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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 February 2015
Los Invertidos (1914) by the Argentinean playwright José González Castillo (1885–1937) is probably the first play in the Spanish-speaking world to treat ‘sexual inversion’ – code for homosexuality in turn-of-the-century European sexology – as material for the modern stage. A three-act drama realista (‘realist drama’) that sets out to present ‘sexual inversion’ in a recognizably Argentinean setting and idiom, Los Invertidos demonstrates, as Edward Said puts it, that ‘ideas and theories’ – in this case about modern drama and sexuality – ‘travel’. González Castillo launched queer visibility on the Argentinean stage with dramatic models and embodied behaviours forged from international and local sensibilities. I argue that Los Invertidos, while shaped by sociopolitical and aesthetic upheavals in the Southern Cone, invites us to place its theatricality in a queer ‘genealogy of performance’ that crosses geographic and linguistic boundaries. How we describe and contextualize queer theatre today might well be informed by González Castillo's innovations and confusions during modern drama's early decades.
1 Said, Edward, The World, The Text, and The Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 226Google Scholar–47.
2 Roach, Joseph, ‘Mardi Gras Indians and Others: Genealogies of American Performance’, Theatre Journal, 44, 4 (December 1992), pp. 461Google Scholar–83, here p. 462.
3 Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I (New York: Vintage, 1978)Google Scholar.
4 Salessi, Jorge, Médicos, Maleantes y Maricas: Higiene, Criminología y Homosexualidad en la Construcción de la Nación Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1871–1914) (Buenos Aires: Beatriz Viterbo, 1995)Google Scholar.
5 Ibid., pp. 205–12.
6 Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990)Google Scholar.
7 Showalter, Elaine, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Viking, 1991)Google Scholar.
8 ‘Por los teatros’, El Pueblo, 15 September 1914. All translations from Spanish in this essay are mine.
9 ‘Los éxitos del Nacional’, La Mañana, 15 September, 1914.
10 ‘El pretendido teatro realista’, La Gaceta de Buenos Aires, 14 September, 1914.
11 Castillo, José González, Los Invertidos y Otras Obras (Buenos Aires: Ediciones ryr, 2011), p. 271Google Scholar.
12 More precisely, it is Clara who insists that her husband obey the report's conclusion that ‘suicide is their ultimate, good evolution’ – an insight dubiously credited to the French ‘decadent’ poet Paul Verlaine (1844–96) – which sets in motion the play's self-fulfilling medico-legal prophecy. See ibid., p. 45.
13 Ibid., p. 61.
14 Love, Heather, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 33Google Scholar.
15 González Castillo, Los Invertidos y Otras Obras, p. 39.