Itinerant Infirmity

Abstract

The motif of wandering appears with relentless frequency in twentieth-century Latin American dissident narratives. Long before the epidemic began, writers and their peregrinating protagonists traveled, whether in reality or in the imagination, in search of others with the same difference, or in flight from the stigma of moral and sexual illness ascribed to them. The persecution of homosexuals as pathological subjects who threaten to corrupt the nation has long-standing precedent in religion, and it continued in the medical and legal sciences that gradually imposed upon the certainty of faith the truths of science. Religion had tried to punish deviance, and now medicine would try to cure it. Curing homosexuals, making their desires conform to normality, was the objective, and only geographic escape could fend it off for a time. This escape was at first a gesture of resistance to the rigid expectations set out by the nation. These movements never followed a fixed pattern: though the nation was the point of departure, the destination changed. But that itinerancy always led toward a foreign place whose norms were not imposed on the traveler. An analysis of the situation makes it clear that this impatience to leave was a result of “very concrete processes of social engineering and modernization” (Quiroga 12) that preceded the emergence of the homosexual as a category imported from the old continent.⁸⁴