LA FOTO NO ES BUENA: PHOTOGRAPHY, THE RESISTANT LOOK, AND THE FUTURITY OF “HOMOSEXUALIDADES LATINOAMERICANAS” IN PEDRO LEMEBEL’S “LA NOCHE DE LOS VISONES”

The Chilean writer and performance artist, Pedro Lemebel, was a prolific chronicler. Before his untimely death in 2015, he published nine collections of chronicles. For Lemebel, the genre of the chronicle became a means through which to demystify the homogenizing and totalizing discourse of the Chilean dictatorship and postdictatorship. Lemebeľs oeuvre significantly centers the figure, voice, and experiences of the loca. She is represented radically as a political subject, situating agency in her experiences, centering her as a protagonist of history. The first half of "La noche de los visones" follows a brief chronological reconstruction of the last months of the Popular Unity government, leading up to the locas' last encounter at la Palma's New Year's Eve party, and concluding with a brief fast-forward to the present, underlining the loss and death that came from the dictatorship and the AIDS pandemic. The second half of the chronicle challenges that aseptic narrative of the locas' AIDS-related deaths and the de-contextualization of the pandemic from the dictatorship. Lemebel reconstructs the lives of the locas leading up to their deaths through a recurring reference to a photograph of the group taken at the New Year's Eve party. In this article, I focus on that reference to the only photograph that exists of that party, which symbolizes the last meeting and celebration of locas from different backgrounds. I analyze the discursive production of the photograph and the significance of its use of as a narrative strategy through which Lemebel traces how the dictatorship, the AIDS pandemic, and the institutionalization of neoliberalism were complied in what he conceptualizes as the "doble desaparición" of the locas. I ask, what does the photograph afford Lemebel, the chronicler? How does the incorporation of a reference to a visual object that is being produced by and within a written text function as a subversive narrative strategy?