Out in the Periphery: Latin America's Gay Rights Revolution
Omar G. Encarnación
Abstract
Latin America, famous around the world as a bastion of Catholicism and machismo, has in recent years emerged as the gay rights leader of the global South. More surprising yet, several Latin American nations are international gay rights trendsetters. Countries like Argentina, which legalized same-sex marriage in 2010, ahead of more “developed” nations, like Britain, France, and the United States, are today pushing the boundaries of gay rights by enacting federal laws to ensure transgender equality, to abolish “ex-gay reparative therapy,” and to provide access to reproductive technologies to sam ... More
Latin America, famous around the world as a bastion of Catholicism and machismo, has in recent years emerged as the gay rights leader of the global South. More surprising yet, several Latin American nations are international gay rights trendsetters. Countries like Argentina, which legalized same-sex marriage in 2010, ahead of more “developed” nations, like Britain, France, and the United States, are today pushing the boundaries of gay rights by enacting federal laws to ensure transgender equality, to abolish “ex-gay reparative therapy,” and to provide access to reproductive technologies to same-sex couples. So how did this dramatic expansion of gay rights come about in such an unlikely setting? Going against the conventional wisdom that sees Latin America’s gay rights “revolution” as a byproduct of a tidal wave of external influence—from the gay liberation politics unleashed by New York’s 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, to the globalization of American homosexual identities, to the international diffusion of policy ideas such as gay marriage—this study aims to “decenter” gay rights politics. The intention is not to debunk assumptions about external influence in shaping the rise of gay rights in Latin America by demonstrating how the “local” has trumped over the “global,” but rather to suggest how the domestic context has interacted with the outside world to make Latin America an unusually receptive environment for gay rights. Of utmost importance to this study is the role of gay activists in crafting gay rights campaigns that while inspired by external events are firmly embedded in domestic politics. In the best-known and most influential of these campaigns—Argentina’s—gay activists succeeded in changing the law regarding homosexuality, and, more importantly, in transforming society and the culture at large.
Keywords:
gays,
homosexuality,
same-sex marriage,
antigay discrimination,
Argentina,
Brazil,
Latin America,
Stonewall,
human rights
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2016 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199356645 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2016 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199356645.001.0001 |
