Latin America: A Free Zone for Queer Colonization
By María J. Binetti
In this article, I intend to explain why and how Latin America, and particularly Argentina, represents an extremely attractive and easily accessible land for queer neocolonial extractivism. There are a number of reasons. First, Latin America is the most unequal region in the world. We have masses of unemployed and impoverished women whose only capital is their own body. Second, the precariousness of political institutions and the lack of democratic tradition put the region at the mercy of highly charismatic and corrupt caudillos. For Latin American populist leaders, poverty is big business. Third, our cultural underdevelopment is continually captured by imported trends.
In such a context, it is not a mere coincidence that the queer agenda first colonized Latin America. In fact, Ecuador was the first country in the world to introduce “gender identity” in its new Constitution of 2008, followed by Bolivia in its Constitution of 2009. Both incorporated Pachamama ‒the aboriginal Goddess‒, Sumak Kawsay‒ the indigenous philosophy of good living‒, along with gender identity promoted by Yogyakarta Principles and UN’s agencies. For its part, Argentina was the first country to approve a legislative model based on self-identity in 2012, followed by Brazil in 2013.
At that time, South America was dominated by a populist wave, disguised as progressive and anti-imperialist. It spread a sort of New Left that combined postmodern cultural relativism ‒inspired by thinkers like Michel Foucault, Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, and Judith Butler‒ with nationalist populism. I refer to the government of Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Nestor and Cristina Kirchner in Argentina, and Lula da Silva in Brazil, aligned with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Fidel Castro in Cuba. They presented themselves as the re-founding Fathers of the Patria Grande‒Great Homeland‒. The progressive and inclusive rhetoric was the frame in which neo-liberal queer entrepreneurship entered in Latin America.
From then on, the legal, political, and cultural discourse began to adjust to the self-identity and constructible model that gender identity presupposes. The global market of sex trade opened to new niches, and influential foundations and NGOs started to lobby hard. Let’s mention, for instance, Red Umbrella, RedTraSex, Mama Cash, Amnesty International, Open Society Foundation, or GATE. The latter was founded in 2009 by Mauro Cabral Grinspan, an Argentine self-identified man who signed Yogyakarta Principles. Argentina plays a leading role in the advancement of the queer agenda and serves as a thermometer of the region. I will briefly refer to what is currently happening in Argentina.
Since last December, the country is again governed by Cristina Kirchner’s party, the same as that between 2007 and 2015 when gender identity theory reached the region. As a result, during the last 10 months, the erasure of women's sex-based rights has been dreadful.
From December, Argentina has a new Ministry of “Women, Genders and Diversity”, an all-inclusive instrument to legitimize everything; including sex stereotypes, and self-identifications. The Ministry is strategically institutionalized for undermining the feminist agenda and promoting the queer one instead. Indeed, under the umbrella of ‘genders and diversities’, women become one more identity, a minority group among many others.
The use of so-called “inclusive language” accompanies the new self-identification model by introducing the neutral phoneme “e” as common genre for feminine/masculine. For example, “todes” instead of “todas” and “todos”. Also, the category of “women” has been replaced with the neutral “person”. This inclusive language has been officially adopted by several universities and public organisms like the Central Bank of Argentina. For the purpose of inclusion, the National Bank along with any other civil service have just established a quota for transvestites, transsexuals, and transgender workers of no less than 1%. The only requirement to apply is the self-declaration of being “trans”, without the need to change sex or name in official documents. It is not clear, however, whether this 1% includes parity between men and women.
All the actions of the Ministry are addressed jointly to women, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transvestites, transsexuals, transgender, and intersex people. For example, the recent National Program “Companionship” was launched to mitigate gender-based violence against men and women in COVID context, without mentioning the specificity of sex-based violence. It also states nothing about what percentage is intended to mitigate the violence against women as opposed to the percentage to mitigate violence against men. The same applies to the National Program “Equalize”, provided to promote gender equality in work, employment, and production according to the principle of equality in diversity.
And it also goes for the National Plan to prevent violence against people on the basis of genders. Another recent example of the confusion between women and diversity is the Resolution Number 34 of the General Inspectorate of Justice, which establishes gender diversity in the board of all corporations, non-governmental organizations, and civil associations. According to the Resolution, there must be an equal number of female and male members in any collegiate bodies. Besides eliminating the right to women-only organizations, the Resolution substitutes the parity between women and men by gender diversity between female and male members.
Erasure is also the destiny of the legal category of “mother” and “pregnant woman”, now replaced by the neutral and asexual term “person” ‒ freely self-identified ‒ plus the functions of “pregnancy” or “breast-feeding” ‒freely dissociated from sex‒. As an example, a recent Bill submitted to Argentine Congress proposes to substitute in some articles of the Argentine Penal Code the category of “pregnant woman” by “pregnant person”. The Bill argues that “woman” remains an old-fashioned and anachronistic term that denies the right to gender identity.
The ideological operation to conflate women and diversity ‒justified by the self-identity model‒ repeats the same strategy. The political initiatives use to begin by invoking the authority of CEDAW, which in Argentina has constitutional status, or the Inter-American Convention Belem do Pará, devoted to prevent, punish and eradicate violence against women, to proceed to substitute women’s sex-based rights by people’s gender-based rights. Briefly, international women’s treaties and conventions were captured in order to erase women.
Whether the legal category of women is completely erased or equated with diversities, the question is the discrimination and violation of women’s and girls’ human rights. To introduce women in the infinite range of genders‒as if women perform some hetero-normative feeling‒ entails symbolic and psychological violence and turns women into a minority. The diverse ones are women. The rest are men.
There is another crucial institution for Argentine feminism severely threatened by queer capture, namely the National Women’s Gathering. For some years now, trans-activists have been lobbying for turning the National Women’s Gathering into the Plurinational Gathering of Women, Lesbians, Transvestites, Trans, Bisexuals, Intersexuals, and Non-binaries. Ultimately, they got it. From this year on, at the 35th Gathering, there will be two separate meetings: the National of Women and the Plurinational of Diversities.
But the big news is that the government has decided to invest about 2 million dollars in the Diversities Gathering while ignoring the Women’s Gathering.
It is worth noting that Women’s Gatherings has been, and will be, self-funded and that the government’s investment in diversities occurs in a context with more than 40 percent of poverty and 5 million of the population in poverty due to pandemic.
“Sex work” has also become a free private identity to legitimize. Although Argentina is an abolitionist country ‒it criminalizes pimping and trafficking but not prostituted women‒, the pressure to decriminalize pimping and regulate prostitution is ever increasing. Last June there was an illegal attempt to incorporate “sex work” into the National Registry for Popular Economy. Feminist abolitionism reacted quickly and the Registry had to turn back.
However, the pressure continues by means of a very influential pseudo-union of sex workers called AMMAR. It has direct links with government, Human Rights Organizations, and “Ni Una Menos”, a women movement now registered as a very profitable trademark. Behind AMMAR are RedTraSex, ONUSIDA, the World Bank, and Mama Cash, Robert Carr Fund for Civil Society Networks, among many others. AMMAR’s main spokeswoman recently attended the 3rd International Congress of Education hosted by Federal and Provincial Ministries, Congresses, and Universities, where she pointed to the importance of introducing sex work as a curriculum content. Last year, AMMAR opened the so-called Red House, a kind of assistance center for prostituted women. Since the coronavirus pandemic, the Red House has been providing ID cards, social programs, housing, subsidies, etc. to migrants. Yes, poor migrant women are “assisted” by the “Ministry of the Whores” in coordination with the State.
But the most worrying issue of queer colonization is reproductive exploitation. In July, a Bill to incorporate surrogacy into the Civil Code was submitted to the Argentine Congress, just on the tenth anniversary of the equal marriage as a sort of wedding gift for reproductive minorities and gender identities. One of the leading promoters of surrogacy in the country is Marisa Herrera, who is, in addition, the current Argentine candidate to represent the country at CEDAW. Herrera has been pushing the reproductive exploitation of women for years. Aligned with the Genders Ministry, she has expressed her desire to democratize CEDAW by introducing diversity. She has also maintained an uncertain position about child custody omitting some general recommendations of CEDAW.
The surrogacy industry attempts to colonize Latin America. This land promises an attractive marketplace to reproductive and sexual exploitation, enabled by masses of impoverished and unemployed women, lack of democratic institutions, and endemic corruption. Currently, there are projects to regulate surrogacy in Argentina, Peru, and Mexico. The Organic Code of Ecuador already approved it, and Guatemala has farms of women and kids. Argentina has authorized by now 47 registrations of children born by an alleged altruistic exploitation, and the last case is now in the Supreme Court of Justice.
Oddly enough, none of these countries has decriminalized abortion, pending agreements between Church and governments.
In such a context, it is hard for Latin American feminists to open up spaces for voices critical of gender. Censorship in academia and exclusion from mass media are the rule. Our main support is international action networks.
We know this fight is global. And we know that as women, together we are stronger.