Queering the Rural in Contemporary Argentine Cinema: Taekwondo, Esteros, and Como Una Novia Sin sexo

Abstract

In queer social histories, the city has been privileged as a normative space for queer identity and social progress to be actualized. Compared with urban spaces, rural spaces continue to be perceived as always dangerous and antagonistic for people who identify as queer. In cinema with queer images, this narrative of the rural as hostile is being challenged by films with queer images that contain positive narratives within a rural or non-urban milieu. In other words, these films are presenting counter-narratives to what scholar Jack Halberstam has called metronormativity. Under a metronormative optic, it is assumed that queer people in a rural space will adopt the spatial narrative of movement from that rural space to an urban space. In 2016, three Argentine films were released that challenged metronormative assumptions: Marco Berger and Martín Farina’s Taekwondo, Papu Curotto’s Esteros, and Lucas Santa Ana’s Como una novia sin sexo / Bromance. Through the representation of queer desire in rural spaces, these films offer a counter-narrative to the privileging of the urban in queer sociality. Through close readings of these three films that take into consideration sexual fluidity, bodily experience, and their intersections with natural elements and iconography, it is evident that there is a contemporary impulse to cinematically convey queer rurality, an understudied and overlooked phenomenon.