Politicizing the Loca Body After the Dictatorship, 1990–2005

Abstract

This chapter examines Chile’s postdictatorship period, in which leftist thinkers often critiqued the supposed exceptionalism of the neoliberal economy still in effect in democracy. They exclude queer experiences from their critical recastings of the period, however, despite a vibrant artistic corpus of (admittedly, politically unpalatable) locas, or queers. The homonormative stories in Pablo Simonetti’s Vidas vulnerables (1995), for example, whitewash queer militancy and propose a total complicity with neoliberalism. Lemebel’s collection of chronicles Loco afán (1996), meanwhile, evades and nuances the postdictatorship critical agenda of the Left by discussing locas’ divergent political perspectives. Finally, the performance artist Lorenza Böttner reminds us of the dangers of politicizing the queer body and exemplifies thinking beyond the logic of the “postdictatorship.”