Javier Hernández Galeano coordina junto a Zeb Tortorici, un monográfico del Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, sobre "Rethinking Obscenity in Latin America: Censorship and Libidinal Politics"

 

Javier Hernández Galeano ha coordinado junto al historiador Zeb Tortorici, un monográfico del Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 32 (2023), 4, titulado "Rethinking Obscenity in Latin America: Censorship and Libidinal Politics". El artículo introductorio, compuesto por los coordinadores del monográfico, se titula "Introduction. The Politics of Obscenity in Latin America". El número se compone de siete artículos centrados en la cultura pornográfica y de la obscenidad presente en distintas creaciones artísticas y literarias contemporáneas procedentes de Argentina, México, Perú y Chile. 

El texto del número es de libre acceso y se puede descargar en este enlace.

Reproducimos debajo un fragmento del artículo introductorio: Instead of assuming that obscenity simply emanates from the exposure of privacy and intimacy, the articles in this special issue trace the complex mises-en-scène that lead to the politicisation of techniques of bodily pleasure and pain. In this

regard, Linda Williams defines on/scenity as “the gesture by which a culture brings on to its public arena the very organs, acts, bodies, and pleasures that have heretofore been designated ob/scene and kept literally off-scene” (2004, 3). As they analyse how on/scenity operates in Latin America, the articles in this issue emphasise that violence, in its multiple forms—police brutality, racism, economic oppression, gender and sexuality-based discrimination, among others—is inextricable from the allure of obscenity, which in colonial and authoritarian contexts operates as a tool of both domination and subversion. As Eric Schaefer notes, the rating of “X” in the Motion Picture Association’s schema to classify movies according to their proper audience also stands for the inextricable workings of four areas of representation that pertain to the obscene, namely “sex, violence, crime or profanity” (2014, 9). Obscenity originates at the point where extreme poles touch: the sacred and the profane, discipline and excess, labour and jouissance, life and death. Furthermore, contrary to the traditional notion of censorship as an essentially repressive, coercive, and top-down force, scholars of New Censorship Theory generatively posit that censorship itself must be seen as “a productive force that creates new forms of discourse, new forms of communication, and new genres of speech” (Bunn 2015, 26). As Fernández-Galeano traces, censors paradoxically and painstakingly curated, restored, and preserved vast archives of erotica and pornography in their compulsive attempts to eradicate and prevent the circulation of obscenity. In the last instance, surveillance depends on documenting intimacy and preserving transgression (2024).