Jeffrey Zamostny (Kansas State University)
jzam@****.com (Log-in to reveal)

This panel explores memory and oblivion as they relate to queer culture and literature of the modern Hispanic world. Focusing on Latin America, Spain, and the global Hispanophone in the eighteenth through twentieth centuries, the panel explores practices of remembrance, commemoration, censorship, and forgetting both in queer culture (i.e., as practiced by queer individuals and groups) and of queer culture (in a broader cultural ecosystem). How have queer people sought to memorialize their predecessors and bequeath their legacy to future generations? How have these practices interacted with more expansive societal forces that alternately commemorate, silence or marginalize queer culture? Papers exploring modern Hispanic queer cultures in connection with experiences of war, dictatorship, exile or migration are especially encouraged. The panel aims to explore an array of queer practices and identities that cut across lines of gender, sexuality, class, race, ethnicity, language or nationality.

The present political moment feels like a constant deluge of crises, reversals, shocking rhetoric, and devastating actions concerning (among other things) gender and sexuality. Amidst such upheaval, pausing to examine practices of memory and forgetting in and of modern Hispanic queer cultures offers us an opportunity to defy those forces that would paralyze us in wait of the next disaster. The Spanish-speaking world witnessed numerous periods of revolution, war, dictatorship, and other crises in the eighteenth through twentieth centuries. Through it all, modern queer cultures emerged and persisted in various national and regional contexts. How did queer people commemorate or forget the past and project their legacy into the future in these contexts? How were their efforts supported, suppressed, marginalized or censored in the broader societies they inhabited?

This panel aims to make a significant contribution to the study of modern Hispanic queer cultures by pushing previous work in three emergent directions. First, the panel aims to assemble papers that explore the overlaps and interstices between lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and other marginalized identities and practices. Second, the panel invites papers that explore queer culture’s connections and movements between geographical and cultural spaces within and beyond the global Hispanophone, through phenomena such as exile, migration, cosmopolitanism, and transnational cultural exchange. Finally, the panel asks us to forge bonds of queer kinship over time and across space to preserve the memory of modern Hispanic queer cultures.