Reframing Identities in Argentine Documentary Cinema: The Emergence of LGBT People as Political Subjects in Rosa Patria (Loza,2008–2009) and Putos peronistas (Cesatti,2011)

Abstract

Using film semiotics, queer studies, and discourse theory as developed by Laclau, Mouffe, and Žižek, an enunciative and rhetorical analysis of Rosa Patria (Pink Motherland) (Santiago Loza, 2008–2009) and Putos peronistas, cumbia del sentimiento (Peronist Faggots, Cumbia Feeling) (Rodolfo Cesatti, 2011) points to the changes in the political and cinematic frames that have enabled the transformation of LGBT people into political subjects in the context of the Argentine documentary of the twenty-first century. The metaenunciative and metadiegetic marks made evident by reframing processes in audiovisual texts can be read as a discursive transition from “element” to “moment” and as cinematic-reflexive symbolization of the traumatic event posed by the dislocation or antagonism that institutes these identities in situated local contexts, contexts contemporary with the struggles for diverse sexual citizenship that led to the promulgation of Argentina’s Equal Marriage (2010) and Gender Identity (2012) Laws.

Utilizando herramientas de la semiótica del cine, la teoría queer y la teoría del discurso de Laclau, Mouffe y Žižek, un análisis enunciativo y retórico de Rosa Patria (Santiago Loza, 2008 -2009) y Putos peronistas, cumbia del sentimiento (Rodolfo Cesatti, 2011) se concentra en cambios de marcos políticos y cinematográficos que hacen posible la transformación de las personas LGBT en sujetos políticos en el documental argentino del siglo XXI. Esas marcas metaenunciativas y metadiegéticas que los procesos de re-enmarque dejan en los textos audiovisuales pueden leerse como pasaje discursivo de “elemento” a “momento” y como simbolización cinematográfico-reflexiva del acontecimiento traumático de la dislocación o antagonismo que instituye a dichas identidades en contextos locales situados, contextos contemporáneos a las luchas por una ciudadanía sexual diversa conducentes a la promulgación de la Ley de Matrimonio Igualitario (2010) y la Ley de Identidad de Género (2012).

This paper explores the changes of frame brought about by the New Argentine Cinema and the sociocultural and political conditions of post-default Argentina in response to the rearticulation of subjects previously “minoritized” (minorisiert [Schaffer, 2008]) and oppressed for their sex-gender condition and/or for their sexuality. More specifically, I analyze two documentaries (Rosa Patria [Santiago Loza, 2008–2009] and Putos peronistas, cumbia del sentimiento [Rodolfo Cesatti, 2011]) and their use of cinematographic framing and reframing of the subjects’ “right to the city” (Lefebvre, 1975 [1967]; Molano Camargo, 2016) and citizenship in both a spatial-urban and doubly political sense—in the political sense, first, because these processes are analyzed in relation to their processes of transformation into subjects of the public sphere, relevant to politics, and, secondly, because what is analyzed is the critical predicaments proposed by these documentaries leading to demands for full citizenship in a context of deep economic and institutional crisis, demands that eventually resulted in the reactivation of sexual citizenship through the promulgation of the Equal Marriage (2010) and Gender Identity (2012) Laws.

Both the urban space and the problematization of sexual self-identity within the identity intersections of class, gender, and sexuality play a key role in these documentaries, and these are the central aspects of my analysis. The main argument is that the emergence of situated LGBT identities (i.e., linked to specific local and historical conditions) is recorded via the cinematic visibilization of personal and collective identification. In this regard, this paper is geared toward Latin American contemporary theoretical-political debates on sexualities and genders to be taken not in isolation but in the place they occupy along with other conditions such as social class, ethnicity, age, nation/region, and political affinity, as well as the roles that sexualities and genders occupy in the discursive and material construction not only of experiences but of the identity categories themselves (e.g., French and Bliss, 2007). I particularly focus on the central place acquired by both the category of “identity” and identity politics in Latin American academic and political debates about sexualities and genders during recent decades (French and Bliss, 2007: 22). Thus, we start from the specific meaning that “queerness” acquires in such contexts, where said category indicates not merely what is construed as “sexually odd,” unconventional, or “weird” or free-floating becomings always in flux but situated identity/ies, given that identity politics have always been central to how “queerness” has historically been constructed, particularly in the Argentine case.

These processes of collective identification and self-narration are political not because they are social or because they reinforce or destabilize concrete identities that are already socially sedimented but because they radically institute new identities: processes of identification are political not because of their content but because they are in themselves “instituting acts” (Laclau, 1994: 4) situated at the very foundation of any given, recognizable social identity. These processes are analyzed, as previously mentioned, within a body of LGBT documentaries of strong political imprint shot immediately before the promulgation of the Equal Marriage (2010) and Gender Identity (2012) Laws during a historical moment of intense debate regarding the social and legal recognition of these subjects: in a manner that is both effective and transformative, Rosa Patria and Putos peronistas, cumbia del sentimiento articulate sex-gender differences in a fashion that is radically different from previous representations of LGBT subjects. ¹

By utilizing methodological tools from film semiotics, the socio-semiotic concept of “frame” (Butler, 2010 [2009]; Goffman, 1986; Tagg, 2009; Žižek, 2014), and the political analysis of discourse proposed by Laclau, Mouffe, and Žižek, I read the cinematographic representations of LGBT people in these documentaries as crossing a key historical-discursive transition from images to “identities”—from “element” to “moment” according to the conceptual terminology proposed by Laclau and Mouffe (2001:105) and as a cinematic-“reflexive” symbolization (Metz, 2016 [1991]: 54, 71–88) of the specific processes of dislocation (Laclau, 1990) of LGBT identities. In other words, while I do analyze representations, my study points to those implicit transition and dislocation processes through which identities become constructed or radically instituted as such (i.e., I ultimately address representations not as by-products of preconstituted identities but as processes of identity construction and “the political character embedded” in the very “instituting acts” that bring such social identities into existence [Laclau, 1994: 3–4; Laclau and Zac, 1994]). Far from any metaphysical notion of representation as Vorstellung or adequaetio regarding a content prior to it (the subject’s identity understood in essentialist terms and transparency/distortion of its representation), I address “representation” from the specific point of view developed by the theoretical-methodological approach known as Political Analysis of Discourse (Laclau, 1996: 149–182; 2005: 157–171; Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 114–122). Starting with “frames” and identifiable textual marks on the surface of specific cinematographic representations, my work in fact points to those processes of transition or passage from certain “elements” that had not been identifiable or visible as such because of the sedimentation effect produced by the suture of a socio-discursive system impervious to these differences, to fully discursive “moments” inscribed as enunciative marks that are readable in the very textuality of the documentaries of the new millennium. I understand these socio-discursive structures sutured by sedimentation as “the social” (defined by Laclau and Mouffe [2001] and Laclau [1994]), as opposed to “the political.”

In short, I study these transitions from element to moment as “changes of frame.” They entail inherent possibilities of unframing, reframing (Butler, 2010 [2009]; Žižek, 2014), ² or “retroactive annulation” (Ungeschehenmachen) or “undoing” (Butler, 2004; 2010 [2009]) of the dominant heteronormative conceptions of sexualities and genders. Frames, in the final analysis, indicate nothing but historicity and, more precisely, historicity as rupture, caesura, and discontinuity.

Rosa Patria

Rosa Patria is a biographical documentary that, through the figure of Néstor Perlongher as a person, poet, anthropologist, and political activist of sexual struggles, represents the emergence of homosexuals (in close alliance with feminists) in the Argentine public space. ³ These subjects identified as sexual persons as well as political subjects linked to leftist 1960s and 1970s struggles, and this historical process, which includes the formation of the Frente de Liberación Homosexual (Homosexual Liberation Front—FLH) in 1971, was a watershed historical event insofar as it helped inaugurate a long process of transformation of the frames through which we understand what politics is. Palmeiro (2016a: 109) has termed this reframing process as one of the “eroticization of politics” and “politicization of the body.” in her interpretation of what Perlongher (2016: 63) himself used to call ‘the politics of the body’ (‘la política del cuerpo [transplatina]’). However, in the field of cinematographic representation, such a change of frame had to wait until the new millennium in order to be documented as such. ⁴

The recognition of homosexuals as subjects of the polis (between exclusion, discrimination, and inclusion) constitutes an event not merely because it has now started to happen but because it implies a change in the interpretive frame through which we perceive and understand the world (Žižek, 2014), thus indicating a historical caesura in the order of temporality. The working hypothesis is that this reframing or dislocating event is textualized in Loza’s documentary as a mise en abyme of representation. In Žižek’s terms, this process can be “presented as a fiction” (2014) that, once opened up within the documentary itself, reframes sexual diversities. How? By creating a new textual space (the very fictionality of any filmic text, documentary or not) capable of putting into discourse the traumatic event of its dislocation, thus managing to symbolize the antagonism that constitutes it (Žižek, 1990).

Visual Frame

Rosa Patria thematizes and problematizes the enactment of of mise-en-discours as performativity—the enactment of the enunciation itself and, therefore, of language and the constitution of collectives (Verón, 2001: 67–86). It does so via both theatrical and cinematographic procedures. It is therefore pertinent to explore this enunciative dimension and, following Metz (2016 [1991]), differentiate two types of (meta)enunciative procedures: on the one hand the various techniques of mise en avant or foregrounding of the technical artifice that is the staging itself, in both theatrical and cinematic terms, and on the other hand the mise en abyme of the filmic enunciation via a pivotal and recurring procedure, the “frame within the frame” (Metz, 2016 [1991]: 52), l’écran dans l’écran (Verón, 1983: 113, 115), the “screen within the screen,” which Deane (2016: xv; xvii) describes as “screens embedded (or enframed) inside one another.”

Regarding the first, certainly more general procedure of “exposing the apparatus” (montrer le dispositif [Metz, 2016 [1991]: 64–70]) by displaying the empirical process of film production (both mise-en-scene and mise-en-shot), this documentary recurrently shows different instances of the filming process. For example, the introduction of each interviewee in the recording studio is made by showing the clapperboard with take numbers, technical personnel, and other cinematographic production rituals. These backstage elements do not (re)double the instance of cinematic enunciation; rather, they simply represent, mimetically, the empirical process of cinematographic production within the filmic statement (enoncé; Metz, 2016 [1991]) itself. In this first level of analysis, the documentary text largely represents production and mise-en-scene processes as important parts of its content, and it is this mimetic representation of its empirical staging and production practices –the backstage, or what Metz [2016 [1991]: 66] calls “the ‘apparatus’ operation”– that provides the general context for the fundamental metaenunciative procedure of the film, which involves something else: the operation of the frame.

Regarding this second procedure, the documentary is structured around the different forms taken by what Metz (2016 [1991]: 52) has conceptualized as the “(re)doubling” of the “scopic mediation” by the very source of enunciation (foyer) in two ways: first, the constant presence of screens within screens, as well as the sounds made by the projector during the different segments, filmed in non-digital cinematic technologies, that dramatize Néstor Perlongher’s life as a “film within the film.” These “internal,” “secondary,” or “second” screens are, according to Metz (2016 [1991]: 52–59), literalization procedures of a more general (meta)enunciative principle: the enunciative redoubling of the “frame within the frame.” Secondly, there are also instances of other nonfilmic metaenunciative frames, such as photographs framed in black borders or slides shown through viewfinders, windows, the slideshows dramatized cinema footage, and photos displayed on the walls of the feminist activist Sara Torres’s home, and the theater curtains and spotlights that, when opened, closed, or focused, reveal—by framing them within the encapsulating screen— various performances of Perlongher’s literary production.

It is in this sense that I propose to read Rosa Patria—not simply as any mimetic representation of the cinematic apparatus but as an essentially performative enactment of the very operation of the frame (Derrida, 1987 [1978]; Tagg, 2009) regarding sexual identities, not so much that which is included and excluded (i.e., the visible and the invisible) as the enactment of the processes themselves through which these exclusions/inclusions and their conditions emerge. Thus, for example, the opening of Loza’s movie significantly begins with framed or “projected” images of Perlongher’s childhood (and the equally framing sounds of a film projector) to culminate in a shot of a “screen within the screen” that is edited immediately after a shot of child Néstor’s face with his gaze pointing to the spot where he should meet his parents’ gazes. Perlongher’s first shots show him at play in his family home, as in a fictionalized biographical film inserted within the documentary, appearing behind his parents’ huge legs; the shot’s angle suggests a higher, adult point of view, perhaps that of the parents. From the start, the homosexual child appears already (filmically) “framed,” but the scene culminates in an interrupted sequence of shots that serves as a “vanishing point” toward another frame. In effect, the high-angle shot of the child looking upward will not be followed by the expected countershot of the image of his parents: the suture will be interrupted and the absence of the suturing countershot will be replaced, via a direct cut, by the metaenunciative shot of an “internal screen” (Metz, 2016 [1991]) that is still empty but extremely bright and a light source. This is followed, in turn, by the first interview in the filming studio, this time at “first- degree screen” (i.e., without a second screen, as will happen with all other interviews and scenes filmed in the studio). The luminous internal screen constitutes the first transit from the metadiegetic to the diegetic story, a transit between narrative levels to which the film will frequently resort, precisely via the enunciative “abyme structure” (Verón, 1983: 116) conveyed by the “screen within the screen.” Its appearance as opening and light will recur throughout the documentary with a specific function: to mark the transition between worlds (or between the diegetic and metadiegetic spaces). ⁵

If, for Metz (2016 [1991]: 56), the screen is “the place of the film, its emplacement, the place where it happens,” then its literal, spatial materialization on an “interior” or “second screen” (the cinema, and the photo-slide, as “screen” or “field of visibility” [Schaffer, 2008: 113]) works textually and visually in Rosa Patria in a manner analogous to the empty signifiers in political discourse (Laclau, 1996: 69–86). In other words, it opens the threshold of the new, a threshold of transformation, of fictive-creative projection and politicization of identity that materializes in the space of the “screen within the screen” as the rendering visible of a “gap” (Laclau, 1994; Laclau and Zac, 1994) or “hiatus” (Laclau, 1996: 86)—something that was previously invisible and that leads to new identifications and to incipient but emerging processes of political subjectivation. Thus, the performative force of the embedded frame—or what Metz (2016 [1991]: 54) describes as a “redoubling in actuality”— goes far beyond the simple mimetic display or exposure of the cinematic apparatus (montrer le dispositif). This is because the latter is still attached to the metaphysical order of representation or Vorstellung, to that which has been “said” (Angus, 2000a: 125) or visually “contained” in the image, whereas the former (the screen within the screen) can be read, from a rhetorical point of view, as a “poetic” procedure in the sense that it is not a mere mimesis of the empirical process of production of the filmic statement or enoncé (as in the above example of “exposing of the apparatus” or foregrounding of the backstage). Far from miming filming production practices, the screen within the screen is the marker that signals the very locus or site of cinematic enunciation (Metz, 2016 [1991]): it inaugurates a new “site of inscription” (Angus, 2000a: 18, 92–128) through the discursive-poetic act of “siting” (126). I understand “poetic” procedure in the sense given to this term by Ian Angus (2000a: 23–24, 126) in his conceptualization of communication from a rhetorical point of view: the “poetics” of discourse describes, from within rhetoric, “the instituting of a society” (23, 126) or of a collective or of a historical epoch through “the construction of a site of discourse” (23), through the “building” of a place that Angus identifies with the “primal scene of communication” (18; also Angus, 2000b) and that, from a socio-semiotic perspective, could be understood as the emergence of a new (collective) enunciative position (Verón, 2013: 421–432), that of a new political subject (Laclau, 1994; Laclau and Zac, 1994).

As a rhetorical-performative procedure, the “poetic-visual action” of screen (re)doubling is performed while metaphorizing the transition of element to moment. This transition or passage is only possible because of the intervention of this created, fictive (Foucault, 1995 [1978]) or metadiegetic (Genette, 1980 [1972]) element of fictio iuris (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 121) as put into effect by that screen within the screen that opens bare the space of Perlongher’s life as biographical fiction. This creative or transformative fiction that defines the political (and the political is nothing but a fictio iuris or “metaphorical transposition,” [Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 121]) metaphorizes dislocation as the irreducible temporality that lies at the basis of any identity, a dislocated temporality that is always rooted in their imaginary and radically instituting moment—that is, “the poetic” in and of the political (Laclau, 1994; 1990). This is so if we agree with Laclau (1990) that dislocation is the very form of temporality, pointing toward those caesuras or discursive discontinuities (Foucault, 1980 [1970]: 43–48) that are at the base of any historical transformation.

Narrative Frame

This reading of the political as “the fictitious” in any relation of representation (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 119) that can be traceable through textual marks of fiction leads me to narratological analysis. The screens within screens (mostly brightly lit screens, as well as serving as sources of light) act, from the narrative viewpoint, as operators of (meta)diegetic transition: they mark the passage between the diegetic and the metadiegetic levels of the documentary’s narrative. These internal screens operate, in turn, as catalysts for metaleptic transgressions (Genette, 1980 [1972]) insofar as they introduce “shifting frontiers” and transition passages between the two narrative levels via their intervention at the discursive level, as well as the interactions between the different narrative levels made possible by these screens.

The most recurring technique is the use of brightly lit screens and the sound of film and video projectors that, devoid of any particular content, do not refer us to anything other than audiovisual projection itself and the very act of aural enunciation and “acoustic reading” of the cinematic text: these are the fundamental metaenunciative shifters that mark the transition between these two narrative spaces or levels (i.e., the diegetic and the metadiegetic). The two most illustrative examples of brightly lit, luminous screens are those that introduce two fundamental metadiegetic sequences, both framed within an internal screen: the story of Perlongher’s political history (1968–1971), including his militancy in the FLH, and that which chronicles his work and erotic-sexual life (1972). Each of them is introduced by two fellow militants interviewed in studio. The transitional value of the brightly lit screen is the passage to other narrative spaces and worlds: from the enclosed, personal and almost familial space of the film studio to the public space of the city and from the narrative world of the diegetic present (2008–2009) to the narrative world of the metadiegetic past (1970s).

The role of these transitional passages through “shifting but sacred frontiers” between different narrative levels (Genette, 1980 [1972]: 236) is also carried out by other kinds of framing that, as we indicated before, also redouble, like the screens, scopic mediation. The theater curtains and stages, for example, are recurrently (re)introduced as framed promises of transitions into other worlds (the public, artistic, political worlds). An example is the sequence in which Alejandro Ricagno’s voice-off recites the well-known poem “Herida pierna” (Wounded Leg) (Perlongher, 2003: 47–48). This is introduced by an epigraph from Lezama Lima, “Desirous is he who flees from his mother,” and the reading is accompanied by shots of a male youth with a muscular torso carrying out a strongly homoerotic body performance. These images, framed by the curtains and the theatrical stage, are followed by a shot that frames, within the second screen, just an “empty” mise-en-scene; that is to say, what the screen within the screen shows is only the filming equipment and the sound of the projector. In this unique, highly significant instance of the documentary, the act of exposing of the apparatus (montrer le dispositif) and the mise en abyme of the screen within the screen take place simultaneously. These culminate in the filmed interview with Rodolfo Fogwill, whose creative and public profession as a writer is the subject of discussion as part of the backstage shown within the “interior frame” of the “second screen,” the “metadiegetic” one. In the interview, Fogwill is introduced by the clapperboard and, after some discussion, with the production technician about his profession, is presented, as a “writer,” in clear parallelism with Perlongher. The interview then takes place at “first-degree screen” (Verón, 1983). In a historical-cultural context that the psychoanalyst Germán García (1980) called one of “political terrorism” and “sexual perversion” (terms endorsed by Perlongher himself [1997c (1991): 132]), Lezama Lima’s quotation eloquently introduces desire as a strongly political moment capable of generating these metaleptic transitions. Desire is thus linked here to a body enframed by the theatrical stage and to the voice of a writer introduced via the “screen within the screen” in a scene that exposes its own filming and lighting equipment (i.e., the cinematic apparatus) as already framed by a screen.

Putos Peronistas

It should be remembered that the main focus of the FLH struggles, as shown in Rosa Patria, were the struggles against patriarchy in capitalist contexts, its dominant gender roles and the function assigned to sexuality within the family institution, as defined by capitalism understood as a mode of production. However, in Putos peronistas, the dislocating event will shift from the sexuality-gender intersections of Rosa Patria toward the concrete intersections between these last two categories and other central ones such as class, region/nation, or political affinity in a postcolonial context. The reframing performed by Putos peronistas acts upon an interpellation that is overdetermined, from the very start, by its (queer) protagonists’ sociocultural class adscription. The rejection of gay identity as an alienating class imposition of foreign origin, a by-product imported by a colonized mentality, leads to a real analysis and problematization of the subjects’ very own personal and collective identity. Thus, before being homosexual, the condition and identity of the poor trolo (homo, fag) is that of a puto; similarly, before being a lesbian, the poor torta (dyke) is puto; before being a travesti (transgender transvestite), the trava (slang term for travesti) is puto; before being a trans-woman or trans-man, the person is puto: (Peronist) puto is, hence, used to signify an intersectional identity condition. And, in this regard, this identity is a political condition rather than a psychological attribute or a normative or subversive social reality. Therefore, it ontologically precedes the experience (i.e., phenomenology) insofar as it constitutes that experience (by making sense of it) and institutes concrete identities (preceding, thus, the latter’s psychological and social “being,” including their normative or antinormative predicaments).

I should clarify here that puto is, grammatically and morphologically, the masculine version of puta, although semantically and interactionally it simply denotes a “homosexual man” (passive and/or active). Notably, the signifier puto/puta never applies, in everyday language, to female homosexuality; lesbianism is never addressed with this insulting appellative. However, its connotative, social meaning is derogatory and its pragmatic use injurious given the material “contamination” of the signifier at the very origin of the swearword chosen for such an insult—its linguistic history. A puto/puta is one who desires men or, more precisely, one who derives sexual pleasure from people with a penis, even if those people are not men, like travestis (transvestites). This is because puto denotes, above all, sodomy (Corominas, 2011; RAE, 2018) or male “sexual inversion” (hombre invertido [inverted man] [Moliner, 2006]). While both insults participate in the machismo violence that produces them, puto, unlike puta, not only is homophobic but also denotes, from the very outset, heterosexism and heteronormativity in the person who utters the term (transphobia is included in such heteronormativity). Furthermore, these two insulting terms do not mean exactly the same as “prostitute.” While some vulgar or popular usage equates puto and puta to male and female prostitutes (Moliner, 2006; RAE, 2018), respectively, we must distinguish, particularly in the context of this article, between the terms puto/a and “prostitute.” Puto and puta share something that brings them closer in meaning—that which, in fact, distinguishes both from prostitutes. If prostitution is the commodification of the body/sex (its sale or exchange for money) and is equally applicable, as an attribute, to women and men (of any sexuality), the condition of being puto/a, or putez, only applies to heterosexual women and homosexual men—those who desire the phallus. Whereas “prostitute” is an attribute that anyone is potentially able to acquire at will, puto/a is a condition that defines only certain sexual groups as central to their very identity.

It is significant that heterosexual men and lesbians are the only two sexualities exempted from such an insult: for example, an “easy,” “sexually public,” or promiscuous heterosexual man who has sex with many women is never considered puto and is only a “prostitute” if he sells his body/sex. Putez and “prostitution” have different ties to the dominant order and different historicities: while the former is a product of patriarchy (and therefore there may be no exchange of money in the objectification of the other but simply use or abuse without necessarily any form of commercial mediation or commodity-form as such for that sexual use), the latter has to do with the commodification of sex and the market, because it always implies an economy based on exchange and exchange value. Hence the notion of a “sex worker” who offers his or her body as part of the labor force in the market of prostitution and not within marriage or the family institution. These differences are both semantic (what each word denotes and connotes) and interactional-pragmatic (to whom they are addressed, who is interpellated by them, who is verbally injured or hurt). They explain why the insult chosen and resignified in Putos peronistas is puto rather than “prostitute,” as Iara’s testimony in the documentary shows (see below): the activist claims her identity as puto (“I like being puto, poor, and Peronist”), while strongly rejecting the identity of the “prostitute” (“No to forced prostitution”).

The documentary opens on a large queer party in which the host and transsexual actress Ariana Cano, dressed as Eva Perón, reads the manifesto of the organization Putos Peronistas:

We are the Peronist putos. We represent the homosexual poor, the homosexuals from the slums or poorer neighborhoods who are doubly convicted. Poverty on the one hand, sexual condition on the other. We are the hairdressers, the pantaloneros [liners or seamstresses], the tortas, the travas with cheap silicones and transsexuals without identity. We are Peronists! A political affiliation . . . The poor of our land. . . . . We are not just another little gay group. . . We do not ghettoize our life. We believe that the only minority in this country is the damn oligarchy. And on the opposite side there is always the people, with their different ideologies (political, social, and also sexual). . . . There is only one truth: puto is Peronist and gay is gorila (lit. ape; here anti-Peronist in the Argentine political context).

Following this speech, party-goers cheer: “Here they are, these are the ones, they’re the putos of Perón!” This initial discursive framing is reinforced by the visual framing of the film. The documentary opens with two emblematic images: photographic portraits of Eva Perón and Juan Domingo Perón, and images of apes with the inscription “The battle of the gorillas.” Such a visual opening frame condenses the structural antagonism that will be repeated throughout the documentary (the Peronist poor vs. the gorillas; oppressed majorities vs. oppressing minorities), summed up in the above phrase that defines puto in opposition to gay on the basis of their respective class and sociopolitical affinities (Peronist vs. gorila/anti-Peronist).

Identity

The documentary performs two fundamental operations: on the one hand and from a rhetorical and discursive-political point of view, it exposes and reveals the processes of construction of the intersectional identity of a (Peronist) puto; on the other, and from an enunciative point of view, it stages such identity processes, as does Rosa Patria, via visual and narrative procedures involving framing and reframing.

First, from the perspective of the fundamentally discursive construction processes of said intersectional identity, what stands out as the primary and instituting component is the identity of the poor (and their alliance with the marginal, the wretched of the land). Hence the notion of “qualitative minorities” as explained by Pablo Ayala, one of the main activists portrayed in the documentary: in opposition to the liberal notion of (sexual and gender) “minorities,” Pablo defines these “qualitative minorities” as “those that lie outside of power.” In other words, they are minorities neither simply because of their statistical numbers nor solely because of their subordinate position (i.e., hence, not equivalent to women as a “minority” in a universalizing or nonsituated sense) but because they represent “popular demands” (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001; Laclau, 1996; 2005), always situated and local, and because they claim the inclusiveness of groups. ⁶

Secondly and from the point of view of sexual identity politics, what is interesting is that is that the puto identity does not constitute a feminization of a so-called masculine nature or essence as the insult intends but also includes a series of subjects who identify themselves as tortas (dykes), travestis (lit. transgender transvestites), trans (transsexuals and other transgender people, excluding transgender transvestites), and putos (lit. fags, poofs), which are all insults. In this regard, this identity is, above all, inclusive and multiple. It is somewhat analogous to the category of sexualidad loca (lit. crazy sexuality). The figure of the loca (“queen”; lit. crazy female) is, within this context of sexualidad loca, not opposed to that of the chongo (a virile male or the “masculine” homosexual or bisexual male who typically occupies the insertive position in the [homo- or hetero-] sexual act); insofar as what both loca and chongo—like puto, and unlike straight masculinity and straight femininity—bring to the fore is an inclusive meaning that encompasses all kinds of sexualities that “escape normality” (fuga de la normalidad), as formulated by Perlongher in the 1980s (1997b [1984]: 33). ⁷ At the same time, and unlike Perlongher’s sexualidad loca, the notion of puto carries out a simultaneous performative movement of inclusion and a distanced reappropriation of such injurious insult. It comes to resignify, via the metonymic selection of the most machista and violent insult of all (or, at least, the most explicitly sexualized and objectifying insult of all), all the diversity of identities it seeks to name. Thus, an inclusive rhetorical movement manages to (re)appropriate other popular insults also enunciated in the documentary: trolos, tortas, travas (slang term for “transgender transvestites,” similar to “trannies” in English), trans (transexuals and other transgender people but excluding transgender transvestites). This fixating moment of identity, always partial, provisional, and precarious, is politically and critically counterhegemonic as well as catachrestical (i.e., it names something new) to the extent that, by (re)appropriating the most sexualized insult of all and resignifying it, something new that had not been termed by interpellations such as “gay,” “homosexual,” transgender or “lesbian,” among others, is now named. ⁸

This means that from all the possible LGBT identities, they opt for a single one, and from among all the existing insults addressed to them they choose only one, because their common, shared antagonism is a single one. I emphasize “oneness” because it is a single rhetorical site—puto is figural, not literal—of the discursive terrain where the critical and counterhegemonic movement becomes partially and provisionally fixed at a “nodal point” (point de capiton) of its movement, on a shared and diverse but “single identity,” even if the latter is achieved through “the precarious unity of a tension” (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 121). This is the result of an articulatory practice or fixation movement that propels the discursive formation toward a provisional and partial fixity of meaning (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 111–113) that halts the overflowing or “dissemination” (Derrida, 2004 [1972]) of the signifying chain. An unambiguous or univocal anchoring of meaning in a very determined, situated, and specific identity that is, nevertheless, not particularistic (Laclau, 1996) but intersectional. The puto identity is queer, in this case, not because it represents the sheer flow of sexualities always in flux or the drift of the signifiers assigned to them or because of their alleged “strangeness” or “oddity” but because it is critical, intersectional, subversive, catachrestical, and counterhegemonic: it undoes (Butler, 2004) the dominant meanings historically attributed to “gay,” “lesbian,” “transgender,” “blue-collar worker,” descamisados (Peronista sympathizers; lit. shirtless), or “soldiers of Perón,” also undoing and reframing the subjects who would carry such identities (i.e., the sexual, cultural, and class subject as well as said subject’s previously assigned and sedimented meanings). Such undoing is achieved, however, by a strategic fixation of meaning through the rhetorical construction of puto as a “nodal point” rather than by the mere proliferation of its signifieds: namely, via the partial “fixation” (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 113) of a semantic-denotative displacement of the signifier puto rather than by the free dissemination or drift of any signifier (Derrida, 2004 [1972]). This is the result of a “rhetorical displacement” through which all “literal” LGBT identity-signifiers (homosexual, lesbian, transgender, and so forth) are replaced and partially fixed by one single “figural” term (puto) that is uniquely able to name “something that is essentially unnameable” (Laclau, 2005: 71): puto has thus been coined by the activist organization Putos Peronistas in order to “express something that the literal term (i.e., “homosexual,” “transgender”) would simply not transmit” (71). It is in this sense that puto corresponds to classical rhetoric’s very definition of catachresis: it is nothing but “a figural term which cannot be replaced by a literal one” (71), simply because literal terms such as “homosexual” or “transgender” are unable to name the intersectional identities that result from the Putos Peronistas’ double oppression: sexual and socioeconomic (both situated in a postcolonial context).

The clearest example of this local movement of identity-building (re)appropriation of the injurious insult pointing toward relational self-recognition (Butler, 1997) is a recurring motto in the documentary: “Puto is Peronist. Gay is gorila.” There is additional emphasis when this motto is shown in a close-up shot of the group’s political logo: their political graffiti are signed by the written inscription of their injurious chosen name (PP), which is, however, framed by a “V” (viva, long live), thus creating a signature that reinscribes the famous Viva Perón in graphic form. A “P” is added for “Long live the Peronist putos.” This in itself contains three crucial discursive self-construction processes:

1. The class-sexuality-gender intersection: according to Putos Peronistas, if the difference between gay and puto is based on class and emotional-political identification, middle-class homosexuals would instead use the foreign word “gay” to distance themselves from the popular puto insult—a distancing strategy, with ghettoizing separatist tendencies (Sedgwick, 1994), that consists in emphasizing only their difference as “gay” but not puto (i.e., thus suppressing any antagonism). Argentine middle-class gay people, following this argument, would be then “incapable,” because of the ideological limitations of their class, to resignify the injurious insult that hurts them without being able to understand that, in addition to injuring, wounding, and threatening them, it also constitutes them. ⁹

2. An implied positive reappropriation of the insult: this “resignification and worthingness of the term puto as a word to convey alterity values” (Médica and Villegas, 2012: 18) is nothing other than putez as a value. This is conferred by the social actors themselves given its emic meaning for (a) sexual diversity (if diversity and otherness are a value, true diversity and alterity reside in the social experience of putez and not in what is gay, trans, or feminine in and of itself), (b) unity (reclaiming a historical FLH motto from the early 1970s [Olivera, 1999] as its own, PP affirms “We have always been part of the people”), and (c) equivalence with the Peronist poor, those “excluded, displaced,” insulted, and humiliated because they are seen as cabecitas negras, working-class members usually of a darker complexion than the middle and upper classes. According to Pablo Ayala, “people accept the Peronist putos as Peronists because they feel they’re like them, because they become part of a fellowship by chanting the Peronist anthem.” Let us remember that, in the Peronist anthem, the principal antagonism is discursively constructed as the people vs. capitalism (“fighting capital”).

3. A stance against the liberal reductionist conception of homosexuality: the puto is not only a private subject (an identity reduced to the sexual aspect, what happens “between the sheets”) but, in the words of the Peronist putos, “can also conceive a political project.”

Frame and Framing

Moving on to the second aspect of the analysis proposed at the beginning of this section, I will now delve into the visual and narrative procedures of framing and reframing in Putos peronistas. As with Rosa Patria, I will focus on both narrative and visual frames conceived as those enunciative instances that encompass inclusion as well as exclusion. As before, I will analyze the operation of the frame itself: the textual source (foyer [Metz, 2016 [1991]: 4]) understood as the place or site (le site [Metz, 2016 (1991)]) from which cinematic “enunciation emanates”; that is, the opening/closing instance for what becomes (in)visible within the visual, (un)intelligible within the story, or (un)recognizable in identities. As in Rosa Patria, the privileged technical-visual procedure is the redoubling of the screen, a metaenunciative procedure that, by referring us to the medium “cinema”—to fiction itself and to the very photographic-filmic process of narration— plays a key role. It does not serve to literally “represent” but rather performs the transition of element to moment by means of figuring or metaphorizing that transition through such a nonliteral second screen.

This transition can only arise from the “fictive” (Foucault, 1995 [1978]) or metadiegetic (Genette, 1980 [1972]) element of “metaphorical transposition” (fictio iuris [Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 121]) that is put into effect by that interior screen that opens up the space of Iara’s life as biographical fiction. This is analogous to the metaenunciative procedure that introduces Perlongher’s life, both metacinematographically and metadiegetically, as biographical fiction in Rosa Patria: from documentary to framed fiction, from the social to the political—from element to moment.

Visual frame. The frame of Putos peronistas as an audiovisual text fulfills the function of visually and narratively rendering figural of the puto identity (i.e., de-literalizing such identity) as an interpellation overdetermined by the sociocultural condition of class through the construction of specific persons-characters (personas-personajes [Verón, 1980]) and instances that demonstrate visual enunciation. This is achieved given that these instances of reframing (the metanarrative and the metaenunciative) summon Peronism and the figure of Eva Perón (Evita) on a textual level as well as one involving ideological content.

From the visual viewpoint, the enunciative frame appears from the very beginning through the use of framed photographs: the documentary opens with a collage of black-and- white archival photos of Perón and his wife, framed by a sepia background, and with the Putos Peronistas’ manifesto read by a transsexual woman dressed as Evita next to a queer man embodying Perón. Putos peronistas ends with the testimony of a travesti woman Iara Ybarra, who appears as a person-character—an opposition that is condensed and deconstructed by her public persona—throughout this documentary analyzed as a narrative text.

Toward the end, the framed photos reappear. This time, however, they are preceded by another type of screen (re)doubling: the framed content is no longer merely that of the still photo but also that of the film screen itself. The moving pictures of the documentary film itself are now framed by a second screen. This is, in effect, the final moment of the diegesis. It is concurrent, as in the beginning, with the reading of a speech, though this time it is not a theatrical performance but a testimony: that of Iara, who reads a personal text during the public demonstration in support of the Gender Identity Law. It is similar to but politically different from the opening manifesto read by the trans-woman Ariana in her Evita drag performance. Iara’s speech goes from diegetic-documentary to metadiegetic “fiction,” and that passage is marked by the introduction of an internal, second screen: a black frame with cinema-format borders that introduces, for the first time in this documentary, the very mise en abyme structure of screen media (meta)enunciation (Metz, 2016 [1991]; Verón, 1983: 116). The screen within the screen refers us to cinema as a fictional instance (Metz, 2016 [1991]), while highlighting, as does Loza’s documentary, the fictive instance of politics as that which is to come; the political as the foundation of the future city, or politics as the very “fictioning” of life (bios).

The documentary’s closing sequence presents us with with a window, framed in a sepia background as in the beginning, that in turn opens on another moving image: a mini-video clip of Iara on the march next to another travesti fellow militant, dancing and holding a PP banner in a moment of final euphoria explained by an informative placard regarding the approval of the Gender Identity Law and Iara’s consequent change of her legal name. The camera immediately pans down and shows, over the same sepia-colored, framing background of the first-degree screen, a drawing entitled “Peronist Kid” and then a black-and-white photo, over the same sepia background, of two children riding wooden horses, possibly part of a carousel. This is followed by a photo of a strongly eroticized female model with the legend “transversality”: all the iconography of the happy Peronist pueblo (people), drawn from their historical inclusivity (children, women, and trans people), is now edited and interspersed with, once again, archival photos of the historical leaders Eva and Juan Domingo Perón.

After the credits, interposed between emblematic photos of the Peronist nation-people and consistently framed by the same sepia background, the documentary finally closes on a quote by Paco Jamandreu, Evita’s famous gay fashion designer: “To be puto, to be poor, and to be Eva Perón are the same thing.” This discursive formulation is directly linked to the structuring identitarian equation that makes up the documentary’s discourse: puto = the poor = Eva Perón. Explicitly self-defined as “We have always been part of the people,” ¹⁰ these three constitutive terms of the Peronist putos are three moments of a single identity, thus approaching, at the very limit or “lower threshold” of representation, the pole of pure presence in the theory of political representation (Laclau, 2005; Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 119–121). Here, the principle of antagonism is so strongly unifying and so categorically institutes a difference that it wholly prevails over the principles of equivalence and difference. Puto, poor, and Eva Perón are not equivalent or extant constituted differences that would subsequently ally with one another in an equivalential chain: they are constitutive parts or “moments” (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001) of one single identity. This identity is single because the articulatory practice that instituted it as such is an overdetermined discursive construction of a single antagonism that “eliminates the separation” (120) between the sexual identity and the class identity of its agents. It is “overdetermined” because it is the result of multiple and heterogeneous determinations of identity: class and gender-sexuality. In other words, putos’ social class overdetermines their sexual identity, and, conversely, their sexual oppression overdetermines their socioeconomic condition as doubly marginalized workers. However, these multiple determinations or facets do not remain separate, as if their agents had split their identities into two or more according to each separate sphere of their lives: this is because their political practice has managed to discursively articulate, in one single identity, the socioeconomic (class) with the sexual, thus serving as their intersectional condition of possibility and emergence. This antagonism is logically prior and radically constitutive of the difference that the puto identity comes to represent. In this sense, it transcendentally institutes such difference as a concrete identity (Laclau, 1994).

Narrative frame. The narrative frame of the documentary enframes Iara’s story by providing it intertextual, “fictive” meaning as well as intelligibility cues. Its fictional dimension derives from its intertextual relationship with the popular stories (both fictional and real/factual) about Evita’s life. The narrative frame of the documentary seems impossible to understand without reference to this parallel regarding such a revisited and (re)imagined biography: from a childhood of poverty and abandonment to Minister of State fighting for justice on behalf of others and to organic intellectual of the poorer and deprived segments of the LGBT community.

The testimonial rather than merely documentary dimension is marked by Iara’s first-person account, which is presented as a personal, collective, and generational self-narrative: “I am Iara Ibarra. I belong to the group Putos Peronistas. I’m here on behalf of my motorway mothers, who are no longer with us. I want to leave a mark showing I lived that life, and I want to leave a record. . . . I like being puto, poor, and Peronist.” This first-person testimonial account is reinforced, in its collective dimension, by her comrades of political militancy, who underpin the testimonial dimension of her voice. They do so via the qualified use that PP members make of the third person to collectively complete Iara’s biography: “Iara is the voice of the people. Iara is the voice of La Matanza” (a deprived and extremely rough county in the Greater Buenos Aires suburban area, far from the capital city [CABA: Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires / Autonomous City of Buenos Aires].

The narrative structure follows a simple schema that reproduces Evita’s journey from an initial dysphoric context of scarcity and violence (abandonment, humiliation, poverty, no access to education, forced prostitution, etc.), which so well condenses the puto/puta insult, to a euphoric narrative closure: Iara has finally become the subject of her own discourse that allows her to produce a speech in the public space. The documentary ends with the following testimonial words read by Iara, now a leader and spokesperson for PP, during a mass demonstration in favor of the Gender Identity Law before a mass audience:

Last night I was standing on the motorway, and today I am standing here: this says a lot, doesn’t it? I am thankful for being healthy and for being here in front of you. I want to acknowledge in front of you all that I am a little too ignorant to read this paper, but it is because they took away my right to an education and I grew up like this, left to my own devices, without schooling. . . . I am simply a marica (an effeminate fag, a male sissy) who went out searching for a pair of tits and found an infinite number of stories, trans-women comrades who didn’t make it just because they wanted to have a bit of tits. . . . May they still accompany us, because we are the future. Let them continue to teach us things. . . . No to silicones, no to the motorway, no to prostitution! We want decent jobs. We want to live in democracy. . . . Enough blood spilt on the asphalt. Thanks to this government. Thanks to Néstor. Thanks, Cristina! Long live Perón, for fuck sake!

This sequence is significantly framed, as we saw in the previous section, by a black cinema-screen-format border film format, thus marking the fictional realm of politics as an imaginative narrative that entails personal transformation. This is a narrative-biographical transition journey from element to moment—from an object to be consumed on the motorway to a subject capable of occupying a place in the public sphere and having access to public discourse.

Toward the end, once the presentation of the diegetic world of the documentary is finished, the intertitles give us some final information, thus closing the collective and public dimension of this biography: “On May 9, 2012, the National Congress approved the gender identity law. ‘La Iara’ is now Iara Otonel. She has left the motorway and works for the National Ministry of Justice.” This is the emblematic trajectory of popular stories about Evita: from “whore” to saint, from poor small-town girl to movie and radio star and minister of the national government.

This Iara/Evita parallel inverts, reverts, and completes the fictional story Evita vive (Evita lives)” by Perlongher (1997a [1975]), providing the documentary with a certain materiality and subjectivity that had somehow been denied by that famous piece of queer fiction, although that short story had perhaps also indirectly and ambivalently hinted at such travesti materiality and subjectivity. In the Perlonghian fiction, Evita is a cisgender woman whose characterization is nevertheless, because of its excess of artifice or masquerade, closer to that of a drag queen or the stereotypical travesti than to her own literal, historical cisgender character or even that of a “queen” or a “fag.” She is the best friend of queens, with whom she shares gossip, interests, and orgiastic sex with chongos. It should also be noted that the Evita of Copi’s play (2006 [1970]) was repeatedly incarnated by male actors and that the construction of Evita’s character in this play is crisscrossed by transvestism (Simón, 2005) from the viewpoint of its dramatic textuality: here, fiction once again destabilizes the cisgender of the historical, “real” character while reaffirming the political-fictional status of Evita as a person-character (Verón, 1980) through a public persona that cuts across and is able to displace the plane of immanence that sustains the opposition between reality (“real person”) and fiction (“character”). That figure that marks and still inhabits the Argentine political imaginary, with a kind of travesti materiality is still alive (“Evita vive” in 1975) and capable of deconstructing the opposition between reality (or the literal) and fiction (or the figural) in favor of the latter.

Putos peronistas, meanwhile, reinscribes this process, reversing as well as completing it: Evita, the cisgender woman and the first figure to appear both in the diegesis and in its narration (i.e., in the discourse of the documentary narrative) is here revealed, as the Perlongherian fiction had once only indirectly suggested, as a transgender woman, through a “metaphorical transposition” (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 110) rendered material through the real person of Iara Otonel (transgender ultimately deconstructs any cisgender claims). This parallel is reinforced in several instances of the film and is not exclusive to Iara, since it is also repeated as a “master metaphor” or “meta-metaphor” for the biography of other travestis portrayed in the documentary.

Conclusions

I must highlight that the shared element between Rosa patria and Putos peronistas pertains to the realm of the new within the history of representations of LGBT subjects in Argentine documentary cinema: this irruption of the new can be read in the reflexive (Metz, 2016 [1991]) appearance of the cinematographic screen that recognizes, in nonheteronormative differences, a frame (Butler, 2010 [2009]) that refers to identities that have now become “specifiable” as such (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001; Butler, 2010 [2009]: 141–142) and to subjects who now have their own discourse in the public sphere. This visibility of the frame can be read as a mark of the trace that the event has left on the emergence of LGBT people as political subjects, a mark that points to historicity as rupture and discontinuity; it serves as the footprint of the event insofar as it opens a space for “fiction” within the documentary itself and the status of the former as the condition that makes possible the latter. This is not just any metadiegetic space but a unique, metaenunciative one, since it constitutes the very condition for the documentary’s enunciation: the symbolic space of the “fictio iuris of representation” or of (nonliteral) presence through “metaphorical transposition” (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 121) that characterizes any form of political representation and subjectivation, the threshold that allows a subject to enter both the polis and the symbolic order.

The cinematographic screen would thus be rendering opaque as well as visible this moment of metaphorical transposition—the fictive character of all identity, the constructed operation of its frame. In this manner, homosexuals and transgender people become “de-literalized”: from the pole of literality or “pure presence” (i.e., the raw unarticulated element, the sheer attribute that can be fetishized, rendered abject but objectifiable in insults usually directed at others) they render themselves visible as subjects of “representation”—as subjects as well as moments that can be articulated into a discourse. It is in this regard that I suggest we read the iconic and narrative figurativization of the frame as a redoubled screen as well as a personal and collective biography that links, in the same narrative frame, person and character, reality and fiction: by bringing fiction or “fictionalization” [‘Fictionaliesierung’] to the foreground (Dimitrova et al., 2012: 22–23) and by marking the very “event of inscription”(Angus, 2000a: 125), the double screen becomes the surface of inscription of a “siting” that opens up a new “horizon of the world” or the trace that marks the very emergence of a radically new “site of inscription” (18). This is what Angus calls “poetry” (2000a: 23) or “the poetics of social history” ¹¹ (125–126), a site that is capable of giving rise to a new subject of public and political representation. As opposed to literary or theatrical fictionalization (so-called dramatization or spectacularization, respectively), the fictioning/fictionalization specific to cinema lies in the very materiality of its “imaginary signifier”, where the fictional-imaginary becomes the very matter of the cinematic medium, a matter devoid of any physical presence. This is the radically material meaning that Metz (1982 [1977]) - in his Lacanian phase - had given to cinema’s very own and specific fictioning: fiction in the cinema is rooted, first and foremost and before any narrative construction, in the sheer materiality of its “imaginary signifier”. And it is precisely this non-physical (or imaginary) materiality what renders cinema’s very material fictioning into a strongly “proto-political” moment (Dimitrova et al., 2012: 22). Why? Because such specifically filmic fictioning is what produces - through the kinetic audiovisual matter as its signifier - “virtual” subjects who are physically absent but materially present via this audiovisual-kinetic fictioning—politics as poetics. What Loza’s and Cesatti’s documentaries managed to achieve in the Argentine public space of the new millennium was precisely this crucially important work of translating “the site” of politics into le site (the place) of cinema.

Supplemental Material

olivera_original_Spanish_for_Web – Supplemental material for Reframing Identities in Argentine Documentary Cinema: The Emergence of LGBT People as Political Subjects in Rosa Patria (Loza, 2008–2009) and Putos peronistas (Cesatti, 2011)

Supplemental material, olivera_original_Spanish_for_Web for Reframing Identities in Argentine Documentary Cinema: The Emergence of LGBT People as Political Subjects in Rosa Patria (Loza, 2008–2009) and Putos peronistas (Cesatti, 2011) by Guillermo Olivera in Latin American Perspectives