Dr. Carlos Gustavo Halaburda (PhD Northwestern University 2021) is a Marie Skłodowska Curie Research Fellow with the Department of Romance Studies at the Universität zu Köln and associate fellow with the Erich Auerbach Institute for Advanced Studies. His work has appeared in journals and print houses such as Latin American Theater Review, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, Taller de Letras, Symposium, Universidad Nacional de la Plata, 17 Instituto de Estudios Críticos, Palgrave Macmillan, and Himpar Colombia, among others. In 2022, he received two awards for his article “Lunfardos: Queerness, Social Prophylaxis and the Futures of Reproduction in Fin-de-Siècle Argentine Dramaturgy”: the LASA Carlos Monsiváis Best Article of the Sexualities Section and the Canadian Hispanic Association Essay Prize. He was formerly a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese of the University of Toronto. His book-length study about queerness and disability in turn-of-the-century Argentine print culture is in preparation.

• Global Nineteenth Century Studies

• Modern Latin American Cultural History

• Argentine and Southern Cone LGBTQ Cultural Production

• Queer, Crip, and Trans* Literatures

• Race, Racism, and Eugenics in the Americas

• The History of Science and Technology

• Disability Studies

• Medical Humanities

The project Modernism’s Trans* Cultural Productions in Latin America, 1905-1933 has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101103095. It analyses the historical conditions for the cultural emergence of a new gender expression in early-twentieth-century Latin America: the marimacho. In the Hispanic tradition, marimacho is the umbrella notion that may refer to a sexist slur as much as an early-modern form of a non-binary gender, a transmasculine subjectivity, or a lesbian identity. By exploring the untold history of this counter-cultural and gender-dissident figure, this project seeks to increase the understanding of the region’s cultural politics of gender and sexuality in the “age of the closet”, that is, before the emergence of LGBTQ activisms, pride literature, and minority politics in the Global 1960s.

As part of my residence as an associate fellow at the Erich Auerbach Institute for Advanced Studies (2023-2024) and a visiting scholar at The Global South Studies Center, I will look at two historical events of significant implications for public discourse around gender and sexual transgressions against a heteronormative status quo in early twentieth- century Argentina. In my chapter The Garçonne Affair, I examine the transnational literary circuits by which the French novel La Garçonne (1922) [The Butch] by Victor Margueritte was used to discuss female bisexualism, lesbianism, and gender-bending practices in Buenos Aires. As tango songs (Correa, 1923), poems (Flores, 1922), translations (La machona, 1923), drawings (Los selectos, 1923), theatre plays (La machona, Morales/Suero, 1923), and essays (Quiroga, 1923; Valdelomar, 1926; Aramburu, 1926) were dedicated to Margueritte’s queer text, the chapter uncovers the politics of translation and appropriation of ‘female deviance’ in Southern Cone popular culture. My other chapter in progress is titled Exotic Perversions and evaluates hysteria, sadomasochism, and prostitution as tropes of European degeneration theory (Kraft-Ebbing, 1886; Nordau, 1892) that were key in the fabrication of European immigrant women as deviant in 1920s and 1930s Buenos Aires. The serialized collection Los realistas (1923), published by the Argentine avant-garde Boedo Group, is used to show how working-class southern and eastern European women, far from being associated to motherhood, came to embody a deviant version of masculinity that undermined Argentina’s racial project of whitening the mestizo nation, showing an intersection among categories of race, gender, sexuality, and nation.