Research

My current book project, preliminary titled Argentina’s Sentimental Underworlds: Slum Theatre and the Staging of Queerness and Disability—1880-1930, studies how fin de siècle degeneration theory informed the dramatic practice in the Río de La Plata by promoting a heteronormative and ableist mindset in the staging of the lunfardo stock characters of Buenos Aires’ arrabales. Linyeras, atorrantes, and cirujas (tramps), percantas and malevas (deviant women), and gringos (European immigrants), among other figures, were integrated into the scientific repertoire as the stark contrast to positivism’s evolutionary patterns of human perfection. And yet, the book shows how popular culture, especially tango and sainetes, rendered an alternative image of criminalized lunfardo populations that, although it did not dissolve it, at least complicated, and at times unsettled, the antinomy deviant/normative—healthy/unhealthy—able/disabled. Where degeneration theory sought social regeneration through social prophylaxis or seclusion (castration, imprisonment, or asylum life), the nexus tango-sainete-melodrama explored the manifestation of sex-gender deviance, physical and cognitive impairment with a tragicomic sentimentality. This aesthetic formula became a dramatic artifact that combined sentimentalism with anthropological renditions of the underworlds to suggest that the moral and physical recovery of the lunfardo was desirable in the making of the ideal Argentine citizen. The project suggests that the dramatic study of body difference offers new methodologies to approach the notion of queerness and disability and the primary role they had in the modernization of theatre and new ideas of citizenship, labor, and (re) productive capacity. Plays considered are Degeneración (1918, Martínez), Los curdas (1908, Sánchez), El degenerado (1910, Lola), El epiléptico (1920, Traversa), and El imperio de los instintos (1926, Portell), among others.