Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Call for Papers

Special Issue on "Obscenity, Censorship, and Libidinal Politics in Latin America"

Abstract Deadline: December 15, 2020

Co-edited by Javier Fernández-Galeano (Wesleyan University) and Zeb Tortorici (NYU)

The Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies seeks contributors for a special issue on the topic of “Obscenity, Censorship, and Libidinal Politics in Latin America.” We are particularly interested in exploring interdisciplinary approaches to better understand the shifting political, cultural, and technical contours of what gets defined as “obscene,” and how censorship works in relation to state politics, aesthetics, and forms of activism. In recent years, with the explosive growth of the field of Porn Studies, there has been a rise in scholarship on the erotic and the pornographic in Latin American and Latinx Studies. Here we build on such interventions, analyzing the mutually productive relationship between censorship and the obscene, seeing censorship not only as a repressive mechanism but as both producing and conditioning the erotic. Censorship thus implies the production of the erotic as its inverse reflection, and the very precondition for the existence and the enticement of the erotic. We are interested in the shifting definitions of what does, and does not, belong in the public sphere, pointing to the curatorial practices by (and beyond) the state. We also want to explore “obscenity” as a driving force in other areas of human experience, including, but not limited to, technical innovation, ideological strife, and racial and class tensions. By focusing on libidinal politics in Latin America, we explore the potentialities for subverting sexual and esthetic ideals that stem from regimes of power, centering issues of race, class, and postcoloniality through the erotic, the pornographic, and the “obscene.”

Possible topics, in addition to pornography, postporn, and erotica, might include:

• Technique and aesthetics as means to either differentiate or blend art and obscenity.

• The role of curatorial practices in enacting social exclusions/inclusion through explicit displays of bodies (or narratives of bodily display) in Inquisition museums, anatomical museums, exhibitions, world fairs, natural history museums, and art museums. 

• The ethical implications of engaging with–and bringing to the public’s attention– intimate materials, fetishistic representations, and violent sexual images.

• The centrality of the body in political cultures of abjection traceable from the tribunals of the Inquisition, to twentieth-century military dictatorships, state violence, and police brutality. 

• Libidinal economies and the afterlives of slavery. 

• Ethnopornographic constructions of alterity in anthropological discourse, photographic, and moving image records.

• Archival activism oriented around the conservation and preservation of textual and visual records of (queer/cuir and trans) bodily desires. 

• The relationship between “porn” and technical innovations, from the era of the moving image to the internet and user-generated contents.

• The role of postporn in challenging the state and its monumental narratives in Latin America.

We are particularly interested in traditional scholarly articles and shorter reflection pieces (as part of the “Dispatches” section) that work at the intersection of film and media studies, visual studies, archival theory, queer studies, and postcolonial studies. 

We will consider abstract & article submissions in English, Spanish, and Portuguese (though for Spanish and Portuguese submissions, the journal will translate them into English for inclusion in the journal). We too are open to visual contributions oriented around images. 

Procedures for submission: By December 15, 2020, please email a short CV and a 1- to 2-page abstract (as attachments) summarizing the article that you would like to submit to zt3@nyu.edu and javier.fernandez.galeano@gmail.com (and Cc jlacs.travesia@gmail.com), with “JLACS Obscenity Issue” in the subject line. By January 15, 2021, we will notify contributors if they will be invited to submit a full essay for peer review. The due date for completed articles will be July 1, 2021.