IRREVERENT PARODIES

Abstract

This article further explores some of the issues that I study in my BA’s Thesis. I look at the traces that would allow us to perceive how, within the so called national case, a science of sexuality was constituted as part of a broader process that aims at increasingly igniting rather than restricting where “techniques applied over sex are not guided by a rigorous selecting principle but by one of dissemination and implantation of polymorphous sexualities” (Foucault, 1995: 20).

Assuming that the very constitution and control over sexuality has been the way that modern society models bodies and behaviors, placing the position of certain individuals as marginal to the concept of normalcy and marking the standards of operability for contemporary culture, it is possible to interrogate this “implantation” of modern relations from within the position and practices of those who are defined as sexually deviants: the so called “inverted” from the early XXth century, -within the range encoded by the Argentine sciences of sexuality- and, particularly, those who cross-dressed wearing the opposed sex’s cloths and that are nowadays known as travestis. It is from within these margins, paying attention to the experience of subjects located in the borders of modernity, where the effect of mechanisms and operations of individuation are exposed as fabricated.