Bodies of Water: Queer Aesthetics in Contemporary Latin American Cinema

by Geoffrey Maguire

Overview

Explores how watery spaces provoke radical modes of screening queer corporeality in a diverse range of contemporary Latin American films.

Honorable Mention, for the 2025 British Association of Film Television and Screen Studies Best Publication Prize

Rivers, swimming pools, lakes, and oceans: these watery spaces recur with remarkable frequency in recent queer Latin American cinema, urging us to question the intimacies between queerness and the aquatic. Unpredictable and uncontrollable, water reflects a natural fluidity in our sexual desires and orientations; it is both a space and a substance, one in which bodies surrender themselves to the natural forces of currents and flows. As the first book to investigate water's queer cinematic potential, Bodies of Water proposes that we think not only about water but also through it, illuminating new directions for the study of queer world cinema and its evolving aesthetic strategies. Bodies of Water engages critically with theories of cinematic embodiment and recent work in queer theory and the environmental humanities, foregrounding a region of the world historically overlooked in global discussions of queerness. By examining the radical queer epistemologies that emerge at the convergence of body, camera, and water, Bodies of Water ultimately poses a question of both critical and sociopolitical concern: what's so queer about cinematic waters?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781438499192
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	09/01/2024
Series:	SUNY series in Latin American Cinema
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	214
File size:	4 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Geoffrey Maguire is Associate Professor of Spanish at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge. He is the author of The Politics of Postmemory: Violence and Victimhood in Contemporary Argentine Culture and coeditor (with Rachel Randall) of New Visions of Adolescence in Contemporary Latin American Cinema.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Beyond Fluidity

1. The Queer Art of Feeling: Fluid Futurities, Fin de siglo, and New Queer Realism

2. On the Shores of Adulthood: Queer Adolescence and the Fallacy of Fluidity in Contemporary Brazilian Film

3. The Coast Is Queer: Visibility and the Queer (Trans)National in Contracorriente and Praia do Futuro

4. Slow Waters: Marco Berger's Taekwondo and the Queer Erotics of Boredom

5. Postporn Flows: Las hijas del fuego and the Queer Poetics of Sexual Pleasure

Coda: After XXY

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"A major contribution, Bodies of Water conjugates Latin American queer cinema studies and the blue humanities in ways that are illuminating and transformational. Lucid and fluid throughout, with nuanced and detailed film analyses, the book enriches our understanding of the queer aquatic poetics of alterity, identity, belonging, and more." — Juli A. Kroll, author of Body, Gender, and Sexuality in Latin American Cinema: Insurgent Skin

From the Publisher