Irreverent Parodies

Abstract

This article further explores some of the concerns developed in my undergraduate thesis. I review the traces that would allow us to perceive how, in the national case, a science of sexuality was constituted as part of a broader process not so much of restriction as of increasing incitement, in which “the techniques exercised over sex have not obeyed a principle of rigorous selection, but rather one of dissemination and implantation of polymorphous sexualities” (Foucault, 1995: 20).

If we assume that the formation and control of sexuality has been the way in which modern society has shaped bodies and behaviors, fixed the position of certain individuals at the margins of the concept of normality, and traced the parameters for the operability of contemporary culture, then it becomes possible to inquire into this “implantation” of modern relations from the position and practices of those individuals defined as bearers of an abnormal sexuality: the so-called “inverts” of the early twentieth century, within the spectrum encoded by the Argentine sexual sciences, and, specifically, those who dressed in the clothing of the opposite gender, those today named travestis.

It is at the margins, by attending to the experience of situated subjects constituted at the borders of normality, that the effect of modern operations and mechanisms of individuation is exposed as constructed.