Para ser bella hay que sufrir: Escrituras y practicas de la diferencia entre Argentina y Brasil

This dissertation examines how a certain constellation of texts and political practices produced during the last 30 years in Argentina and Brazil allows to rethink the status of literature and its relationship with politics in contemporary Latin America. Ranging across a series of translations, smugglings and short-circuits between Argentina and Brazil, mainly operated by poet and activist Nestor Perlongher, this work elaborates a dialectical image of a discontinuous trail of queer-trash antiaesthetics, orientated to the mutation of subjectivity through a queer bodily experimentation understood as a molecular revolution. Reading together underground literature with documents of avant-garde political activism, this dissertation explores the forms in which literature reaches beyond the limits of its autonomy to intervene in concrete social practices, as well as explores political formations alternative to the classic concept of engagement. Rather than affirmative identity politics, queer thought (especially in its Latin American version) questions the epistemological order of identity that produces the concept and the experience of difference, and therefore inequality, thus establishing a link with political contestation. This materialistic analysis allows to read anti-aesthetic movements as expression of cultural conflicts that boosts the insurgent impulses in society as an objective need of social change, as well as intends to provide a language of expression for those impulses.;This thesis has an introduction and three chapters. The first chapter reads the work of Nestor Perlongher in Argentina, as a neo-baroque poet and a founding member of the Frente de Liberacion Homosexual, the first LGBT group in Latin America, and later in his Brazilian exile, which provides an aperture. The second chapter analyzes Perlongher's work and body politics in dialogue with Brazilian writers and activists such as Glauco Mattoso related to the marginal poetry generation but also to the first gay rights movement in that country, Somos. Perlongher's pioneering work provided perspective in considering the contributions of subsequent generations to queer-trash poetics and its links with micropolitics today, particularly in reading such writers-activists-cultural agents as Cecilia Pavon, Fernanda Laguna and Washington Cucurto in contemporary Argentina, who were deeply inspired by those revolutionary attempts in Brazil.