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The Tongues of the Locas

The Radical Art of Poverty and the Feminist Avant-Garde

Cecilia Palmeiro

To cite this article: Cecilia Palmeiro (2020): The Tongues of the Locas, Third Text, DOI:
10.1080/09528822.2020.1726624

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 Third Text, 2020
https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2020.1726624

The Tongues of the Locas

The Radical Art of Poverty and
the Feminist Avant-Garde

Cecilia Palmeiro

Literature de Cordel, (detail), This article argues that a feminist avant-garde has emerged from within
Brazil, 2012
Argentinean literature as a distinctive feature of the recent feminist revolu-
1 Ricardo Piglia, Las Tres tion – most notably illustrated in the organisation of the International
Vanguardias: Saer, Puig,
Walsh, Eterna Cadencia,
Women’s Strikes starting in March 2017. Because this revolution is
Buenos Aires, 2016 deeply connected with new artistic practices that challenge the commodi-
2 In his book, Piglia refers to
fication of art, I assert that this emerging avant-garde can be productively
Juan José Saer as the explored through the concept of amateurism.
Argentinean representative The political prerogatives of my own generation in Argentina – after
of this trend. The classic
avant-garde, from Baudelaire the decimation of the former generation during a dictatorship – altered
to Rimbaud, Flaubert and our relationship to cultural production and to the market, particularly
Lautréamont, is the context in the context of the economic collapse and crisis of 2001, and its corre-
to understand the first
reaction of art against the spondences now with the most contemporary neoliberal crisis produced
culture industry. Art appears from above and the poetics of the feminist resistance against it. In what
here as resistance against the
normalised communication
follows, I address the formation of a trend in Latin American writing
and the stereotype of and poetry from the perspective of amateurism, which I define as a critical
consumption as an ideal relationship to the market and to the institution we call ‘literature’ (which I
value. Saer’s non-
conmmunication poetic is a
understand as an exclusionary, patriarchal canon). To begin with, I
‘military, parodic and a examine two concepts to rethink the dissolution of art into life within
priori failed response the present context: avant-gardism and post-autonomy.
[against the mass culture as
degeneration of art and the
According to Argentinean writer and critic Ricardo Piglia, in his study
loss of any artistic quality of Argentinean literature within the context of world literature, there are
through standardisation and three main trends within avant-gardism.1 The first historical avant-garde,
mass circulation], but one
that makes of that beginning in the nineteenth century and practiced by European writers
confrontation the banner of a such as Arthur Rimbaud or Charles Baudelaire, can be described as the
poetics that presents the radical negation of the mores of society and the rules of art that came
artist as an exile from
reality’, Piglia, Las Tres before. For them, art is a barricade, a site of resistance in which cultural
Vanguardias, op cit, p 15. producers hurl ‘bombs’ against bourgeois society.2

© 2020 Third Text

 3

This poetics of Hermeticism, A second form of avant-gardism thinks of politicisation as the refunc-
of destruction of common
sense, provides a utopic and
tionalisation (or functional transformation) of the means of production;
anti-real space of resistance this is related to what Walter Benjamin analysed in the now classic text
against generalised anti- ‘The Author as Producer’ (1934). In this text, Benjamin calls for a mate-
artistic aesthetics and
methodology of mass
rialist critique, one that would be able to delve into the study of artistic
consumption, and also productive technique as a form of immediate social and political analysis
against the logics of of works of art. Benjamin posits the question of how to approach the
commodification-
consumption that govern the revolutionary potentials of art, and also of how to produce, through
art market today. this analysis, a revolutionary (anti)aesthetic theory: an avant-gardist, pol-
itical theory of the avant-garde and a political criticism of literature. He
states: ‘instead of asking: what is the relationship of a work of art to the
relationships of production of the time? Is it in accord with them; is it
reactionary or does it strive to overthrow them; is it revolutionary?’ In
place of this question – or before asking this question – I would like
to propose another: how does a literary work stand in relation to the
production of a period? This question aims directly at a work’s literary
technique. Based on this idea, he concludes that ‘the place of the intellec-
tual in the class struggle can only be determined, or better, chosen, on the
basis of his position in the process of production’. In order to formulate
this critical relationship with the productive technique, one that would
liberate the means of production, Benjamin takes Brecht’s notion of
‘functional transformation’ of the forms and instruments of production
from an anti-capitalist perspective as the demand for intellectuals and
artists: ‘do not supply the production apparatus without, at the same
time, with the limits of possible, changing that apparatus in the direction
of socialism’.3
In Argentinean literature this second form of avant-gardism was prac-
ticed by writer and journalist Rodolfo Walsh, who reorganised literary
genres as forms of political intervention and one of the founding
members of Prensa Latina (the first Latin American anti-capitalist news
3 Walter Benjamin, ‘The agency), and later on, as I will argue, by the publishing co-operative
Author as Producer’ [1934],
in Understanding Brecht,
Eloísa Cartonera, which, as a result of the transformation of the pro-
Verso, London, 1998, p 93 ductive technique in an amateur sense, made space for revolutionary
4 Some of his best-known queer feminist poetics.
novels include Betrayed by A third kind of avant-gardism relates to the critical occupation of the
Rita Hayworth (1968), culture industry and to the reassessment of the popular feminine sensibil-
Heartbreak Tango (1969),
and The Kiss of the Spider ity, as camp writer Manuel Puig did in his extremely popular novels.4 This
Woman (1976), which was trend relates to the critical incorporation of the queer feminised subculture
transformed into a theatre and its inscription in ‘high’ literature; I consider this a founding moment in
play and also an Academy
Award-winning film directed the tradition of the lenguas de locas (tongues of madwomen), the focus of
by Hector Babenco. Until this article.
recently, Piglia states, Puig
was the only Argentinean
Another enlightening concept, developed by Argentinean literary critic
writer who could make a Josefina Ludmer in her article ‘After Literature’, is post-autonomy, the
living from his book sales, idea that contemporary writing exists outside of the category of literature
yet at the same time he never
capitulated to the anti-
or the self-contained aesthetic sphere. Here she states:
artistic mechanisms of the
market. He successfully
brought minor, queer, Post-autonomous literatures, these territorial literary practices of the
feminised tongues into avant- quotidian, are based on two (self-evident) postulates about the world
garde procedures and then today. The first is that all that is cultural and literary is economic, and all
back to the big markets.
Puig’s avant-gardism is a
that is economic is cultural and literary. And the second postulate of
fusion between experimental these writings would be that reality (which is constituted by its changing
art and mass culture. media) is fiction and fiction is reality… These diasporic writings not
4

only cross the frontier of literature but also that of fiction, and remain
inside–outside in both frontiers. This occurs because they reformulate the
category of reality: it is not possible to read them as mere ‘realism’ in
either referential or verisimilar terms. They take the form of testimony,
autobiography, journalistic reporting, personal diaries, up to ethnography
(many times with a ‘literary genre’ interjected in their interior: the police
novel or science fiction, for example). They leave literature and enter
‘reality’ and the everyday, the reality of the everyday – the everyday
being TV and the media, blogs, email, internet, etc. They fabricate
present with daily life and that is one of their politics.5

Post-autonomy explains a specific contemporary relation between lit-

erature and society in terms of the transformation of reading and
writing practices in the digital age. The autobiographic genres that
emerged online blurred the borders of literature and contaminated it
with the real, with life itself. This fusion of art and life does not
depend on artists’ decisions, as was the case with the canonical avant-
gardes (as interpreted by Piglia), but is rather a technical, structural con-
dition of these forms of writing and their circulation on the internet.
Post-autonomy then refers to the impact of the digital mode of pro-
duction on writing and on the simultaneous reshaping of the production
of subjectivity and identity.
In my book Desbunde y felicidad: de la cartonera a Perlongher, I inves-
tigated the literary productions of the political, economic and institutional
crisis in Argentina around 2001. I observed that many of the projects run
by young writers and artists (mainly in the publishing house/art gallery/
convenience store Belleza y Felicidad and the publishing house Eloísa Car-
tonera, both based in Buenos Aires), escaped from what was traditionally
considered ‘strictly literary’.6 These writing and publishing experiences
were at the same time more and less than literature. They were more
than literature in the sense that they linked themselves to other social prac-
tices as a form of political intervention, and they were also less than litera-
ture, because literature was, until that moment, a space dominated by
male perspectives with little to no space for the production of women,
queer and other non-binary people. Since the big names that shaped the
national literary canon in Argentina have always been masculine (not to
say macho), feminised voices and perspectives have been considered
minor and outsiders to the hall of fame of Argentinean and Latin Ameri-
can literature.
The 2001 economic crisis made clear that a radical act could not be cir-
5 Josefina Ludmer, ‘Las cumscribed to the literary sphere (especially since we had the sensation
literaturas posaotónomas’ that all the spheres were collapsing). The crisis of political representation
[2008], (‘After Literature’),
see https://www.mitosmag.
also affected other discursive practices, questioning the very existence of a
com/infideles/2018/9/26/ literary sphere and redefining the political conflicts in which these prac-
postautonomous-literatures tices sought to intervene. Since the concept and practice of representation
6 Cecilia Palmeiro, Desbunde was at stake, it can be argued that the crisis was not only economic, but
y felicidad: De la cartonera a also catalysed a crisis of the unconscious, aiming to question and trans-
Perlongher, Título, Buenos
Aires, 2011; part of this
form normative subjectivity, the fuel of capitalism. I claim that this
research is available crisis of capitalistic subjectivity produced the conditions for a process of
translated into English here: ‘becoming different’ as a collective process of desire. This development
https://issuu.com/nyu_
esferas/docs/esferas_issue_ can be traced in literature, which also provided linguistic materials as
four_spring_2015_red/138. weapons for this subjective revolution that started with queer politics
 5

around 2001 and now explodes on the feminist tide that emanates from
the global South.

Poesia Marginal
In my early research, I established the connections between this writing
revolution in Argentina and the flourishing of local queer activism in the
aftermath of the importation of queer theory from the US. This was par-
ticularly evident as it was translated and interpreted through the lens of the
political and aesthetical practices of resistance in Latin America within the
authoritarian contexts of the military dictatorships of the 1970s and
1980s. These new conditions of writing and new networks of distribution
in Argentina were predicated on a historical precedent: Brazil in the 1970s.
In order to produce a radically different literature, the young Argentinean
writers of 2001 rescued a virtually unknown experience of literarisation of
life from the recent past in Brazil: the movement called Poesia marginal
(marginal poetry), which was a trend developed by young artists during
the last military dictatorship as a form of resistance against the regime,
against censorship, and against bourgeois morals – as well as against
the conservative character of high literature and the culture industry.
Writers Fernanda Laguna and Cecilia Pavón, the founders of Belleza y
Felicidad, discovered this literature accidentally on a holiday trip to Bahia,
northeast Brazil. There they encountered the lojas de cordel, tiny shops in
which little booklets are sold together hung from a rope with other inex-
pensive objects of popular culture. This form of ‘minor’ popular literature
inspired one of the most interesting movements in Brazilian countercul-
tural tradition. Poesia marginal can hardly be defined as a unified, solid
movement, but is instead a form of production and circulation alternative
to the mainstream culture industry. The most salient characteristic of this
experiment is the continuity between the roles practiced by these writers
all at once: they live alternative lifestyles, write about their experiences,
self-publish these writings, and – circumventing the publishing and mar-
keting trades altogether – sell their texts directly to the public. This is a lit-
erature centred in the mutation of subjectivity through the intensive use of
drugs and psychedelic perceptions, anti-capitalist forms of life and non-
heteronormative experiences of the body. It can be described as a micro-
political bodily subversion against a state of subjectivity dictated by the
military and by the Catholic Church and Christian family values, which
served to discipline Brazilian society and prevented social transformation.
These experiences are still relevant today in the context of President Jair
Bolsonaro’s ‘democratic’ fascism.
Because of their exclusion from the culture industry, these young Bra-
zilian poets initiated their own underground circuit of self-publishing, pro-
ducing Xerox copies sold in bars, nightclubs, street fairs and lojas de
cordel. Reaching outside of the literary sphere depended on a handcrafted
form of production, as the material making and the production technique
of the book are as important as the poetic; in fact they are part of the
poetic. Using the latest technology (at the time, Xerox) in an old-fashioned
style (traditional, handcrafted north-eastern Literatura de cordel) the mar-
ginal poets could arrange a sort of dialectical image in which the contem-
porary techniques could actualise productive forms of the past. The DIY
6

Literature de Cordel, Brazil, 2012

technology of Xerox copying liberated the texts from the publishing indus-
try and from censorship, to encourage alternative forms of subjectivity
through countercultural writing.
Such self-published texts implied both a rejection of the literary tra-
dition and an assertion of the immediacy between living, writing, distri-
buting and reading. These poets, such as Glauco Mattoso, Leila
Míccolis, Chacal, Sebastião Nunes and Ana Cristina César, to name a
few who became well-known as mature writers, also understood literature
as a transformative activity. Living life as a work of art, as a way to alter
subjectivity and politics, was contagious; poetry was the medium for this
contamination. From this viewpoint, art is subordinated to life, it is at the
service of life: one reads and writes in order to become different, to bring
the ‘elsewhere’ home.
Poesia marginal was a literary rebellion within the context of a wider
micro-political revolution which marked the origin of a politics of desire in
Brazil: the boom of alternative political organisations such as feminist,
LGBT, indigenous, African-Brazilian, hippie and ecological movements
that flourished in the 1970s, when the grammar of social struggles
shifted from class conflict to the intersection of many issues around
power, identity-formation and subjectivity. Poesia marginal also rejected
 7

the idea of the book as a luxury commodity, which is how they often func-
tion in an uneven society with a very high rate of illiteracy. Amateur DIY
production allowed for the possibility for writing to exist outside of this
luxury market, and it spread the possibility of a different life in the
context of suffocating repression and censorship by a twenty-one-year
military dictatorship.
This molecular revolution would have been virtually unknown in
Argentina and the rest of Latin America if not for the poet, activist and
anthropologist Néstor Perlongher, the ‘aunt’ of the LGBT movement in
Latin America (as he used to call himself). From 1978, he smuggled
ideas and texts across both sides of the border.7 Living in Brazil as a
‘sexual’ exile from 1981 until his death in 1992, Perlongher was capti-
vated by the movement also called desbunde (debauchery) and the litera-
ture that fostered and expressed it, bringing it back to Argentina with the
idea of connecting Latin American neo-baroque literature to a countercul-
tural canon. (In fact, two of the Brazilian writers mentioned above,
Mattoso and Míccolis, were very good friends of Perlongher’s and foun-
ders of the SOMOS LGBT group.) In my previous research, I have
termed this literature ‘queer-trash antiaesthetics’, but now I call it
lenguas de locas; it is a concept that rejects the idea of autonomous litera-
ture (and of literature itself) and also moves beyond understanding queer-
ness as a specific historical formation. In Latin-American Spanish, the term
locas (madwomen) is also used for gay men and women, transgender, non-
binary and other non-heteronormative, non-cisgender groups and those
outside of mainstream culture.
Perlongher, one of the founders of the Frente de Liberación Homosex-
ual (Homosexual Liberation Front) in Argentina, was one of the theorists
of a politics of locas, which suggested a utopic communion between all of
us locas without a normative fixed identity, an alliance between feminists
and queers, and a strong Latin American background of poverty, femini-
sation and playfulness. In collective documents such as ‘Homosexualidad
masculina y machismo’ (Male homosexuality and machismo), the Homo-
sexual Liberation Front produced a political theorisation of the specifi-
cally Latin American character of the effeminate gay, marica o loca, as
a critical figure that challenged the order of identity as established later
by the Anglo-Saxon gay identity model. The loca was androgynous and
presented her/their/its subversive femininity as a challenge against patriar-
chal binary role models.
Later Perlongher would analyse the social character of the loca in terms
of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of ‘becoming woman’ as a key to politi-
7 My postdoctoral research cal minoritarian action and this applies also to the tongues of the locas as a
project was a study of
Perlongher’s conceptual
category that overcomes the binary division of identities. In their founda-
smuggling network from tional A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari state that:
Brazil. As a result, I
published a critical edition of
Perlongher’s personal we must distinguish between: the majoritarian as a constant and homo-
correspondence; Cecilia
geneous system; minorities as subsystems; and the minoritarian as a poten-
Palmeiro, ed, Néstor
Perlongher, tial, creative and created, becoming. The problem is never to acquire the
Correspondencia, Mansalva, majority, even in order to install a new constant. There is no becoming-
Buenos Aires, 2016. This majoritarian; majority is never becoming. All becoming is minoritarian.
archive is a map of the poetic Women, regardless of their numbers, are a minority, definable as a state
and political debates of
dictatorships and democratic or subset; but they create only by making possible a becoming over
transitions in Latin America. which they do not have ownership, into which they themselves must
8

enter; this is a becoming-woman affecting all of humankind, men and

women both.8

The concept of loca, as a theoretical tool, is both an antidote against

identity but also against political rigidness. It stays in the margins and
from that underprivileged position the locas shout, scream and laugh
against patriarchy. In political terms, locas are the Mothers of Plaza de
Mayo (founders of the human rights movement in Argentina, who were
called the madwomen of the Plaza), the LGBT activists, and of course
the feminists (not to mention the witches).
The unsubordinated languages of the locas are normally excluded from
literature and the public sphere, but in the voices of the locas, the political
meets the literary as a radical formula for creative subversion. This is why
the tongues of the locas are above and beneath literature, and they are
immediately connected with an emancipatory micro-politics, as in Perlon-
gher’s poetry, in which he exercised the delirious baroqueness of a ple-
beian ‘faggot’, as he put it, in the search for a radical political language,
from poetry to the streets and vice-versa. One great example of this
loca’s poetics is the poem ‘Hay Cadaveres’, from 1981, a jewel of the
neo-Baroque camp that at the same time became the best-known poem
about the disappeared by the last military dictatorship in Argentina,
without ever mentioning the key word, desaparecido. In the remainder
of this article, I will try to demonstrate a vibrant, discontinuous genealogy
of various voices of the locas as a political and aesthetic avant-garde in
terms of contemporary human rights struggles.

Belleza y Felicidad
Despite Perlongher’s efforts, the locas coming from Brazil were not
included in traditional book publishing circuits. This is why the
voices of the locas, present in marginal poetry, had to wait until the
technological transformation of writing to reappear, this time with the
internet and its new autobiographical genres in which subjectivity
became politicised again – this time under the paradigm of queerness
– fostering a new wave of politics of desire out of a digital poetic revo-
lution. In 1999 Fernanda Laguna and Cecilia Pavón founded Belleza y
Felicidad as a bookstore, publishing house and an art gallery inspired
both by the lojas de cordel they had discovered in Bahia, and the heri-
tage of the locas enlightened by the queer activism that exploded at that
time. In the light of the new communication technologies, which ‘demo-
cratised’ production and circulation of texts, they opted to use an obso-
lescent technique, Xerox copies, to make a sort of deliberate
anachronism in which emerging ideas (the flexible subjectivities of the
digital age) meet the old technology of cheap copies. The books by
Belleza y Felicidad featured progressive contemporary literature
8 Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari, A Thousand through the lens of a vintage technique, and this melding of high/low
Plateaus: Capitalism and and multiple temporalities functioned as a metaphor for the conjunction
Schizophrenia, trans Brian of neoliberal poverty and amateur writing.
Massumi, Continuum,
London and New York, Belleza y Felicidad translated the model of marginal poetry to the
1987, p 117 Argentinean context of neoliberal decay in which a devastated book
 9

industry had no space for anything that would challenge the conservative
market. Because publishers could not afford to publish risky or exper-
imental books that might fail to sell, they only wanted books that
would appeal to broad audiences or would fit into the acclaimed category
of ‘high’ literature. As a result, very low-cost self-publishing appeared to
offer an alternative to the hegemonic dictates of globalised, ‘free’
markets. The books edited by Belleza are quite simple, made of A4
paper and Xerox copied; they cost five US dollars. They can be as long
as the writer wants, including books that consist of only a single page.
One poem can be one book. Within the highly compressed timeline
afforded by the craft mode of production of marginal poetry, one can
live, write, publish and sell on the same day. By erasing the normal
delays inherent in book publishing, writers are able to reach their
readers much more immediately.
The objective of this literature is to live life as a work of art. The focus
of this artistic project is not on the final work of art, but rather on the in-
between and the process; whatever happens between the reader and the
book is especially emphasised. This is the transformative aspect of this
poetics of the locas, the literary effect as a mutation of subjectivity for
both writer and reader. It is important to note that this poetics of locas
developed as a consequence of the technique of production: for Belleza,
cheap is beautiful. This literature is not a luxury.
Writing was thus emancipated from the burden of success: when
producing such small, cheap books there is no risk of failure or
success in terms of the market. This mode of production can be liber-
ating: writing stops being a privilege of educated minds, or of those
who are professional, ‘good’ writers. Anyone can write and publish,
regardless of the value, of the quality, or the commercial aspect of
their texts. The inexpensive, craft-based character of the plaquettes
also allowed them to extend beyond the traditional circuits of book-
stores and literary readers, to be accessible to other audiences. Belleza’s
books were sold at parties, political events and music concerts (often
seen as the privileged locus of the emancipatory experiences promoted
by this literature), as well as at the store Belleza y Felicidad, in which
literature and art met other social practices like partying, political acti-
vism and spirituality.
Laguna and Pavón were trying to make space for themselves as young
female artists and writers who were rejected by mainstream publishers
who considered them girly, stupid, or shallow.9 But as an unexpected
effect of this misogyny, Laguna and Pavón turned away from official chan-
nels and thereby opened up space for the locas to publish and exhibit their
work. In the 2000s, Belleza became a sort of queer-feminist mecca. In
2007, though it was internationally recognised and renowned, Belleza
was not making enough money to pay for its escalating rent. Laguna
9 On the back cover of
(Pavón had left the project earlier) closed the art gallery; now Belleza con-
Laguna’s poetry anthology, tinues to operate both as an art workshop in Villa Fiorito, a slum on the
Control o no control: outskirts of Buenos Aires, and as a nomadic publishing house that is so
poemas 1999–2011 [2012],
Mansalva, Buenos Aires, low-maintenance that it does not even need a commercial premises.
2014, poet and critic Neither does it need to sell a single copy in order to continue to survive:
Alejandro Rubio wonders if because there is no copyright, no profit and sometimes no authorship
Laguna is or pretends to be
an idiot; ‘Fernanda Laguna (some of the books are anonymous, and many are signed by mock pseu-
es o se hace la boluda?’ donyms), anyone is able to Xerox the books and sell them.
10

Window of Belleza y Felicidad, Buenos Aires, 2007, photo: courtesy Fernanda Laguna

Belleza’s marginal position in the market was central in debates

about literature and art, providing a key platform for launching new,
young, locas writers that could develop their poetics through this exper-
imental, experiential form of publishing. It is worth noting that the mol-
ecular revolution of 2001 created a counter-power that eventually
reached macro-politics and these social experiments of queer politics
informed progressive state policies such as the Law of Equal Marriage
(2010) and the Gender Identity Law (2012) in Argentina, promoted
by the first female president to be re-elected, Cristina Fernández de
Kirchner (2007–2015) (who was also called a loca by her political
opponents, just as Eva Perón and the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo had
been before).

Eloísa Cartonera
In 2003, still feeling the transformative effects of the crisis, this amateur
publishing revolution in Argentina took another turn. Fernanda
Laguna, together with writer Washington Cucurto and visual artist
Javier Barilaro, founded another anti-capitalist enterprise: the publishing
house Eloísa Cartonera. Following Belleza’s recipe of the non-commercial
 11

Newsstand/book store Eloísa Cartonera, Buenos Aires, 2014, photo: courtesy Eloísa Cartonera

production of cheap books, Eloísa Cartonera involved activities bordering

on the illegal.
The original project was named ‘Eloísa’ and the books were printed on
coloured papers using the materials and machines of a public library
where Cucurto had previously worked as a part-time cultural producer.
Cucurto employed his working-class background combined with his
10 On this emergence, see deep knowledge of Latin American neo-Baroque literature to create a
Djurdja Trajkovic, Made in poetics of the locas that was shaped by poverty, the voices of Latin Amer-
Buenos Aires: Eloísa
Cartonera and Literary ican migrants and the aesthetics of cumbia, a very popular tropical music
Production in the Post– of Colombian origin. Taking this aesthetics further, Eloísa started
2001 Crisis in Argentina,
doctoral thesis, University
working with cartoneros (cardboard recyclers), who came to play a signifi-
of Wisconsin-Madison, cant social role after 2001. After the crisis, which implicated a devaluation
Wisconsin, 2011, and the of approximately seventy percent of the local currency, the publishing
collective anthology of
cartoneras publishers,
industry collapsed due to the prices of ink and paper remaining at the
Akademia Cartonera: A international rate of the US dollar rate, while the general purchasing
Primer of Latin American power dropped dramatically; books became unaffordable and many pub-
Cartoneras Publishers, by
researchers at the
lishing houses and bookstores had to close.10
University of Wisconsin- Eloísa started making super cheap books out of cardboard recycled by
Madison, 2009: http:// cartoneros, from whom they bought scavenged cardboard at five times its
digicoll.library.wisc.edu/
cgi-bin/Arts/Arts-idx?id= market price. The price of books had originally been set at one dollar and
Arts.AkadCartEng. they were hand-made by cartoneros, who also learned to paint the covers
12

inspired by cumbia records, according to an original design by Javier Bar-

ilaro that was then re-created and re-versioned on each cover. Every book
is a unique and original work of amateur art, but they are not recognised
as art by the market. Amateurism here is consonant with both ‘low’ aes-
thetics and the realities of poverty, embracing not only ‘poor’ materials
such as trash and scraps of discarded cardboard, but also the poverty of
the subjects who make them. Such an embrace of amateurism emphasises
the precarious nature of these books, that lack a spine detailing title and
author name, and that resist bookshelves and the physical order of
libraries, instead celebrating the cheap nature of these objects.
The mottos of Eloísa Cartonera are: ‘la editorial más colorinche del
mundo’ (the world’s most colourful publishers), and ‘nueva narrativa y
poesía sudaca border’ (new ‘spic’ border narrative and poetry). Eloísa
took the idea of Belleza to a new level: it extended the tongues of the
locas from Argentina and Brazil to Latin America more widely. By focus-
ing on the process of production, it spread over the continent first and then
globally, transforming the world’s literary landscape to the point that now
there are more than 200 cartonera publishing houses around the world.11
Eloísa Cartonera’s emphasis on cheap materials and the Latin-Ameri-
canisation of aesthetics broadened the notion of a counter-cultural Latin
American canon (until then, Argentinean culture was very Eurocentric).
Materially, every aspect of the books reflects an attention to the scrappy
necessities of poverty and re-use: the raw cardboard, showing its origin
with the logos of the factories and brands of supermarket products,
hand-painted in flashy colours, sheds light on its hand-made mode of pro-
duction, as opposed to ordinary commodities that hide their process of
production as alienated labour.
Eloísa Cartonera, as well as many other cartoneras publishers, has
edited and translated more Latin American locas writers than any other
traditional publishing house in the continent and recycled the classics of
the marginal poetry, Belleza y Felicidad, and Perlongher’s most radical
11 Because of the amateur, texts. The catalogue has now grown to more than 200 books that
DIY, independent nature of include young new and generally unknown experimental locas writers
these publishing projects, it
is difficult to establish an that would never have had an opportunity in the regular market, together
accurate map of the with famous authors who have donated their works to support and lend
cartoneras around the prestige to the project, such as Ricardo Piglia, Rodolfo Fogwill or César
world, but researchers at
the University of Wisconsin Aira. For Eloísa and the cartoneras around the world, as well as for
have produced a catalogue, Belleza, there is no copyright, no privatisation of the language or the lit-
see https://researchguides.
library.wisc.edu/
erary work or the translations. Piracy (with consent only in the case of
cartoneras/ living authors) is the rule, as well as self-piracy, as anybody can Xerox
cartonerapublishers. In the contents and hand-paint the cardboard cover.
November 2018 I attended
the International Cartonera
Publishing Meeting at Casa
de Povo, São Paulo (7–8 Feminist Amateurism, Feminist Avant-Gardism
November), a research
project that aims to explore
the fifteen years of Both the cartoneras and Belleza became the perfect space for the poetic devel-
international cartonera opment of the tongues of the locas as a form of immediate political interven-
practices in terms of new
forms of cultural activism, tion of life and as a functional transformation of the forms and instruments of
social change and production in an anti-capitalist, communitarian sense. Both projects are a
horizontal artistic space to rehearse and articulate the expression of the bodily subversions of
networks. See http://
cartonerapublishing.com/ desire, to shape those subversions and at the same time to create new
about-the-project/. poetics. The poetic formation of new political languages that are able to
 13

connect bodily desire with political discourse is fundamental for a micro-pol-

itical revolution. The traditional macho macro-political language is unable to
connect with the forces of collective desire, as it is repetitive, bureaucratised
and reified, deprived of passion and isolated from the impulses of social trans-
formation that we experience at the level of the body. ‘Live to write and write
to live more and more intensely, to become different’, these poetics seem to
say; they do not demand that one write to make a living, as life can never
be expanded within the frames of the markets.
These cheaply made and cheaply circulated forms of writing imply the
negation of private property; they emancipate language from commodifi-
cation and transform these writings into a barricade for political struggles.
This can only happen when it does not matter who is speaking, because
the book is available at a nominal cost or for free. Writing as an act of
freedom that challenges the rules of the market is an act of sovereignty
but also transgression, and the idea of transgression takes us to the very
core of avant-garde literature as it has been defined since modernity. But
in the tongues of the locas the trespassing is double: they trespass the
rules of literature itself and of the market that defines literature.
To liberate language, to steal and to plagiarise, to connect with other
social practices, to radicalise language in its collective aspect: this new litera-
ture is a laboratory for political struggles. The tongues of the locas, formed
in minor genres such as jokes, gossip, insults, slander and scandal are
charged with rebellious corporality. Two examples of this poetics are the
first books published by Eloisa. One is the first book edition of Perlongher’s
maudit text Evita Vive (Evita Lives, 1974–1975) – a polemic short story
that is a scandalous proliferation of the political slogan ‘Evita Lives’ after
Eva Perón’s death, about her afterlife in marginal queer territories.
Another is Cucurto’s nouvelle Fer: una fábula encendida y atolandrada
(2003), a homage to Fernanda Laguna as a mock political leader of the
popular revolts of December 2001 in Argentina, published anonymously,
with no author or signature. The third book was Fernanda Laguna’s
novella Durazno Reverdeciente (Evergreen Peach, 2003), her future auto-
biography as a loca, under the nom de plume Dalia Rosetti, that reads
like a manifesto of the new literature to come. In all of these examples,
writing appears as a laboratory for radical political languages, as they
informed the queer revolution after 2001. After their poetic training in
this ‘minor literature’, thanks to the possibility of writing and publishing,
the tongues of the locas get radicalised and function as speakers and ampli-
fiers to the impulses of social transformation that agitated the collective
body. Each of these books called for others and offered sources of inspi-
ration for political movements, such as the Queer Area and our struggles
for democratisation of public space and equal rights.
This permeability between politics and literature, the immediacy
between life and art allowed by the amateur experimental character of
this publishing experience, informed the origin of the fourth wave of fem-
inism as a new political language, a new code of subversion that became
viral thanks to the reading and writing practices allowed by digital
social networks. The massification of these poetics of the locas turned
into political claims, appropriated by new political subjects and collec-
tives, opened the possibility for fresh forms of political interventions
and experimental horizontal organisation that we can call amateur as
opposed to traditional hierarchical formations.
14

Significantly, the poetics of the locas that were allowed space for the
first time in literature in the publishing projects of Belleza y Felicidad
and Eloísa Cartonera are also one of the antecedents of the most contem-
porary feminist movement born in Argentina in 2015: Ni Una Menos (Not
One [Woman] Less). This movement began as a poetic-political exper-
iment, when a group of women writers and journalists decided to
devote our professional skills to contest machista violence by creating a
collective shout to articulate feminist claims. In March 2015, our group
called for a poetic marathon, revisiting the Argentine tradition from the
perspective of femicide to provide inspiration and mobilise the collective
sensitivity. Even the name of the collective comes from a Mexican loca’s
tongue: it is a reformulation of a poem by Susana Chavez Castillo, one
of the first activists to denounce femicides in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico,
who was herself a victim of femicide in 2011.12 Ni Una Menos works
as a collective shout, a hashtag, a political slogan, as a war cry and as a
password for sorority: it is a proper tongue of the locas that connects
poetry, digital languages and street action. In our poetic and political
language, we are heirs to the locas that came before: Perlongher, the
LGBT movement and the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo.
Fernanda Laguna, a founder of both Belleza and Eloísa, is one promi-
nent figure in this collective that strategically combines an expressive
bodily language (created and transmitted through poetry) with a critical,
12 Chavez’s poem states: ‘Ni anti-capitalist use of communication technology and street action. This
una víctima más, ni una movement signified the massification of concepts and claims of feminism,
mujer menos’ (Not one
victim more, not one
through the mobilisation of hundreds of thousands, and even millions of
woman less), and from bodies.13 It helped create the conditions for the global feminist tide, the
there, as a contraction, our collective political subject that women, lesbians and trans people through-
collective was named Ni
Una Menos.
out the world are articulating in actions such as the Paro Internacional de
Mujeres (International Women’s Strike) of 2017, 2018 and 2019.14
13 On the most massive
feminist demonstrations of
Ni Una Menos can be described as the ultimate development of the
millions, see my article on tongues of the locas. It sought to radicalise the bodily poetics of collective
the abortion struggle: intelligence, emancipating language from individual authorship through
https://medium.com/@j_
lacs/the-latin-american-
the politics of friendship and the trans-individual aspect of creativity,
green-tide-desire-and- which foster the mechanisms of construction of unprecedented alliances
feminist-transversality- and new forms of community. Our first collective book, Amistad política
56e4b85856b2
+ inteligencia colectiva: documentos y manifiestos 2015–2018 (Political
14 On the concept of the Friendship + Collective Intelligence: Documents and Manifestoes 2015–
International Feminist
Strike 2018, see my blog 2018) was edited by ourselves and printed in a co-operative printing
post at Verso, 7 March house, Imprenta del Pueblo, with no publishing house; it is an example
2018, https://www. of the ‘amateurism’ that this new activism features as an alternative form
versobooks.com/blogs/
3670-the-strike-as-our- of politicisation and organisation, as we refuse to follow the recipes of ‘pro-
revolutionary-time, and my fessional’ politicians. Amateurism here means: no authorship, nor privatisa-
interview with Claire
Branigan, ‘Women Strike in
tion, no commodification (the book is available from our website as a PDF
Latin America and Beyond’, at no cost), and the collectivisation of intellectual and spiritual labour.15
NACLA, 8 March 2018, Ni Una Menos, through a critical amplification of the tongue of the
https://nacla.org/news/
2018/03/08/women-strike-
locas, became a global tide of insurrection. We aim to defamiliarise patri-
latin-america-and-beyond. archy, and this is the cornerstone of our molecular, sensible revolution,
15 See Ni Una Menos, one that is expressed but also shaped by new, collective, anonymous
Biblioteca at http:// forms of hybrid artistic activisms that emerged with the first Ni Una
niunamenos.org.ar/ Menos rally on 3 June 2015 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This is a form
herramientas/biblioteca/
amistad-politica- of aesthetic creation that crosses the boundaries of art as an institution,
inteligencia-colectiva/ in which the works (music, painting, sculpture, writing, performance)
 15

Hambre de paro (Hunger for strike), banner, International Feminist Strike, 8 March 2018, Buenos Aires, 2018, the strike
appears as an urge and need of the body, the world in our mouth as a piercing, photo: courtesy Fernanda Laguna

are no longer commodities; in which there is no individual responsibility

16 ‘Mareadas en la marea’ was nor property, in which works have a use value rather than a market
featured for the first time at value. I call this sensible reconfiguration of the world a feminist avant-
the Nora Fisch garde; it meets all the goals of the historic avant-garde trends I mentioned
Contemporary Art Gallery
in Buenos Aires 5 May – 1 at the beginning of this essay as they are analysed by Piglia: the creation of
July 2017. It was exhibited a counter-society that works against the grain of patriarchal capitalism,
at the Universidad Nacional the refunctionalisation of the means of production in a feminist-socialist
de General Sarmiento 28
March – May 2018, on the way, the massification and fusion of avant-gardism with the languages
outskirts of Buenos Aires. It of mass media and social networks, and an inherent move of aesthetic
was exhibited as ‘High on
the Tide’ in London, at
practices out of the aesthetic sphere (post-autonomy). In this tide of collec-
Campoli Presti Gallery 27 tive creativity, ‘works’ are not produced by professional artists but by
June – 15 September 2018, spontaneous activists that became ‘amateur’ artists working for the revo-
and part of the archive
featured at the wider
lution to shape our claims to the utopic images of our desire.
exhibit ‘Still I Rise: The enormous quantity and novelty of the works created by the Ni Una
Feminisms, Gender, Menos collective as well as by anonymous groups and spontaneous collec-
Resistance, Act 1’ at
Nottingham
tives has inspired the creation of the live archive and exhibition ‘Mareadas
Contemporary, 27 October en la marea: diario íntimo de una revoluciόn feminista’ (‘High on the Tide:
2018–27 January 2019, Diary of a Feminist Revolution’, May 2017), curated by Laguna and
and Act 2 at De La Warr
Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, 9 myself.16 This experiment of collective creation and the socialisation of
February – 2 June 2019, see the means of production begins with creative writing (poetry, but also
16

High on the Tide: Diary of a Feminist Revolution, poster of the London exhibition, 2018, photo: courtesy Cecilia Palmeiro
 17

https://www. manifestos that are fundamental for this movement) and traverses differ-
nottinghamcontemporary. ent genres and fields (painting, music, photography, film, performance),
org/whats-on/still-i-rise/.
For images and texts see
expressing the creative strength of the global feminist tide.
https://www.campolipresti. Two examples of this wave of creativity, encouraged by Laguna and
com/exhibitions/high-on- myself, are the intimate-collective call for action #Orgasmatón and the
the-tide.
sound tracks ‘ReggaeVogue’ and ‘Marea feminista’ (Feminist Tide), all
17 See the first video, https:// intended to promote and shape the first International Women’s Strike
www.facebook.com/
NUMArgentina/videos/
and the Second International Feminist Strike on 8 March 2018. Orgasma-
orgasmaton/ tón was a call for the production of female and trans orgasms at midnight
780472202143964/, the on 8 March to create an orgasmic wave that would prepare the collective
second stage at https://
www.youtube.com/watch?
body and energy for the Strike. The organisation of the action took three
v=NXSF2XXBrZ4, and the steps/calls on social networks combining poetry, video and magic. The
third at https://www. idea is that women and trans of the world would arrange a creative
youtube.com/watch?v=
YBtXaM67h_g. Regarding
form of reaching (or at least trying to reach) an orgasm and post #Orgas-
the soundtrack, for the first matón in their networks to make it viral.17
International Women’s Defamiliarisation is the main critical effect of art as it aims to alter our
Strike Laguna and myself,
together with DJ friends, perception of reality. This concept was explored by most theorists of the
produced the track avant-garde, starting with Viktor Shklovsky.18 For us, defamiliarisation
‘ReggaeVogue’ by sampling applies to everyday machista violence and exploitation, and causes us to
Madonna’s introduction to
‘Vogue’, with a reggae perceive with critical distance what we used to accept as ‘natural’. A fem-
backing track, and wrote inist avant-garde is one of living life as a work of art, of designing the life
lyrics on what it means to we desire. This is why I propose to approach this new feminist experiment
strike and who strikes, see
https://www.youtube.com/ as both a political and an aesthetic avant-garde; the avant-garde is not
watch?v=zBOCAJab2VU. only the front line of an army – the line that is ahead of the existent
The following year, Laguna
and myself, together with
state of affairs – but it is also the space in which it is possible to create a
DJ Chetas, took a more counter-society. Amateur DIY writing and poetry – as opposed to
‘professional’ approach in professional, commodified literature – opened the possibility of a new fem-
our amateurism: we took a
very famous cumbia song,
inist avant-garde as a twist in post-autonomous art: a new anti-capitalist,
reappropriated it and collective art that is at the core of the feminist revolution. These amateur
changed the lyrics. Natalia feminist projects are part of a new tide, one that challenges the language of
Oreiro, a very famous
Uruguaian singer and
criticism and the hierarchies of the academy, and the tide calls for new
actress, interpreted and theoretical concepts in order to do justice to the non-patriarchal epistem-
produced the track, which ology of locas.
went viral in the media and
became the official song of
the strike in Spanish-
speaking countries. See
NUM Como Marea,
https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=8WKCgnTjD64.

18 In his foundational article

‘Art as Technique’ [1917],
Viktor Shklovsky defines
ostranenie or de-
familiarisation as an artistic
effect that de-automatises
perception; see Shklovsky,
Theory of Prose [1925],
Benjamin Sher, trans,
Dalkey Archive Press,
London, 1998, p 4.