Birth of the Marimacho: Modernismo's Trans* Cultural Productions in Latin America

Birth of the Marimacho: Modernismo’s Trans* Cultural Productions in Latin America is a Horizon Marie Skłodowska Curie Action 2022-funded project under grant number 101103095. This research analyzes the representations of a radical gender embodiment in early-twentieth-century Latin American literature, medical science, and visual culture: the ‹‹marimacho››. In the Hispanic tradition, marimacho is the umbrella notion that may refer to a sexist slur as much as a modern form of non-binary gender, a transmasculine identification, or a lesbian sexual identity. This project examines the aesthetic construction of this hybrid, counter-cultural, and gender-dissident figure in an extensive cultural repertoire that includes novels, plays, silver films, leaflets, medical studies, prison and mental hospital records, poems, newspaper, and tabloid articles from the period 1880-1930.

Data collection aims to assemble a corpus of published and unpublished sources held in print and digital archives and special collections in Latin America and Europe. These sources are copyright-free and are available through open access in university digital repositories, national archives, and research institutes in Germany, France, Mexico, Spain, and Argentina. The main purpose of the data collected and presented in this critical reference data base is to analyze its content through the methodologies of literary studies and gender theory concerning the main research questions of the project outlined in the original proposal. Some of the research questions that inform this project are:

1) What gendered formats, systems of racial classification, and mechanisms of sexual exclusion did modernista & avant-garde writers use to construct the marimacho (butch women/ early forms of transmasculinities/lesbian populations) but also the maricón(the fairy) as public enemies of national morals?

2) How and why did writers engage with tropes of world literary traditions—notions of Greek love, vampirism, primitivism, orientalism, teratology, and sexual inversion— to define the marimachos and maricones as dangers to bourgeois society?

3) What aesthetic practices such as clothing, hair, makeup, fashion, fragrance, tattooing, sports, dancing, poetics, and musical performances did queer women, non-binary peoples, and trans* men use to contest naturalized notions of femininity and masculinity?

This research seeks to increase the understanding of the region’s politics of gender and sexuality during the so-called positivist era (1880-1930), that is, before the solidification of LGBTQ activism, pride literature, and minority social movements of the Global 1960s. In the period of modernization that this project covers, there was a reaction against new gender dynamics led by cosmopolitan networks of feminism and the discreet homosexual liberation movements of the turn of the century. In response, the keepers of gender normativity created the marimacho as a monster version of conventional masculinity. Today, examining this response of the late 19th and early 20th centuries is crucial to understand the current anti-LGBT hatred in socio-political discourse.