategic international dialogue. There was, we must stress, a general atmosphere of suspicion towards the arrival of queerness in the Andean territory, as remarked after the fact by activist⁸ Gabrielle Esteban:

It felt very strange that this conference was being held in Ecuador. Queer Paradigms, if I’m not mistaken. And of course, the FLACSO filled up with people who wanted to know more about the topic. My sense is that there were more people willing to criticize queerness in this environment, in this context . . . That was really interesting. It was like a cold shower for lots of people, but for others it was very refreshing to get to understand queerness from a distance. And I think that was very important in thinking not about queerness with a “q” but cuyrness with a “c,” to start thinking about it from the Andean context. I feel it’s something that still needs to be developed, but it started in that conference.⁹

Against this backdrop, I remember (with the caveat that memory is neither exacting nor all-encompassing) that, outside the main hall where the conference was held, in the heat of the indignation over the events described above, an artivist called La Mota said to Gabrielle Esteban, loud enough for others to hear (paraphrasing again), that “this queer theory can go right to hell and it was more important to think of a cuy theory, which would need a cuy(r) manifesto.” This big little gesture, a near-poetic episode that draws on paronomasia and is rooted not in writing but in orality, expressed irritation with and objection to queerness as a term. Defying queerness through cuy(r)ness was, in my opinion, the revelation of the conference: it allowed us to break the false “presumption of translatability” (Shih) which promised that in spite of our different cultural capitals and origins, gender would connect us through queerness to an ethic and a praxis. The intersectional identities and their ensuing privileges/detriments hindered dialogue in the same plane, even in the same language—emphasizing asymmetries concealed by processes of coloniality that, seven years ago, produced numerous disconnects and ruptures between subjectivities of the North and South, academia and activism.

The Andean cuy(r) proposal, understood as an explicit desire to question queerness, addresses four issues. First, the dissonances resulting from the arrival of queerness in the Global South, caused by the academic and scholarly shield that covers this concept; its lack of attention to intersections of race, class, and coloniality, among other things, shed light on local tensions (Espinosa Miñoso).¹⁰ Second, the “failure” of queer translation: bodies from the South cannot fully express this concept (Rivas), which indicates multiple discomforts associated with the globalization of sexualities. Third, the emergence of a place of Andean sexo-dissident enunciation that divided queerness—not as a result of gender alone, but also of bodily, racial, and social displacements in post-colonial contexts that have historically occurred in this area (Cornejo Polar, “Una heterogeneidad”).¹¹ And fourth, the possibility of rearticulating an international dialogue to highlight certain conceptions of queerness, but which, by stressing the incommensurability between sexualities of the North and South, endeavors to avoid implicit understandings of alterities. Instead, it seeks to acknowledge its own colonial limits (Falconí Trávez, “”De lo queer/cuir/cuy(r)”)—a basic starting point in finding spaces for shared political negotiation.

These four points invite us, once again, to consider the importance of linguistic and cultural translation in the region. At the time of the conference, many theorizations of queer translation already existed;¹² however, they didn’t offer sufficient inoculation for those of us who participated in the event to act more clearly, at least with respect to two of the discourses that most hampered the translation of queerness in Latin America: coloniality and neoliberalism (Domínguez-Ruvalcaba). In this sense, several blind spots in queer theory went uncalibrated in their shift from theory to practice, as they were largely gestated in colonial centers, inside the same knowledge-typifying scholarly formats.

I believe that the Andean context shows us how every hemispheric, international, or global discussion of queerness in Latin America and the Caribbean moves through two types of translation relationships: on the one hand, the translation of queerness “in” Latin America; on the other, the translation of queerness “with” Latin America. Regarding the first, the translation of queerness “in” Latin America, it is essential to consider the different ways in which this word operates (or does not operate) in the region, including the numerous subjective hierarchies in existence, as well as differences between its constitutive countries, cities, and sub-regions. To undertake this complex operation, we must start with the fact that the term “queer,” however unstable it may be in English, is not translated ipso facto into other languages and belongs to a territory still marked by logics of domination, which means it produces an ethnocentric desire for terminological universalization (Venuti). As a result, perhaps queerness itself cannot be translated, but it is certainly possible to “cuirize” translation, that is, to treat translation as a political gesture (Mira) in which the signifier “queer” is contingent. Its defiant gesture is that which allows us to compare it to other words centered in different sexo-dissident subjectivities (loca, puto, puta, marica, travesti; transfeminism, faggotry, etc.) Thus, rather than transferring identity categories, we translate field categories (Sabsay, “Políticas”), which are more useful for political enunciation. In this way, the translation process, more than translation itself, is essential to finding possible frequencies and asymmetries that demand the production of critical and reciprocal works to disassemble the hierarchies implicit in certain binaries: academia/activism, scholarship/orality, and white and mestizo/indigenous and Afro, for instance. Translating queerness “in” Latin America (while acknowledging that this does not involve defining queerness as a template) enables dialogues between people traveling through academia, art, and activism as part of a community, city, or country, but also between countries, through encounters and disagreements that operate in the semantic and cultural movement of queerness.¹³

By contrast, the second, queerness “with” Latin America, refers to the relationship between the Global North and South. More than concerning itself with the resulting signifiers and signifieds, it addresses the production of knowledge and the material conditions that make translation, and the circulation of a term like queerness, possible. The Brazilian sociologist Richard Miskolci asserts that queer theories have entirely neglected the colonial framework, “which underscores and privileges that which is created in the United States and Europe, relegating [queer or cuir] work from the South to an ethnographic status or as a resource for case studies” (21). If human movement marks translation (Cantú), and if said movement has been controlled by just a few countries since the establishment of European modernity, we must invariably discuss a geopolitics of queer translation that raises many questions within academia. Would queer people from the North attend a colloquium self-defined as cuir? Should English remain the lingua franca of the Southern academy in order to facilitate dialogues with the North, pushing languages like Portuguese or Quechua, which hinder a South-South dialogue, into the background? Which authors get cited in paper presentations, and in which language? Why do Northern norms of publication indexing, and the pressure to translate into English, seem to carry more weight in the South?¹⁴ What basic repertoire of queerness reaches the North in translation as a basis for the discussion? What is the relationship between migratory policies of the North and bodies from the South at the conferences and events we organize, and what effects do they have? What kind of value are we granting the spontaneous translations of non-academic groups?

Some of these questions remain urgent with respect to regional reflections on queerness, which continue to grow; they betray real inadequacy in the moment not only of fagging queerness but also of dykeing knowledge. Therefore, it is imperative that discussions and translations of queerness, present and future, not only make local and regional sense but also question structures, practices, people, and institutions that preserve the geopolitics of knowledge in the North (and with the complicity of agents in the South). This refers to the fact that certain bodies and their accompanying concepts enter, are translated, and are institutionalized in the Third World without any need for a visa, whereas bodies and concepts from the Third World must struggle to travel in the opposite direction, South to North, bolstering the idea of contemporary barriers: the much-maligned wall on the southern border of the US or the protected borders of Fortress Europe.

Given these reflections, I find it essential to view queerness in its arrival to the Andes as an old/new episode of the coloniality of knowledge in Latin America (Lander). By this I mean that it is not the first case of epistemic coloniality to be found in gender studies, nor will it be the last.¹⁵ In the region, critical tools such as transculturation, baroquization, and cannibalization recall the history of resistance to the cultural assimilation of terms. Moreover, the decolonization processes of Southern feminisms help outline the eventual decolonization of queerness (which, in the process, allows for the cuirization or encuyation of the decolonial) through translations against the grain: translations that disregard the original word; bad translations; or, as suggested by the Argentine academic Leticia Sabsay, translations with potential to produce “confusion and impossibility of dialogue” (Viteri and Castellanos 117). Fagging, dykeing, or travestifying queerness are also actions that resist the colonial legacy in countering grotesque practices such as academic extractivism, homonationalism, and cultural imposition, thus seeking the balanced, reciprocal traffic of bodies and ideas.

It is within this complex lattice of cultural translations, and with the reflections I have undertaken here, that I intend to recover cuy potential as an act of translating rebellion within and beyond the academic circuit. The shift from queer to cuy(r) that occurred in Quito in 2013 was an impasse of translation—a concept that, as Joseph Pierce remarks, has the power to produce

desiring reverberations that at the same time generate other forms of seeing, feeling, and understanding different (and dissident) forms of embodiment . . . [an impasse] that aims to undermine the imperial domination of the United States [and Europe] in terms of the production of knowledge—[and] depends on imperfect translations; on embodied proximities, gestures, affects, which in any moment may end in violence, failure, or silence. (31)

The signifier “cuy(r)” overflows the bounds of translation itself (Viteri, Desbordes), profaning the word that may never be translated in the South, given the instability between the identity and practice of sexo-dissident subjectivities that necessarily multiply its signifieds. In this way, rather than barring the entrance of queerness into the language, cultures, and countercultures exposed to it, the intent is to rearrange the pacts of translatability (we do not entirely recognize ourselves in queerness, we are not entirely alienated from ourselves in queerness), proposing, in the political realm, other-practices of subjectification and action throughout the essential national, regional, and international dialogue that sexual dissidences must uphold.

The Andean cuy of the activist proposal was a “bad translation” of queerness. Cuy comes from the guinea pig: the cuy, which could be referenced in Spanish as “el cuy,” masculine; “la cuy,” feminine; or “lx cuy,” gender-inclusive, one of the pre-Hispanic animals domesticated by our ancestral communities (Diamond) and subsequently by mestizo communities as well. El/la/lx cuy and its metaphorical use with respect to queerness does not constitute a literal translation (a recurring move in Spain, which at one point sought, with its monopoly on the language, to textually translate this word into Spanish)¹⁶ so much as it took up a word (cuy) that is similar enough sonically to parody the term “queer” (cuy…r) and to propose a differentiated signifier and signified. A cuir translation of queer that, through sexual and regional cheekiness, politically distinguishes a series of localized people and practices that refused to allow a post-colonial concept and apparatus, which rendered them circular, to name and universalize their practices as queer. The outcome of this episode, which accounts for the instability of cuy(r) identity in its Andean singularity,¹⁷ was that the abovementioned manifesto never arrived. Thus, the cuy(r) promise of institutionalizing protest was fleeting and strategic, which made cuy(r)ness very queer indeed, or perhaps queerness very cuy(r).

From that day forward, and sporadically ever since, some of us who identify as sexual dissidents—in academia, activism, and art, in moments of togetherness and disagreement, with limited coordination but occasional collaborations—have been considering cuy(r) potentiality.¹⁸ “Cuy(r)” does not have one unified spelling: cuy(r), cuy-r, and cui/r may all be used. As a result, its possible appropriation and institutionalization is far more precarious. In the process of writing this article, I repeatedly introduced the word cuy(r) into the word processer, which automatically corrected it as cuy®: both a macabre and an eloquent metaphor for contemporary academia, which so often patents concepts in hopes of making them trending topics—evoking, in turn, the importance of eluding the logic of conceptual documentation. Thus, cuy(r)ness, a contemporary symptom of the unequal traffic in the economy of sexualities, has no future as an identity category, nor as an intent to become an avant-garde fag/dyke/non-binary practice with a mestizo flair (and therefore with the potential for ancestral appropriation). Cuy(r)ness would not represent the Andean region in the international queer space. Rather, it would appear as a questioning gesture, inscribed into a contradictory postcolonial history of gender in the territory of a Latin America that strives to become Abya Yala.

Indeed, this curious word has made its way into the current debate (almost as if it were digging a little tunnel underground) and served as a catalyst for discrete thoughts and actions that have collaborated with interesting processes in different spaces. Without any intent to be prescriptive, exclusive, or systematic, I will put forth several ideas-in-progress, which I have deliberately decided not to develop in detail—both because this would exceed my capacities and because to do so would mean pivoting from an individual discourse toward certain ideas that outstrip both the scholarly and the personal; that is, pressuring cuy(r), cuy-r, and cui/r transience into becoming cuy®. In this sense, as Shih remarks, there is real danger in seeking to monopolize the signifieds of a signifier, particularly one still in the process of plural signification. I am confident that other people and collectives will continue to develop some of these ideas in the future.¹⁹

Meanwhile, I will present several possible subjects that invite broader debate, and which, viewed in terms of the power of the cuy metaphor, I feel have potential for political impact.

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Cuy anticoloniality, since the cuy is an animal designated mostly for human consumption, sparks horror in certain Westernizing eyes, which view hamsters or guinea pigs as pets; this makes it possible for a veiled ethnocentrism to insert itself. El/la/lx cuy underscores the contradiction of the Global North, the region that has imposed and maintained ecologically harmful lifestyles, which nonetheless views other means of interacting with nature in a condescending and Eurocentric way. An analogous case that may help us consider the discomfort caused by cuyness is that of the Kwaio people in the Solomon Islands, studied by the Australian anthropologist Roger Keesing. In his ethnographic work, Keesing recounts his horror when he learnsd that this population ate dolphins, which led him to tell the community that such animals were intelligent mammals and therefore shouldn’t be eaten. “Don’t eat that thing! . . . They’re like people, not fish! Look at its blood—it’s red and warm, like ours!” (18).²⁰ Ironically, the animality/humanity divide was essential to the emergence of anthropology as a hegemonic discipline (Muscio 95). That is, the vision that privileges the Western human being over other beings in nature (which coincidentally makes the white European subject, the “non-savage,” more human rather than less) shapes a form of knowledge that serves to impart a “civilized” relationship between people and their environment. Emphasizing these paradoxes through powerful images, such as a platito de cuy,²¹ is important as a way to reveal certain anxieties in the Global North regarding their desire to discipline bodies.

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Cuy promiscuity: with their voracious sexual practices, lxs cuyes can help reflect on and translate particular politics of desire in certain human populations of the region. The metaphor of the cuy allows for a departure from the idea of the productive, cisheteronormative body by encompassing forms of humanness associated with animality. Although he does little to question queer coloniality, Gabriel Giorgi argues that certain uses of the sexo-dissident body “also challenge species-belonging: leaving normative gender is always, in some way or other, a means of leaving the species; the recognizability of the human species involves having a legible, identifiable gender” (7). Kelly Perneth, the Afro-Colombian activist who lives in Ecuador, remarks on the need to call queerness cuyness:

[calling] it ‘cuy’ through an intensely animal relationship, which has always been a way to satirize and represent Latin America and the Caribbean. Cuy/cuirness had more in common with its own quests, with agency toward re-presenting ourselves/de-enunciating ourselves from the outer edges of gringo and European centrality . . . Cuy for the Andes. Cuir to understand and define oneself as part of the Caribbean. (Perneth, Conversation)

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Perhaps this cuy animality, associated with the sexual, can lead to translating “queering” (a verb that describes actions of political re-signification) as “encuyar”: a verb form entirely absent from the RAE, but certainly present in social networks as a way to describe rage, tenderness, and eroticisms from a playful perspective enabled by this sexed animal.²²

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Cuy bodily chaos may invite us to rethink both the potentialities of the flesh and certain sex/gender emancipations/impositions resulting from scientific discourse. In this sense, we might turn to the way in which researchers Charles Phoenix, Robert Goy, Arnold Gerall, and William Young analyzed the results obtained from administering androgens to guinea pigs and observed the changes in their development and sexual activity. This research made it possible to “think,” through an animal’s body, about the complex components of what we define—automatically, in a limited and binary fashion—as “man and woman” in the human body, and which articulate a kind of gender destiny. Their study helps scientists to continue establishing the endocrinological truth, insofar as it promises to approach gender through science-based interventions and protocols. Nonetheless, science itself can re-articulate mechanisms of domination and inequality resulting from coloniality in which some bodies—non-binary bodies, for example—are disciplined from a new normalizing destiny. According to Marlene Wayar, contemporary medicine involves “a biomedical construction of happiness,” to which this travesti theorist responds: “The meaning of this [biomedical] construct must be challenged. Who builds it and why,” specifically in order to question hormonation as a destiny for trans people (V. A. 53-54). This questioning invites us to reflect on other health paradigms. For example, in the Andes, the concept of buen vivir, good living, associated with the native principles of the Sumak Kawsay:²³ as a case of intercultural medicine (in which two concepts of medicine and of life may coexist without one opposing the other), and as a way to contemplate wellbeing and other forms of bodily becoming that do not heed the mandates of Western medicine as the only option.

In this economy of images and meanings in which science and the law continue to articulate discourses of truth, it is worth acknowledging that WikiHow, the tutorial division of Wikipedia, has a guide to overcoming the “difficulty of determining the sex of [a] guinea pig” (Elliot). This references the cuy’s characteristic elusiveness to the categorizing human eye. In numerous ways, a cuy is a contemporary catalyst for viewing this animal not only as a guinea pig or cavy, a physical repository for scientific experimentation, but also as a non-human animal.

This idea may help us, in turn, consider other-signifiers in the contexts of health, sexual and reproductive rights, and living with dignity.

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Cuy anality: among the primary images of the cuy in the Andes are depictions of its body impaled on a stick from anus to mouth, or vice-versa, which allows us to think in radical ways about a destiny of fatality and fear, inserted into the cisheterocentric perspective. The use of the metaphor of anal fatality, developed in queer theories from the North (Bersani), allows for the assembly of anal-ogous uses located in the Andes, in which the ass, as a site of shame, becomes a site of pleasure and empowerment (Cornejo). This idea is expressed in the Quito-based collective PachaQueer in their performance Ano-Sober-Ano (a play on words with ano, or anus, and the adjective soberano, sovereign), accompanied by the exhibition Ano-nimxs (“anónimxs” would be the gender-inclusive form of the adjective “anonymous”), which proposes to “reclaim the power of our cuerpas [a feminized adaptation of the word cuerpos, bodies] as a mechanism of liberation, one that allows us to cuyrify practices, identities, and imaginaries, and especially one that invites us to rethink individual and collective sovereignty, and its permanent cessation to states and institutions (PachaQueer). Likewise, Kelly Perneth, through lesboanti-racist positions in the Andes, seeks to decenter the anus as a way to acknowledge the gay man or fag (“Cavidades”), incorporating the anus as a key organ for pleasure and sexo-dissident thought through the concept of diva-cagación (a play on words with the verb divagación, which means wandering or digression, and the verb cagar, to shit). Forms of sex/gender disobedience and an amplification of the possibilities of the flesh.

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The shift in cuy humanist/environmentalist paradigms makes it possible to revalue ancestral modes that recognize nature as a living subject and challenge the colonial hierarchy that positions human beings at the center of the world, as well as a return to rurality, questioning urbanity as a symbol of a better life. In this sense, interventions from the indigenous world into Western views are key. As Nina Pacari clarifies:

According to the indigenous worldview, all beings in nature are invested with energy, which is samai, and are therefore living beings: a rock, a river (water), a mountain, the sun, plants; in short, all beings are alive and they too have families, feel joy and sorrow just like human beings . . . We are all part of a whole, and even though we are different, we are complementary, we need each other . . . Many readers will believe that this way of thinking borders on folklore, or that it’s a matter of the indigenous past. Not so. Tradition keeps thought and its resulting practice alive. Indeed, the application of this concept is what has made it possible, amid the destruction unleashed by developmentalism and modernism, for eighty percent (80%) of biodiversity in Latin America to exist in the territory of indigenous peoples. (130-131)

The reflections resulting from ancestral Andean worldviews have had political consequences: for example, the fact that the Constitution of Ecuador acknowledges the rights of nature has illustrated the importance of native thought at work in an ethical shift in the globalizing paradigm. Contemplating fag-futurity, without having to sift it through heterocentered Latin American reproduction or the dystopia and submission to pleasure of Northern gay subjects, may find support in a respectful engagement with ancestral worldviews.

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Cuy dialogue, which takes place in the act of eating, can enable forms of encounter between mestizo (and white) communities and indigenous and Afro-descendant communities, without appropriation by the hegemonic white-mestizo discourse. Seen through this lens, it is impossible to think of cuyness without ending up in the intercultural paradigm that dispenses with multiculturality, in which diverse cultures gather under the umbrella of the hegemonic culture-—Western culture—to assemble themselves through anticoloniality. Viewing interculturality as a still nonexistent project, one that asserts itself as a collective construction of people and forms of knowledge (including those associated with gender and sexuality), prompts considerations of “a sociopolitical process and project addressing the construction of new and different societies, relations, and living conditions” (Walsh 140). Given the globalization of LGBTI identities, intercultural dialogues are essential, as they nourish the critical formation of and collaborations within sexual dissidence.

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Cuy emotion: the means of representing this animal may help us consider new kinds of affect and interrelation among dissident communities. In this sense, the reflections derived from feminisms, faggisms, and travesti thinking proves essential: they seek to disassemble certain forms of academic, activist, and artistic action that, in the belligerence against the cisheteropatriarchal regime, have activated careless forms of action. Viewing tenderness as a radical mode of care is crucial in reformulating the actions and affects of different activist spaces. Likewise, the act of politicizing negative emotions, such as resentment and anger, may produce a localized knowledge that does not so much avoid feelings that might depart from reason and good judgment as it understands the value of affects in the production of knowledge.

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Cuy anti-racism: the genealogies of subjectification in the conquest-era Spanish language with respect to “other races”; for example, the word “mestizo,” used to identify a mix between white and indigenous “as contrary to nature as that other unquestionably familiar example—donkeys crossed with horses—” (Caillavet 312). The example of “mulatto or mulatta, words rooted in the mule, a young undisciplined animal” (Segura 18), speaks to the anxieties harbored by the white First-World body on purity and control. Cuy(r)ness as a present-day response in Andean Spanish can challenge policies of castes and colorisms in a way that defends animality and flirts with anti-racist proposals. I believe that understanding and not-understanding queerness, rather than parodying it through cuy(r)ness in order to arrive at certain critical applications, has proven to be an interesting means of appropriation and precarious movement. Without erasing colonial remnants, it has articulated a productive concept within the local sphere, which has successfully produced critical positions that forge a discrete and more equitable international dialogue on the subject of dissident sexualities. A promising and contradictory form of loca-lization that does not renounce the exchange of knowledge, but is protected from neocolonial structures and dynamics traversing academia, the art world, and activism. Below, and in response to the trail of the cuy(r) gesture that aspires to a broader root system for queerness, confronting the universalizing rhetoric of globalization, I will present a theoretical approach that seeks to cuyify contradictory heterogeneity, a key concept for Andean and Latin American literatures. Revisited through gender and decolonial knowledge, this concept can help us better understand the sexo-dissident writings of this region.

Contradictory Heterogeneity: The Potentiality and Sex/Gender blindness of a Key Concept

The Andean space is characterized by chasms that speak not only to the region’s rugged mountain peaks and plains but also to stark cultural precipices. Before Spanish conquest, the coexistence of various populations made for complex societies, articulating particular logics in which power was forged: sometimes with force, sometimes with reciprocity (Murra). By contrast, Spanish colonization imposed a cultural system—the Western system—that caused grotesque asymmetries. They made the abovementioned chasms unbridgeable and prolonged them in time, even after national independence was secured across the region. Thus, a series of paradoxes appeared when indigenous, Afro-descendent, mestizo, and black bodies and subjectivities had to coexist under the hegemonic Western cultural umbrella, which reduced multiple cultures and their diverse subjectivities to the modern paradigm’s pretension of singularity.

Antonio Cornejo Polar was likely the most important Andean literary critic of the past century. He translated this historical quandary—the chasms and their structural and subjective consequences following the instatement of the Spanish colonial regime—into the Andean literary field in order to study how these profound cultural and subjective contradictions appear in regional texts, acknowledging the impossibility of unifying what is complex and diverse into a single concept of literature. His revelatory theory had such impact that it became a model, an agenda, which provided a useful interpretive key for engaging with other Latin American literatures (“Para una agenda”). In this respect, Cornejo Polar remarks:

Latin American literary theory works on an illegitimately shortened oeuvre . . . Oral literatures in native languages and even in popular Spanish-language literature, whether oral or written, are banished from the realm of national literature . . . This expresses the universalization of the cultural canon of dominant groups . . . The entire process reveals the failure of the Latin American bourgeoisie. (“Unidad” 80-81)

To better understand the different ways in which Andean cultures are reflected in literary texts, Cornejo Polar proposed a key concept: contradictory heterogeneity (Escribir). He defines this concept as “processes of producing literatures in which two or more sociocultural worlds discordantly intersect . . . making them scattered, fractured, unstable, contradictory, and atypical within their own limits” (10). These literary texts, even in following the Western model, cannot erase native cultures, popular knowledge, or orality from their pages, as these elements are part of their context and its aesthetics. Andean texts often symptomize the complex cultural coexistence that seeks to reduce heterogeneity to one single thing, spilling forth a series of incongruities and paradoxes that add complexity, texture, and richness to their content.

Based on this conceptualization, Cornejo Polar also proposes complex processes of subjectification without yielding to a deceptive, assimilationist mestizo identity/ideology that absorbs different cultures in a de-problematized and utilitarian way (Cornejo Polar, “Unidad”; Sanijnés). Instead, Cornejo Polar presents a heterogeneous and contradictory subjectivity:

A plural subject that undergoes different experiences in discontinuous temporalities, associated with diverse cultures . . . that recognizes the unviability (and even illegitimacy) of a model that collapses what is multiple, diverse, and inconsistent into oneness . . . A new textual subject . . . whose single presence, however intermittent and subordinate, substantially alters the order and limits of the literary space of Andean nations. (Escribir 43, 197, 200)

In this way, we find a rigorous project that illuminates the antagonistic coexistence (in both the texts and bodies) between native and Western, learned and popular, hegemonic and peripheral—which, in their historical evolution, have created a cultural system and subjectivities that are different and even opposed to their European counterparts.²⁴ These include paradoxes, discordances, and forms of violence reflected in literary and artistic representation, and they offer their own record of Andean and Latin American cultural products. Moreover, this conceptual apparatus has far more density in explaining different phenomena in the Andean region than other concepts do, for example, baroquization (Echeverría), hybridity (García Canclini), or transculturation (Ortiz). In the words of Mabel Moraña, it is “a call to the processes of cultural translation” (xii) that have been relevant to the Andean region and its own logics since the colonial period.²⁵

To construct his theoretical framework, Cornejo Polar states that there is an initial moment, located today in the time-space of myth, that allows us to understand the start not only of colonization but also of heterogeneous and contradictory literatures and subjectivities. This is an episode related in the chronicles of various authors, and it reveals the beginning of the end of the Inca civilization: the dialogue between Atahuallpa and Valverde the priest. In it, the clergyman gives a Bible to the Andean monarch, telling him that it contains the word of God to see how he reacts. Atahuallpa takes the book and brings it to his ear: his cultural system is rooted in orality, which is the means of access to the divine word. Hearing no response, he tosses the book aside—an act of sacrilege in the priest’s view. Valverde orders Pizarro, the most “successful” conquistador in the area, who was hiding in the bushes, to attack the Inca army and capture Atahuallpa. Here, in the impossibility of reading and writing in the lettered format, we find “the history of the failure of the book itself” (Cornejo, Escribir) when it comes to containing the diverse body of regional knowledge: the native sovereign and the entire indigenous population are apprehended, the dialogue is broken, and writing is imposed over orality.

I would like to explore the value of Cornejo Polar’s conceptualization in order to consider the aesthetic and political possibilities inserted into Andean literary texts and subjectivities, but also to point out a blind spot in his proposal: gender, which does not appear as a category of his analysis. Accordingly, my study strives to carry on an Andean tradition of resistance to totalizing views by criticizing, precisely, the sex/gender universalization at work in Cornejo Polar’s contradictory heterogeneity—a concept that points to a false cisheteropatriarchal universalism, as I will explain below. By analyzing, questioning, and making the term mutate, it is possible to forge a dialogue with the cuy(r) proposals of sexual dissidence in the region by contemplating politics of queer destabilization, especially those centered on racialized bodies, even if produced in the Global North.

To do so, I suggest that this episode—the dialogue between Atahuallpa and Valverde, rooted in the epic, a traditionally masculine genre—proves insufficient in considering a principle as complex as contradictory heterogeneity. Which means we must turn to another incident in the period: the burning of the sodomites. Indeed, certain colonial chronicles recount how the Spanish conquistadors exterminated entire populations for the heinous sin of sodomy, a term that grouped together a series of practices and simultaneously criminalized them (Jordan); we may view this event as a gender genocide. Take, for example, the account of Pedro Gutiérrez de Santa Clara, which describes the extermination of the natives on the coast of present-day Ecuador:

With these wicked men having gone so long without women, and the devil himself having tricked them and blinded them and distracted them from natural reason, they engaged in drunken revelry, in which they began to employ the heinous sin . . . Juan de Olmos, a neighbor from the village of Puerto Viejo, burned a great many of these perverse and diabolical Indians, as the high Justice he was at that time, although the people were under his jurisdiction, so that they would be parted from this pestiferous and diabolical vice, and never took advantage of the authority still vested in him. (317-18)

This is a rich account of sexual other-subjectivities (named by the conquistadores as sodomites after the sin in question) is itself uprooted with brutal violence by colonization. Ironically, the only remaining record of these lifestyles is this chronicle, a text full of nooks and hideaways, vacillating between history and fiction, which buries the native subject altogether. Unlike the episode of Atahuallpa, the incident of the sodomite-burning was not reconstructed by any genre, literary or popular, nor was it theorized. Its long suppression has only now come to an end, thanks to the rise of gender studies.

If the act of tossing aside the book that cannot be heard is the foundational moment that marks the bloody imposition of the Western writing system over the native one, the burning of the sodomites is the act that represents the violent annihilation of a broad system of gender that, from the West to the Andes, renders the sodomite body to ash—”sodomite” being an adjective that inexactly describes certain homodesiring and non-binary identities.²⁶ Thus, the imposition of writing over orality is parallel to the destruction of a broad sex/gender cultural system that, through fire, becomes dichotomous, cisgendered, and heterosexually obligatory (Benavides; Horswell). On the one hand, the book becomes the receptacle that monopolizes culture and seeks to replace orality; on the other, the cisheterosexual body monopolizes gender performativity (Butler), seeking to silence non-heteronormative practices and bodies dissenting from the gender binary. However, despite the imposition of writing, the book cannot be constituted as a totalizing reality of knowledge in the Andes, which leads contradictory heterogeneity to appear as the guiding force of Andean texts. The lettered text reveals interferences and contradictions with orality and discordances with whiteness/mestizaje that must also often grapple with indigeneity. By this same logic, the anti-sodomite fire, however “successful” in destroying pre-Colombian subjectivities deemed heinous, fails as soon as it tries to contain the possibilities of the body: despite the gender binary and mandatory heterosexuality, multiple colonial texts (and later texts) will address the persistence of varied bodies and desires disobeying the impositions of the West.

Cornejo Polar did not consider the impossibility of uniformizing culture through the hegemonic sex/gender model, even when he had the opportunity to do so²⁷—probably because his own site of annunciation did not allow him to perceive the patriarchy as a political system (Millet), and therefore also part of culture. This approach means that his theory is based on heterogeneity, but also in heterosexism, which exacerbates the contradiction that he himself put forth. Indeed, the multiple subjectivities of the Andes are forced to live not only under a hegemonic cultural model but also under a heteronormative, patriarchal, and cis-sexist regime. This too is present in Andean cultural roots. Heterogeneity is multiple, complex, and contradictory. It accounts for varied forms of life and cultural documentation. Consequently, it should include the diverse ways in which the body and the cultures it embodies become written texts. However, it would seem that heterogeneity can only be contemplated in patriarchal terms, as the social contract, signed in the age of modernity, treats heterosexuality as mandatory (Wittig), and the man/woman sexual binary is imposed as a universal law, especially through science (Fausto-Sterling).²⁸ Thus, the rich concept of heterogeneity loses its power. This matter grows more evident with the study of Andean sexo-diverse and sexo-dissident jargon, which uses the shortened form “hétero” or “hetero” as a synonym for a heterosexual person. As a result, for example, Frau Diamanda/Héctor Acuña, a travesti artist from Peru, asserts that the shortened form hetero “only speaks to heterosexuality, losing its geometric/spatial quality” (9).

To resolve this omission, this new chasm overlooked by Cornejo Polar, I find it important to revisit his concept in order to properly understand the vast fabric of bodies and sexualities that is the Andes and is expressed in its literature. To do so, I propose a mutant concept, derived and diverted from Cornejo Polar’s, that accounts not only for the cultural complexities of sexuality but also for the various sites of enunciation required in contemporary academia (Haraway; Mignolo, “Posoccidentalismo”), an important antidote for protecting critical thinking from universalist aspirations. In this sense, it is crucial to sodomize, faggify, dykeify, travestify, encuyify contradictory heterogeneity so that it may enunciate certain peripheral and nonglobalizing sexualities (somewhat different from LGBTI sexualities)—which in turn will help us think of/from a fag register, a butch register, a puto, cola, playo register, as well as an Andean, Abya Yala-ist, and Latin American one. My proposal, likewise loca-lized, is to consider a contradictory heterofaggeneity: a fluid, parodic concept that allows us to grasp the complex cultural coexistences that view the sex/gender construct as nodal in regional literatures.

Contradictory Heterofaggeneity: A Cuy(r) Approach Through Literary Theory

As a fag interested in discussing fag subjectivities, I propose the concept of contradictory heterofaggeneity. I do so in order to loca-lize my own knowledge, which does not claim to be universal but only subjectivized, and which is inscribed within a critical framework (not without its tensions) that links gender and anticoloniality. This concept, following this perspective, mutates depending on who enunciates it: a non-heterosexual woman might speak of a “heterodykegeneity,” a Costa Rican person might refer to a “heteroplayogeneity,” a person with a disability might comment on a “heterocripgeneity.”²⁹ The possibility of discussing unfixed subjectivities that change according to their complex intersections with race, class, desire, nation, or disability status, forges critical, opportunistic, and productive dialogues with queerness. In this sense, I should mention that heterofaggeneity can (and must) operate as an intradiegetic concept (within the literary text). In addition to loca-lizing knowledge, this concept enunciates certain means of interpretation in dissonant characters, narrators, or spaces with respect to more globalized LGBTI identities and narratives. In analyzing the narrative of an intradiegetic character—for example, Joaquín in La noche es virgen [The Night is Young] by Jaime Bayly—we might consider a characterization and even a narrative structure of heterolimpwristedgeneity. In the case of literatures beyond the Andes, we might think of Manuela in El lugar sin límites [The Limitless Place], a classic novel of José Donoso’s region, in discussing a contradictory heterotravestigeneity. Such phenomena make it impossible to read these works unquestioningly, viewing these characters and narrations as gay or trans without needing to follow another analytical route (along the lines that “queering” suggests) that accounts for a series of intersections and agencies marked by the existence of regional chasms expressed in different texts.

Contradictory heterofaggeneity seeks to insert gender, especially from a place of sexual dissidence,³⁰ into a theoretical debate that has been far too “hétero.”³¹ In this sense, the concept seeks to explain that gender categories and sexual binarism are rooted in colonization; as a result, they are not immutable, ahistorical realities, but are inscribed into bodies and texts. Precisely by analyzing the interaction between coloniality and gender, heterofaggeneity can reveal a complex system marked by multiple and often aggressive contradictions in which chasms of class, race, and sexuality appear in the cultural texts of the region. In addition, it has the potential of positioning fag, travesti, dyke, cola, and touched-by-thunder subjectivities and examining their paradoxes in order to loca-lize the debate through concepts and practices beyond the global identity-based traffic of possible sexualities. In the case of regional literatures, for instance, this concept shows a system in which complex subjectivities coexist. Beyond traditional dichotomies such as written/oral, lettered/popular, and Hispanic/native, this system incorporates—never so aptly put—other pairs stemming from the agency of the flesh, such as hetero/homo, man/woman, cis/trans, Hispanic/native/Afro. Therefore, it is a concept that draws on a consideration of affects and illness. But it is also nourished by other cuir ideas, including, to mention just a few: the valuation of loca-l sexual forms, the strategic use of theories from the North, and the aesthetic and political register. It feeds, too, on other de-colonial materials: the changing notions of culture, interculturality, and the decolonization of knowing and being. I believe that this amalgam of knowledge could enact an analysis worthy of the Andean regional reality.

In my study of twentieth-century literatures in the Andes (De las cenizas), I explore texts and authorships from the area that exhibit insurmountable paradoxes with sexual dissidences—and their respective intersections of race, class, and coloniality—at their center. Hence, I have gone on to consider this concept as a means of explaining the complex aesthetics and actions present in texts and authors from this region. For example, the lettered literary canon has defined Pablo Palacio as the author who initiated the homodesiring model in Ecuador and probably across the region, even though the homosexual character dies a violent death in his texts (Serrano).³² This is nonsense in the very conception of what the rule ought to be, at least from a pedagogical perspective; a rule, that is, that seeks to impart the values that should remain in a society (Mignolo, “Los cánones”). When we understand that a classic author from the region puts forth a hidden homosexuality that is immediately annihilated in his texts, where orality and writing intersect in a state of conflict, this is a case of contradictory heteroviciousgeneity.

For his part, in his novel La noche es virgen, the bisexual Peruvian author Jaime Bayly, who has tended to align himself aesthetically and politically with the most hegemonic Western ideas, articulates a narrative in which intense homoerotic desire is presented through a loose, indirect discourse that simulates orality. Meanwhile, his presentation as a proper heterosexual man is described through direct discourse. This fragmented use of language, also present in other novels by Bayly, enunciates a politics of desire in which his characters—who vacillate between being homosexual, gay, and bisexual—are continually associating themselves with mestizaje as a whitewashed reality that brings them into contact with the United States and Spain. At the same time, this reality distances them from the fag and street cultures of Lima, with whom the more affluent characters pursue sexual exchanges.³³ An example, in short, of contradictory heterobigeneity.

Another illustrative case is that of Julieta Paredes, who has been part of feminist collectives such as Mujeres Creando [Women Creating] and Comunidad Mujeres Creando [Women Creating Community]. She has written poetry and essays, both lettered genres—but also worked in graffiti and audiobooks, both popular subgenres, from a collective perspective, tearing down the Western idea of individual authorship and emphasizing a communal, lesbian, Aymara feminism. Yet she writes in Spanish, not Aymara, due to the patriarchal violence inflicted on her body (Falconí Travez, “Entrevista”), refuses to be defined as a poet, and, in recent years, has been involved in episodes of abuse committed against her community of women, all questions that characterize a contradictory heterodykegeneity.

In his novel El desbarrancadero [The Cliff], Fernando Vallejo explores the peripheral place of Colombia, a sub-Andean territory (Arellano), in the history of the struggle against HIV/AIDS, by revealing the dehumanizing treatment of seropositive people in the Global South. In this auto-fictional text, which is intertextually linked to his other novels, he establishes a difference between, on the one hand, certain white and mestizo bodies, for which he cares through the meticulous protection of his writing,³⁴ as well as the animals he deeply values—and, on the other hand, other racialized, feminine, or precarious corporealities, ravaged by a more oral use of the language. This, then, is a clear case of contradictory heteropillowbitergeneity.

Finally, in two texts, Adalberto Ortiz recovers a being, La Tunda, hailing from the mythology of Afro-Pacific oral and literary cultures of the northern Andean region, thus tightening the boundaries between writing and orality. La Tunda, who abducts children to change their personalities, is depicted as a sexually voracious entity that oscillates between masculine and feminine, and which connects Afro-descendant and Montubian populations. This figure constitutes a proto-queer character who does not require queerness in order to exist, albeit with patriarchal overtones that perpetuate the culture of female rape and express regional contradictions. What’s more, La Tunda carries out “tundifications,” actions that subjectively and sexually transform people and may be considered a kind of queering. Ortiz’s literature assembles, then, a contradictory heterobattingfortheotherteamgeneity that can be dis/associated from/with queer thinking. Contradictory heterofaggeneity and all its variations are an interpretive key that can be applied to more than just literature.³⁵ However, in literary and oraliterary texts, as well as in authorships of the Andean region, it finds a loca-lized analysis toward understanding sex/gender contradictions caused by the imposition of coloniality, which has continued in numerous ways into the present.

Colaphon

Katie King remarks that queer theory is contingent in transnational contexts, while Judith Butler asserts that queerness is “never fully owned” (228), needing to remain in that place of uncertainty in order to ensure its critical possibility. Likewise, in their volume on understanding queer translation, Epstein and Giller state that “queer translation theory is able to point up, and to a certain extent shrilly parody, the constitutive incoherence of the totalitarian thinking through which the dominant ideology reaffirms itself.” Thus, unlike most ideas coming from the West, which seek to enthrone themselves with knowledge, certain seminal voices in queer theory have made use of mechanisms to contextualize it, rename it, and even discard it to keep from articulating a totalizing definition of bodies and sexualities. Despite this good will, other authors more attuned to coloniality have remarked that certain postmodern concepts in Latin America, once they are “shopworn” or “out of fashion” in colonial centers, have a “profitable second life” in the region (Beverley and Oviedo, 1995), thus losing their power or initial effectiveness and reinstating the colonial episteme. With such precedents in Latin America, where several cultural translations of queerness have been published (Rapisardi; Rivas; La Fountain-Stokes), and faced with the eternal dilemma of linguistically and culturally translating the concepts gestated in the West, perhaps it would be better to “tundify” translation itself. Contradictory heteromecogeneity, heteroputogeneity, and heteromariposóngeneity are, precisely, anti-universalist attempts to exceed the semantic translations of queerness by taking sexo-dissident subjectivity and action into account (queering, in other words)—and without overlooking the global geopolitical inequalities that, in spite of everything, must not halt strategic international dialogues.

Like all concepts that begin in the heart of theory, mine seeks a sense of continuity to measure its worth. Nonetheless, its very mutability according to the site of sexo-dissident enunciation, as well as the very genesis of its conception, impede both its stabilization and its certainty. Just like the cuy(r) manifesto that was never written, it is highly probable that the concept of contradictory heterofaggeneity, with its possible variants and routes, will be more a symptom than a model of precise application. And so the outline I have presented here is a queer concept, albeit with a cuir and especially a cuy(r) genealogy that better explains a purpose and a possible disorganizing, politicizing utility of sexualities—even (and time will tell) that of being a fragmentary, mutating, “failed” concept (Halberstam). A concept that served only to take stock, once again, of cultural chasms, and the difficulties of unifying translations to define the vast history of sexualities in the Andes and across Abya Yala.

Diego Falconí Travéz is an Associate Professor at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, and Professor at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito.

Robin Myers is a poet and Spanish-to-English translator. Recent translations include Salt Crystals by Cristina Bendek (Charco Press), Copy by Dolores Dorantes (Wave Books), The Dream of Every Cell by Maricela Guerrero (Cardboard House Press), The Book of Explanations by Tedi López Mills (Deep Vellum Publishing), and The Restless Dead by Cristina Rivera Garza (Vanderbilt University Press), among other works of poetry and prose. She was double-longlisted for the 2022 National Translation Award in poetry. She lives in Mexico City.

Notes

1. This article originally used a non-unified form of the word cuy(r), which is sometimes written as cuy-r or cuy/r. However, in response to an editorial request, I have chosen to use the form cuy(r) throughout, adhering to the original phonetics of its formulation. First published as “La Heteromaricageneidad Contradictoria Como Herramienta crítica cuy(r) En Las Literaturas Andinas.” Revista Interdisciplinaria De Estudios De Género De El Colegio De México, vol. 7, no. 1, July 2021, pp. 1-39.

2. The 2012 colloquium was originally organized by María Amelia Viteri, Santiago Castellanos, and myself, with support from our respective academic institutions (FLACSO Ecuador, San Francisco University in Quito [USFQ], and the Autonomous University of Barcelona [UAB]). Initially, the 2013 conference was meant to be a continuation of the colloquium, but due to impositions we found expressive of “civilizatory” mandates (a kind of queer FMI or FIFA that demanded numerous requirements in order to hold the event in Quito) from the leadership team at Queering Paradigms, Burkhard/Bee Scherer, both Santiago and I decided to leave the organization, although we did attend the event and participate in several activities.

3. All Spanish-to-English translations throughout this article are Robin Myers’s.

4. María Amelia Viteri, one of the organizers, states: “Queering Paradigms V (QP5): Disrupting Paradigms was held for the first time in the Andean region and in a Spanish-speaking country, Ecuador. In hopes of understanding how queer perspective can pose alternative conceptions of modernity, QP5: Disrupting Paradigms interlaced horizontal academic dialogues with and through art, as well as a conversation, articulation, and theorization of art’s impact on this discussion—non-antagonistically combining activist strategies and academic concerns, for example. Besides bringing art into the academy, QP5 served as a bridge between activism and academia, delving deeper into the influence of the arts. We were accompanied by international activists on the global level; as for the Americas, we invited Lía García (Mexico), Carlos Motta (Colombia/NYC), Malú Machuca Rose (Peru), and Felipe Rivas and Raúl Martínez Quiroz (Chile) to converse with Ecuadorian activists such as Elizabeth Vázquez, Jorge Medranda, Leticia Rojas, Sara Solórzano, Diane Rodríguez, Mariefranci Córdova, Manuel Acosta, and PachaQueer, among many others” (Testimony).

5. Gabrielle Esteban, an important trans activist in this narration of cuy(r)ness, remarks: “Besides, I crashed it [laughter]. That was one of our critiques: they didn’t contact organizations. It was an academic event, but we activists weren’t invited because we didn’t communicate from that place, from queerness.”

6. Rafael Correa, Ecuadorian president and self-declared leftist who facilitated certain social advancements during his administration, took continual actions to silence feminist groups, especially in response to the call for the de-penalization of abortion that criminalized hundreds of women. He also articulated forms of violence with respect to sexual diversity and dissidence. On his Saturday address of December 13, 2014, he criticized “gender ideology” and said “enough with men looking like women and women looking like men! . . . don’t impose that on children . . . I’d rather a woman look like a woman and a man look like a man . . . this ideology is incredibly dangerous . . . it destroys the foundation of society, which remains the conventional family.” At the time of the conference, it felt important to hold critical dialogues, as the president’s high popularity due to certain anti-imperialist and social justice-oriented actions made it difficult to understand, from the outside, the complex situation facing feminist and sexually diverse people in Ecuador. This also points to the challenges of organizing conferences with national funding if the Chief of State himself, in this case, held personal beliefs so hostile to gender and maintained such ironclad control over national resources.

7. The word loca has multiple meanings associated with gender. For example, a loca may refer pejoratively to a liberated woman, a homosexual man, or a travesti person. The word “localization” plays on the word “localization,” which traditionally refers to the positioning of something. In the case of “loca-lization,” this term is situated in a terrain of counter-hegemonic, transfeminist, sexo-dissident knowledge as an alternative to globalization. Loca-lization may be translated as a form of queering perspective or queer-situated knowledge, thus situating itself in a decolonial Latin American episteme.

8. In the original Spanish version of this text, I referred to Esteban as “lx activista” and incorporated sexo-dissident movements’ proposal to use the letter “x” instead of the “o” or the “a,” at least for subjectivity-designating nouns, in order to go beyond the definition of masculine or feminine. That said, I recognize the possible inconsistencies that may arise and hinder the reading of this written form. As an apocryphal mode, currently without any chance at formal establishment, it seeks to break with the binary of the Spanish language in academic writing-a matter I believe is essential in helping us consider the linguistic constructions of gender and coloniality that, in the Latin American case, are still put forth by the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE, in Spanish). Moreover, I wish to respect the personal (in)definition of certain people cited in this text who identify as non-binary or trans.

9. La Coca, an activist in the PachaQueer collective, adds in the same vein: “Questioning queerness with a ‘q’ was the result of this white, Anglo-Saxon, bourgeois discourse. Later, when the ‘c’ came into use, I think it was coopted by academia. Then it was like lots of texts started using this as evidence for the irreverence of queerness” (“Ni hombres ni mujeres”).

10. In the region, seropositive activism in the 1990s US (ACTUP and Queer Nation), which lay the groundwork for the political articulation of queerness, is far-removed from the demands that make queerness visible in Latin America: abortion, the precariousness of travesti life, racism in sexo-dissident communities. etc. Criticism of gay gentrification and certain feminist limitations with respect to trans people may be adjacent perimeters, although they certainly call for critical contextualization. In this sense, Kelly Perneth, a Colombian-born, Afrodescendent activist and thinker in Ecuador who identifies as anti-racist and a migrant, lays out her own reasons for using cuy(r): “I decided to mutate the concept of the queer—which quickly went from being the catch-all term of academic gays and non-heteros to being asserted in a world of intellectuals—and decided to call it ‘cuy,’ evoking an intensely animal relationship that has always been a way to satirize and represent Latin America and the Caribbean. Cuy/cuirness had more in common with its own quests, with the agency toward re-presenting ourselves/deenunciating ourselves from the outer edges of gringo and European centrality” (Perneth, Conversation).

11. The author remarks: “Given certain trends that search migration for a nearly apotheosizing celebration of deterritorialization . . . I believe that migratory displacement doubles (at least) the territory of the subject and offers or condemns them to speaking from more than one place” (“Una heterogeneidad” 841). In the case of the conference, we must acknowledge the context in which many of us who were seeking to dialogue with queerness had encountered this concept and its practices in the so-called “First World,” returning later to our countries of origin to examine its worth. Likewise, it is important to mention that certain activisms present at the conference hailed from places such as Colombia and Peru, as well as from regions beyond the capital of Ecuador, representing other migrations and displacements.

12. The argument over the instability of the term “queer,” in its own language, already entailed such an exercise. In this sense, a theorization of queerness has been conducted by the white Anglo-Saxon academy (Brontsema), second-generation Latinas in the US (color critique is essential in this regard [Muñoz]), Latin American diasporas in the US and England (Viteri, “‘Queer'”; Sabsay, “‘What’s'”), and the Latin American academy in situ (Sutherland). These were followed by reflections on translation in Latin American diasporas in Spain (Piña; Falconí Trávez, “De lo queer/cuir/cuy(r)”).

13. This debate also prompts consideration of the differences among Latin American countries and how important it is for nations with less of a voice in the so-called “international concert” to be better heard.

14. For over a year now, I have coordinated, in collaboration with colleagues living in the US, a dossier of cuir politics and hemispheric translation in Latin America (titled “Traducción, decolonialidad y lo inconmensurable” [“Translation, Decoloniality, and the Incommensurable”]) in a prestigious US journal of gay and lesbian studies, which is indexed in several of the databases most coveted by the international system. When we met with the director of the journal—a person with extensive publishing experience and an ethical, respectful, dialogic view of subjectivities and knowledge from the South—she was not familiar with the databases in which her own journal was indexed. Later, talking with the editorial group of the dossier about the importance of publications in indexed journals, it emerged that indexing is not particularly important on the US tenure track (in fact, my colleagues weren’t aware of the most popular indexation systems: Scopus, Social Sciences Citation Index, etc.), while the content of the article is. In sum, this measurement system is less important in the North.

In contrast to the lesser importance of indexes, many people in the South, for reasons like securing the equivalent of a tenured position, accessing academic incentives, or justifying research projects, must publish their articles in indexed journals. In Ecuador, over the past four years, I have directed one of these publications in the legal field, which the university itself requires to be indexed, enabling the internationalization of knowledge and expanding access to quality standards that are ultimately beneficial to the institution as a whole. To fulfill the indexing requirements, my editorial team and I have spent these four years following a series of steps and instructions imposed by the companies that authorize these indexes, located in the Global North. These requirements have demanded a great deal of time and capital, even beyond what it already takes to establish a biannual journal (for example, paying someone to copyedit all translations into English). Such academic asymmetries also call for complex debates in the field of queerness. I recommend reading the introduction to the dossier we are currently compiling (forthcoming in the US, as well as in two journals in Latin America in 2021), as it addresses these asymmetries of queerness. However, there has also been some resistance within the academy to these types of practices.

15. I must stress that queerness, even if it functions as a kind of gender scapegoat, is not the only construct of our complex field of knowledge with this lineage. Indeed, feminism itself has had to evolve into decolonial feminism or communal feminism in order to make sense within a series of embodiments marked by race or coloniality; authors such as Shih argue that the arrival of feminism “is not unlike any other concepts originating from the West, whose travel is facilitated by steam engines, airplanes, computers, and like all the others, superior armaments, all of which buttress their assumed universalism” (73).

16. The case of Ricardo Llamas and his twisted theory is eloquent in this regard.

17. Evidenced, for example, by the circular temporality that is neither fully chronological nor as certain as Western temporality, or by relations marked by spatial and cultural verticality (Ayala Mora).

18. Spaces such as PachaQueer and their concept of gender cuyness, the pro-abortion cuyero activism of Kelly Inés Perneth, the residency Con registro cuy-r [With Cuy-r Documentation], and the artistic and curatorial research work of Eduardo Carrera, are just four of the ones I know and with which I have been in touch.

19. In evaluating this article, one reviewer asked me twice to elaborate on ideas of cuy(r)ness, despite the fact that I wanted to leave them less developed so as to keep from modulating the debate from within the academic context. Although I understand the gesture and have tried to comply with requests for revision, I hope to leave the possibility open for other ideas and genealogies, necessarily beyond this scholarly reflection, to appear.

20. Keesing ends his observation on an ironic note, recounting that cannibalism was documented in the Kwaio population during the Victorian era. This remark leads him to embrace a kind of cultural relativism more than any real awareness of his own colonialism-induced ethnocentric gaze.

21. A colloquial phrase for the dish that includes grilled guinea pig with a side, usually potatoes.

22. The Facebook page “Memes de cuyos” is one example of this apocryphal use.

23. Luis Macas remarks that “buen vivir” is not an adequate Spanish translation of Sumak Kawsay, because this usage involves a process of Westernizing indigenous cultures as if they were synonymous. His caveat reminds us that if a dialogue between different forms of knowledge is not rooted in intercultural paradigms, it will be invariably appropriationist.

24. Cornejo Polar paid little attention to the study of Afro-Andean literatures, although his concept may also be understood in this context.

25. In this sense, for example, I believe that the concept of contradictory heterogeneity is associated with other later theoretical concepts such as interculturality.

26. In this respect, another description found in the chronicles of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, pertaining to the Caribbean region, describes how a group of cross-dressing sodomites was eaten by dogs. Thus, the sodomy associated with anal sex in Europe is also described in terms of non-binarism in the Americas.

27. In his book Escribir en el aire [Writing in the Air], he analyzes the story “Un hombre muerto a puntapiés,” by Pablo Palacio, which involves a man who is kicked to death by a worker for being homosexual and a pederast. Although Cornejo Polar does address contradictory heterogeneity in the text, he misses an opportunity to discuss the sex/gender system and the contradictions it presents. His analysis focuses in particular on the disjoint between orality and writing and between the hidden and the explicit.

28. Wittig does not focus on modernity, as her critique does not address processes such as coloniality. Nonetheless, her reflections on heterosexism as an ideology and political regime are essential to an understanding of certain central changes.

29. My thanks to Carlos Ayram for the conversations that have allowed me to consider the relationships between disability and cuy(r)ness.

30. I recognize the insufficiency of my approach for articulating ipso facto a feminist critique that would shed light on Cornejo Polar’s concept regarding the category of women. A single factor is responsible for this difficulty: I struggle to take positions in a static, non-intersectional (and non-contradictory) way. However, the consideration of a contradictory heterofemalegeneity or heteroslutgeneity, for example, strikes me as a possible way to advance the concept through feminism.

31. I use the word “hétero” rather than “hetero” as part of the gay jargon that refers to a heterosexual man in certain parts of Latin America. Contradictory heterogeneity, in fact, is a concept that defines the complexity of heterosexual men more than any other category, at least in Cornejo Polar’s reading.

32. “Un hombre muerto a puntapies” [“A Man Dead on Tiptoe”] and “Relato de la muy sensible desgracia acaecida en la persona del joven Z” [“Account of the Terrible Misfortune Befalling Young Z”].

33. For example, No se lo digas a nadie contains the character of Pedro, a flete, or young prostitute from the Peruvian working-class.

34. Textual care is associated with the Foucaultian concept of the care of the self. I review this concept as applied to the novel in my article “El desbarrancadero de Fernando Vallejo: Des/integración y cuidado en el cuerpo/corpus seropositivo latinoamericano” [“El desbarrancadero by Fernando Vallejo: Dis/integration and Care in the Seropositive Latin American Body/Corpus”].

35. In Santiago, Chile, in 2009, as part of the I Simposio Internacional Arte y Política: Hegemonies, resistencias y activismos en América Latina y el Caribe [First International Art and Politics Symposium: Hegemonies, Resistances, and Activisms in Latin America and the Caribbean], I revisited this concept as a key to reading and analyzing the video art of Carlos Motta; the performances of Ángel Burbano, Kosakura; Giuseppe Campuzano’s Museo Travesti del Perú; the project YO GENERO by Diego Aramburo; the Proyecto Transgénero de Ecuador; and the feather section of the October 12 march in Barcelona.

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