Queer Argie

In this essay I analyze the links and tensions between queer theory and politics of recognition in the Southern Cone. The queer gaze in Argentina seeps into the discussion of state recognition and the processes of civic normalization. Several demands with respect to the state were initiated or adopted by those who discussed queer theory in Argentina, from which circumstances I think also derives the originality of the process. These stretched from demands for legal personality for transvestite groups and for civil union at one end to equal marriage and gender identity law at the other. I also examine how none of these achievements was a point of arrival but rather a step toward the next objective and that each particular law did not solve the totality of any demand but, on the contrary, made it possible to continue deepening the analysis of the needs of increasingly wider publics.