Introduction. The Politics of Obscenity in Latin America

Among a large lote of dozens of early to mid-twentieth-century erotic and pornographic postcards, illustrated novelettes, amateur photographs, and pamphlets purchased at a flea market in the San Telmo neighbourhood of Buenos Aires in 2021 was one Spanish-language novel, El mundo del placer: o las memorias de Susana [The World of Pleasure: Or, the Memories of Susana]. The materials in this set—most of them in Spanish—nicely illustrate the partly—and generatively—fragmented, disjointed, occluded, copied, and reprinted nature of early twentieth-century pornography. El mundo del placer is undated—it looks to have been printed during the 1940s or 1950s—and although it was supposedly printed by the “Editorial Gato Negro” in Madrid, this typographical information may also be the result of a printer’s sleight of hand. Given the illegality of printing and disseminating such publications, it is probable that the book itself was not printed in Madrid, and perhaps not even in Spain, as it was common for such risk-tolerant printers to cover their tracks, at least partly, through several means.

This particular book’s presence in an Argentine flea market, so many decades after its printing, gestures towards the multiple trajectories—occluded traversals those are both geographic (across borders and languages) and individual (among hands, sellers, collectors)—that such an object may have taken. As historian Lisa Z. Sigel makes clear, starting in the 1890s with the beginnings of the postcard craze, referred to as “cartomania” or “cartophilia”, new forms of visual pornography began to outstrip older ones. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Sigel writes, “[v]isual pornography continued to focus on women as the objects of desire; ephemera deepened, rather than inaugurated, the imperial gaze; scatological humor, social commentary, and an undifferentiated sexuality returned to pornography after a brief hiatus with the end of radical pornographers” in nineteenth-century England (2002, 119). In the wider context of Spain and its ties to Latin America, Maite Zubiaurre notes that Spanish-language serialised pornography “was often published as periodical fiction, which served as a smooth prolongation of the nineteenth-century novel” (2012, 16). Indeed, El mundo del placer: o las memorias de Susana might be seen as playing some role in the world of publishers of erotic contents. Yet, erotic fiction came to be increasingly connected to popular sexology, advertisements for sexual hygiene, and erotic and ethno-pornographic postcards. Obscenity takes multiple shapes and forms; the adaptability of producers and consumers to different contexts of censorship, and their capacity to maintain clandestine networks of circulation, have shaped media innovations for centuries, connecting artistic creativity, entrepreneurship, and erotic intimacy across borders.

What interests us here, as a means of opening up this conversation on obscenity and libidinal politics in Latin America, are the ways that this one text, like so many others surrounding it, positions itself among a deep-seated form of pornographic production, dissemination, and critique. El mundo del placer is a disjointed story, comprised of 3 chapters (and 19 pages of text) along with 12 pornographic offset lithographic prints (see Figure 1), in which the narrator engages in a range of sexual escapades with women and men, some of whom are older family members. Despite the fact that the book itself does not textually represent sex between Susana and any member of the religious clergy, the strategic decision to include image #19 (the number is visible on the bottom left, just between the subjects’ legs) says something important about the earlier cultural roles and functions of pornography that oftentimes survive well into the present. Pornography, as this special issue attests, regularly and historically functions as a form of social, political, and religious critique. As historian Lynn Hunt tells us, in early modern Europe, between 1500 and 1800, “pornography was most often a vehicle for using the shock of sex to criticize religious and political authorities,” and it was intimately connected to the underbelly of the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution (1993, 10).

Figure 1. Two pages from the pornographic novel, El mundo del placer: o las memorias de Susana (Madrid: Editorial “El Gato Negro”), including a letterpress halftone image depicting sex between a priest and nun with a religious image in the background. Purchased by Zeb Tortorici to be donated to Archivo El Insulto, Mexico City.

Obscenity is profoundly political; it makes explicit the norms that regulate the public dimensions of subjects’ intimacies, encompassing the consumption of self-fashioned narratives in early colonial Lima, sexual fantasies that reify racialisation in the recent democratic transitions in Argentina and Peru, and kissing as a viscous gesture to denounce necropolitics in Chile and the cult of national leaders in Venezuela. We see, for instance, how Pilar Espitia challenges in her article any assumed binary between pudor (shame) and obscenidad (obscenity) by analysing and comparing the self-fashioned writings, sometimes voluntary and other times coerced by the Inquisition, of and about two holy women in colonial Peru, Saint Rosa of Lima (1586–1617) and Ángela Carranza (1643–1694). Espitia shows how notions of shame and obscenity are profoundly contextual, and how their relationality is often one of complementarity, co-production, and ambivalence versus one of a priori opposition. Analysing how Saint Rosa of Lima, upon trying to defend the holy sacrament of the Santo Domingo Convent from the presumed invasion of Dutch pirates that had invaded Callao in 1615, tore her religious habit using scissors and teeth to better climb the altar and protect it from “enemies of the faith”, Espitia cogently explicates how a specific act might be a sinful form of exhibition in one context. Yet, in another context that same act might be viewed as sacrosanct: “the categories of modesty/saintliness and obscenity/heresy are not necessarily oppositional, but rather unstable, relational, and entirely dependent on the circumstances of their own production and consumption”. Eroticism, religiosity, and subversion intertwine in unexpected ways. Indeed, the image above from El mundo del placer gestures towards this and involves the outside observer in the scene in ways that bespeak the theatricality and performativity of the obscene.

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).

Subject positionality intersects with notions of desire, excess, and the obscene, opening up worlds of erotic world-making, sometimes by subverting the strictures of censorship. An example of this is a photograph analysed by historian Joan Flores-Villalobos in her recent work. Flores-Villalobos notes the curious and troubling placement of a photograph of a nude, Black, West Indian woman photographed during the construction of the Panama Canal in an archived folder succinctly titled “Freak Letters (Obscene)”. She probes the many possible meanings of the presence of such an image among the U.S. National Archives, showing how, during the construction of the Panama Canal, the management of transient workers entailed the classification and archiving of the “freak” and the “obscene” as categories that remit to forms of labour that were “unassimilable by the canal administration”, and hence considered unproductive and excessive. It is likely that a certain Panama Canal administrator (or archivist of those records) labelled the bodies of those who populated these archival files as inherently obscene, with the “Freak Letters (Obscene)” folder containing records related to the “sexuality or death” of labourers (2019, 46). In other words, the archive itself leads us to conceptualise obscenity as the disruption of labour discipline by subjects’ libido and death drive, while keeping in mind that capitalist profitability regularly depends on the production of “surplus populations” that are deemed intrinsically obscene or expendable, perhaps not unlike the smiling woman in the Panama Canal photograph.

In her work, Deborah R. Vargas proposes lo sucio as a “latino queer analytic” that delves into the “sensory registers of genderqueer sexualities” to contest the dehumanisation of populations deemed surplus, dirty, and wasteful (2014, 715 and 717). In Vargas’s analysis, sucio (dirty) smell, sound, and taste shape the spaces inhabited by “lewd, obscene, offensive hypersexual undisciplined bodies” that “waste” the time otherwise demanded by capital reproduction (2014, 716 and 721). There is a continuum between obscenity and suciedad (dirtiness), both related to capitalist surplus and the sensorial excesses that can potentially undermine productivist logics. The coy smile of the photographed woman in the archive pertaining to the Panama Canal ruptures the colonialist gaze, challenging any connection of brown and black bodies to the “freak”, rather than reifying it. Suciedad and beauty, excess and erotics, are always tied to one’s politicised perspective.

As evidenced in the article by Irina Troconis, accusations of profanation, another form of obscene excess, marked many of the public reactions to Venezuelan artist Deborah Castillo’s performance, The Emancipatory Kiss (2013), in which she uses her lips and tongue to caress and kiss the face of a bronze bust of Simón Bolívar, the “Father of the Fatherland”, and of Venezuela. In her article, Troconis shows that this eroticised encounter between the performance artist and (a statue of) Bolívar generatively becomes a particular type of iconoclasm in which the “excessive modality of the kiss grabs us, charges us with an energy that blurs the boundaries between our body-her body-his body, contains us, frees us, and then spits us back into the outside of the image, where we stand still but also vibrating, semi-confused, traces of saliva still dripping from our eyes”, Castillo’s piece performs what Troconis terms “erotic iconoclash”, which makes visible the fragility of power. It also shows how such corporeal gestures linger in the political sphere, and in everyday memories, signalling those hungry, disillusioned, and migrating bodies in the wake of the death of Hugo Chávez in 2013. Castillo’s kiss was neither obscene nor pornographic, but it generated visceral sensations and affects in many who viewed it and came to be offended. They did not, however, look away. Troconis shows us that in the erotic, the abject, and the carnal—which The Emancipatory Kiss engenders and exposes through discomforts—lie the potential for meaningful political subversion.

The visceral operates as an affective field that connects the colonial and modern periods beyond slippery semantic distinctions between obscenity and pornography, helping us to think critically about regimes of visibility and embodiment where violence and sovereignty coalesce. For historian Sarah L. Leonard, obscenity is categorised as such because it is “antithetical to the ethical and political aspirations of a society” or because consumers engage with it in an obsessive, voyeuristic, or prurient way (2014, 2), whereas Eliot Borenstein claims that pornography and obscenity became autonomous categories in the West when blasphemy ceased to be a primary concern and porn abandoned any artistic pretensions (2005, 236). The authors in this special issue question the metanarrative of these arguments, showing instead that blasphemy and art are, if anything, increasingly relevant for the politics of obscenity that encompass pornography’s markets.

In his contribution, Iván Eusebio Aguirre Darancou explores the filmic realms of pornography in twentieth-century Mexico, which further the trope of Catholic clergy engaged in illicit sex. The Mexican stag film Juana y Chema (Viaje de Bodas), dated 1928–31, for example, foregrounds female pleasure while poking fun at the act of confession with a sexualised and particularly seductive priest. While the gay porn flicks legally produced by Mecos Films in the early 2000s—specifically, La putiza (2004) and La verganza (2005)—are Aguirre’s main object of analysis, they importantly ground such pornographic productions by reaching back to the 1930s, when Spanish bookseller Amadeo Pérez Mendoza screened silent black-and-white explicitly pornographic stag films in a clandestine porn cinema in downtown Mexico City for an admission fee. Aguirre traces how, from the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas in the 1930s to the increased efforts at neoliberalisation in the post-2000 decade, Mexican gay pornography became a space for the negotiation (and parody) of Mexican masculinities, sexualities, and pornographic consumption. Populated with such national icons as lucha libre wrestlers, referees, and charros, chinas poblanas and other eroticised working-class figures, Aguirre carefully delineates how the shifting medium of pornographic consumption, from postcard to moving image, altered the terrain in which Mexican identities were both constructed and performed. Aguirre shows how the stag films of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s archived in Mexico’s Filmoteca de la UNAM “parody the archetypes of nationalism and gesture toward their erotic sovereignty”. In a similar satirical vein, decades later, Mecos Films uses archetypes and stereotypes “of popular nationalism to push back against their normative definitions and expand their globalized subjects through pleasure”. Such pleasure, as this issue shows, is always deeply politicised.

The sociopolitical frameworks under which obscenity and pornography are commodified and circulated inform their effects on daily life, including their ability to shape gender roles and consumer patterns. Theorist Paul B. Preciado studies how Playboy magazine responded to the expansion of mass consumer culture in 1950s United States by cultivating a libertine polygamous heterosexuality (represented as clean, healthy, and rational) as an antidote to the “perversions” of monogamy and homosexuality (2019, 40). Similarly, Natalia Milanesio notes that the process of sexual liberalisation (destape) that took place during the Argentine democratic transition “simultaneously subverted and endorsed traditional representations of female sexuality, stimulated a democratic debate about heterosexuality and heterosexual pleasure while muting expressions of queer desire” (2019, 19). The interconnected dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that obscenity sets in motion are core to the articles in this special issue: from the porous boundaries between heresy and sanctity and nationalistic tropes in Mexican, Argentine, and Peruvian porn, to the obscene interventions through which writer Pedro Lemebel and performer Hija de Perra each critique Chilean neoliberalism.

In fact, Maria Célleri proposes in her article—a beautiful reading of Pedro Lemebel’s little-studied Los incontables (1986)––that the Chilean author creates characters and scenarios where the double valence of obscenity becomes manifest: the Pinochet regime is obscene in that its excessive violence makes life precarious and sometimes unbearable (here Lemebel extends this critique to the pro-dictatorship sectors of the Catholic Church); but the people whom the regime deemed dispensable, including women that take their sexual excess to the streets, turn the obscene into a mode of existence that defies discipline and judgement. Célleri skilfully follows Lemebel as the latter draws the contours of violence and its multiple roles as a form of singling out sucia women who—because of their lack of affiliation, their transience, and their “unproper” sensorial presence—become targets of abuse by men and state agents. Lemebel’s thematic focus on cruelty does not detract from characters’ erotic agency, deploying obscenity in its rich and paradoxical multiplicity.

Similarly, Natalia Milanesio underscores the plasticity of the obscene as a metaphor to debate the implications of democracy, post-dictatorial justice, and censorship in 1980s Argentina. The “nonsexual pornographic” is a central category of analysis in Milanesio’s article, which shows how the weaponisation of obscenity served opposite political agendas: from ultra-Catholic sectors’ attacks on the sexual liberalisation of the media (known as the destape) to human rights activists’ argument that the true pornography was the very visual scenes of torture and death that the military had staged in years prior to buttress its own power. Milanesio threads and presents visual/textual archives where voyeurism, violence, and sex are so entangled that observation becomes a form of participation: she analyses how the sensationalist press recreated scenes of torture to satiate readers’ appetite for explicit depictions of military violence, and how these images coexisted with photographs of female nude bodies that symbolised democracy’s permissiveness towards erotic markets. Milanesio’s juxtaposition of interconnected yet seemingly disparate fields of representation and experience—democracy, military violence, commercial porn, torture, press sensationalism, human rights and Catholic activism—turn transitional Argentina into a core example of the expansive operations of obscenity that this special issue foregrounds.

Pablo Ben and Santiago Joaquín Insausti provocatively present a series of counterintuitive findings in their comparative study of pornography in 1980s Argentina and Peru. Instead of a correlation between democracy and sexual liberalisation, they emphasise that porn had a golden age in Peru under dictatorial rule whereas it faced a backlash with the return to democracy. Regarding Argentina, they argue that the destape was rooted in an incipient market for erotica, which coalesced under the dictatorship that came to power in 1976. Insausti and Ben propose a methodological approach to obscenity that reveals large-scope trends, consumers’ agency, and porn’s political importance. They demonstrate that porn was a vehicle for the popularisation of Marxist vocabulary and analytics in Peru, responding to demographic trends that placed serranos or racialised immigrants to Lima at the centre of political change. Serranos formed a core consumer constituency for porn magazines like Zeta, which appealed to this readership by hiring local models (who gained leverage in terms of their salaries) and printing moralistic articles about the corrupting influence that the metropolis had on immigrant women. Ben and Insausti contrast serranos’ impact as consumers of porn/partisan politics with the destape in Argentina, where the main target of porn magazines was the urban middle class. Since this demographic group aspirationally identified with progressivism in the Global North, publications cultivated edginess, experimentation, and openness to the demands of LGBTQ activism. Ben and Insausti suggest that middle-class consumers perceived obscenity as a vehicle to attain whiteness, and posit that there is no understanding pornography without considering the politics of race and modernisation, and vice versa. Violence is still central in this mode of analysis—military rule, racism, and economic inequity form the structural scenario for the consumption of pornography—but Ben and Insausti centre bottom-up dynamics through which common people redirected porn’s semantic field, making it more akin to their own local politics.

Finally, “gore aesthetics” is the category that trans studies scholar Cole Rizki proposes to centre the necropolitics of neoliberalism in Chile and performer Hija de Perra’s use of different media to denounce politics of cooptation that normalise gay subjects while perpetuating the criminalisation of reproductive autonomy. Hija de Perra did not shy away from abjection, which she embraced as the travesti and sucio correlate of necropolitics that generate surplus populations for whom precarity is a condition of existence. Rizki guides readers through the career of Hija de Perra and her death from causes related to HIV in 2014. The financial burden that a privatised health system imposed on her surviving mother to confront the expenses of Hija de Perra’s medical treatment infuriated Hija de Perra’s trans and queer kin, who organised street protests around the symbolism of kissing (this connects back to Troconis’s piece on kissing national icons). Rizki not only incorporates grotesquerie, camp, parody, viscerality, and bodily metaphors into his reading of obscenity, but also argues that Hija de Perra’s art foreshadowed the protest repertoires of el estallido (2019–2020) and problematises the potentialities of gore aesthetics once necropolitics become a self-evident and inescapable facet of subjects’ intimate and social life.

To conclude, it is worth returning briefly to Editorial El Gato Negro’s El mundo del placer: o las memorias de Susana, which invites us to think critically about that book’s printing (in Madrid?) in the mid-twentieth century, and it subsequently passing through the hands of distributors, sellers, consumers, collectors, and, eventually, archivists across borders. Attentiveness to material form and circulation within and among bookstores, kiosks, private collections, flea markets, special collection libraries, and archives invites us, as Zeb Tortorici notes, into an open-ended and “multilayered reflection on popular cultural practices over time, as well as a reflection on how new meanings accrue to erotic images and objects with each passage of ownership or custody” (2020, 1338). Taken together, this first issue of a double special issue of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies on “Obscenity, Censorship, and Libidinal Politics in Latin America” demonstrates the interconnectedness of pornographic repertoires, obscene epistemologies, and ongoing forms of political critique, from the colonial period to the present. The forthcoming second issue will lead us into a wide range of performative interventions in the public sphere, via decolonial and postpornographic literature, art, activism, and archives. It is our hope that these two special issues invite others to locate, preserve, and theorise erotic and pornographic traces across time, to radically open up political, cultural, and corporeal praxis of lo obsceno.

Acknowledgement

Javier Fernández-Galeano belongs to the research groups “El problema de la alteridad en el mundo actual” (HUM536), “La clínica de la subjetividad: Historia, teoría y práctica de la psicopatología estructural” (PID2020-113356GBI00) and “Memorias de las masculinidades disidentes en España e Hispanoamérica” (PID2019-106083GB-I00) of the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (Gobierno de España): AEI/10.13039/501100011033.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Notes on contributors

Zeb Tortorici

Zeb Tortorici is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. His book Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain (2018) received the John Boswell Award among other prizes. He recently coedited Ethnopornography: Sexuality, Colonialism, and Archival Knowledge (2020); Baptism Through Incision: The Postmortem Cesarean Operation in the Spanish Empire (2020); and Turning Archival: The Life of the Historical in Queer Studies (2022). His current project on “Archiving the ‘Obscene’: Censorship, Erotica, and Pornography in Latin America, 1700–-1955” is generously supported by a Mellon New Directions Fellowship. In 2022, his “Circulating Erotica: Flea Markets, Collections, and Archives in Mexico” was co-recipient of Award for Best Article by the Archives, Libraries and Digital Scholarship Section of LASA. Since 2018, he has collaborated with Mexico City-based Archivo El Insulto towards the preservation of historical erotica and pornography in Latin America.

Javier Fernández-Galeano

Javier Fernández-Galeano is a historian of twentieth-century Argentina and Spain, a Ramón y Cajal fellow at the University of Valencia. His first book, titled Maricas (University of Nebraska Press, 2024), traces the erotic lives and legal battles of Argentine and Spanish gender-nonconforming people, and his second book, titled Queer Obscenity (Stanford University Press, 2024) adds a rich complexity to both the history and theory of pornography. Javier has a PhD in History from Brown University, where he graduated as a Mellon/ACLS fellow; a MA in Historical Studies from the New School for Social Research, where he was a Fulbright scholar; and two BAs in history and anthropology (both cum laude) from the Universidad Complutense of Madrid.