Paper Title
Queer Resistance During Argentina’s Dirty War: The Poetic Discourses of María Elena Walsh and Néstor Perlongher
Abstract
My conference intends to trace elements of poetic resistance forged by María Elena Walsh and Néstor Perlongher, two Argentine queer poets who suffered imposed and self-imposed restrictions and developed extraordinary creative strategies of survival whether under an atmosphere of extreme domestic censorship, in the case of Walsh, or in forced exodus and exile, in the case of Perlongher, during the dark years of the Military Junta (1976-1983). Reading between the lines of their diverse literary production, we argue, allows critics and readership to discover camouflaged pieces of transgressed discourse elaborated within the parameters of a hermetic queer aesthetic known as “the language of the entendido,” a common linguistic code from the 1960-80s shared by non-heterosexuals as a way of circumventing hegemonic impositions of normativity. A comprehensive study of their work will shed new signification and will justly place them in a prominent space within the early developments of queer literature in Argentina.
Keywords - Exile, Queer, Poetry, South America, Dirty War, Music, Lyrics, Sexuality, Repression.