On Monday, October 19th at 2:15 PM EDT Mariano Lopez Seoane and NYU Comparative Literature will host Queer Revolutions in/and the Third World, a lecture by Germán Garrido:
Recent scholarship has demonstrated how, to a large extent, gay/homosexual liberation movements across the Americas dealt simultaneously with issues of sexuality, class, race, gender, and more, which they viewed as interlocking and interrelated. As this presentation will try to demonstrate, our understanding of the intersectional and multidimensional legacies of these movements can benefit greatly from a new vantage point that accounts for the global impact that Third World discourses, ideologies, and imaginaries had on the gay/homosexual radicalism of the early 1970s.
Through a reading of programs, essays, and poems published by the Argentinean Homosexual Liberation Front (1971-1976) and the NYC chapter of Third World Gay Revolution—a groundbreaking Black and Latinx gay organization active in 1970—we will posit a cosmopolitical approach that sheds light on how these organizations contested capitalist, racist, imperialist, (neo)colonial world orders while also advancing their own world imaginaries, which were largely impacted by Third World discourses and by the Third World as an emancipatory project with a global scope. A joint study of these activist experiences can help us counter diffusionist approaches that portray “Stonewall” as the center from which LGBTQ liberationism spread to the hemisphere—if not the world—while, at the same time, recuperating one among many possible genealogies in the relations between Latinx and Latin American queer activism. Complementing contemporary studies that concentrate on the important South-South relations established by various Latin American movements, we will pay heed to the fruitful contacts between an organization from the South and initiatives carried out by activists in the North who saw themselves as “brothers and sisters of the peoples of the Third World.”
Germán Garrido is Assistant Professor in the Modern Languages Department at the Borough of Manhattan Community College/CUNY. His current book project, "La Internacional del Pecado: las cosmopolíticas queer de Copi, Néstor Perlongher y María Moreno (1971-1992)," [The International of Sin: The Queer cosmopolitics of Copi, Néstor Perlongher, and María Moreno (1971-1992)] explores the aesthetic and political potentials of traveling and migrant queer communities, examining these writers’ literary output alongside their involvement in queer and feminist activism. Germán's essays have appeared in El lugar sin límite, Escena: Revista de las Artes de la Universidad de Costa Rica, among other academic journals, and in The Cambridge History of Latin American Women's Literature (Ileana Rodríguez and Mónica Szurmuk, eds., Cambridge UP, 2015). He also contributed to the Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History (Macmillan Reference, 2019).
