Drag performances in the recent Latin American documentary: Uses of the voice and musical flows

Abstract

This article aims to contribute to the configuration of a crooked cartography, to the construction of a map of the sexual dissident audiovisual geography in Latin America’s documentary filmmaking, after many decades of highly transphobic audiovisual imagery. In the documentary short film La otra (Lucrecia Martel 1989), we find a fundamental moment in the journey towards trans* visibility in Argentine cinematography. In Martel’s student work, we find a focus on drag performances, something unusual in local documentary film and in LatinAmerican theater studies. Our first outline of this map extends from 1989 to 2017 and cuts a trail through Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela, Cuba, and Peru. In addition to Martel's work, this initial corpus consists of the short films: Es mi vida (el arte de la transformación) (Espinoza, 1995); Perra (Navarro, Plaza and González, 2011); El Arte de La Transformación (Uzcateguí and Castillo, 2016), and Nebulah (Montoro, 2017). By claiming a specific positioning within the field of documentary cinema and building an archive that deviates from the canon, we put forward a perspective that reflects on the uses of the voice and musical flows in the drag performances presented in the films, performances that for decades have battled against transphobia, which is still active in Western societies and also present in some of the discourse of the films’ protagonists.