"Queer Pasts in Latin America" — A Collection by Santiago Joaquín Insausti on the History of Sexuality in the 20th Century
Studies of sexuality in 20th-century Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico.
In October 2024, the Argentine publisher Prometeo Editorial released the collection “Pasados queer en Latinoamérica: Historias de la sexualidad en el siglo XX” (Queer Pasts in Latin America: Histories of Sexuality in the 20th Century) in Spanish. The editor is Santiago Joaquín Insausti, an Argentine sociologist and Doctor of Social Sciences from the Universidad de Buenos Aires. He is a researcher at CONICET (Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council), based at the Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento. Previously, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (IIS-UNAM) and was a María Zambrano Fellow at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona.
According to the editor, this is the first collection dedicated exclusively to Latin American queer history. Historiography had long neglected this subject, but the contributors demonstrate that it is not a marginal topic: rethinking sexuality and gender in the past opens up the possibility of rewriting the political, social, and cultural history of the entire region.
The collection brings together researchers from Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, the United States, and Spain. The foreword was written by James N. Green, a historian at Brown University and a pioneer in the study of LGBT history in Latin America. Among the contributors is Pablo Ben, professor and chair of the History Department at San Diego State University and a specialist in the history of sexuality in Argentina and Latin America.
Thematically, the collection covers a wide range of subjects across three countries: Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. Contributors examine Afro-American religions and their connection to sexuality, LGBT spaces in Latin American cities, state repression of sexual minorities under Southern Cone dictatorships, sexual liberation movements, queer activism during Argentina’s democratic transition, and the history of homoeroticism and homosexuality in twentieth-century Mexico.
One of the collection’s stated goals is to make Latin American queer history more accessible: by translating into Spanish the work of Lusophone scholars and researchers from the Global North, it aims to reach a broader Spanish-speaking audience and to advance the institutionalization of the history of sexuality as an academic discipline across the region.
