‘They call me the father of the gay movement in Argentina but everyone knows that I’m the auntie’, Perlongher wrote in a letter to the founders of feminism in Argentina (Correspondence, ’73). This quote shows both his style and his commitment to the ethics, aesthetics and politics of dissidence and difference, elements that characterize not only his body of work but also his intellectual life, which changed the course of ideas, history and political practice in Latin America and laid the groundwork for the modern feminist movement as well as for a radical new conception of difference.

Néstor Perlongher (b. Buenos Aires 1949; d. São Paulo 1992), poet, essayist and activist, not only survived dictatorships, the transition to democracy, neoliberalism, the AIDS epidemic and various resistance movements, but lived life to the full, with an intensity that radiates from the baroqueness of his plebeian prose, aimed at the minoritary, and at agitating accepted ideologies which for him translated to sexist, capitalist, colonialist and patriarchal violence against dissident bodies in whom he detected a revolutionary force.

From his intellectual life surged a voice that remains one of the most relevant to modern debates on politics, poetics and social sciences in the Spanish and Portuguese languages. It is a voice that blends discursive genres, that contaminates and disrupts institutional hierarchies, that forges a new style. Lust and sensuality imbue the poetic texts, literary criticism, political documents and anthropological essays collected in this book, a work fundamental not only in Argentina and Brazil, where he spent his life, but vital to contemporary politics and revolutionary notions the world over. Because politics without poetics is bureaucracy, Perlongher’s words whisper in the rushing tide of the current feminist revolution, of which he is also the aunt (and one of our favourites). And poetics without politics is impossible, because where there is poetry there is always a politics of language and the body. It is precisely at this intersection of politics and poetics that we find the origin of queer theory in Latin America, inexorably linked to political activism. This unique articulation makes Perlongher’s work a baroque pearl in the field of critical theory, glowing with subversive style. Perhaps the central concept here is that of micropolitics, magnifying the quotidian and corporal dimensions of social transformation on a micro scale, with imagination playing a vital role in the design of what does not yet exist. Perlongher is recognized today as one of the most important voices in Spanish-language poetry, but also as a very unique brand of intellectual: activist, academic, cultural agitator, mystic. His thinking has proven central to global intellectual history as it connects to philosophy and academic knowledge, spirituality and subjectivity, desire as a revolutionary force, and everyday experience as something historical and political. These pages serve as an inspiration for the wave of feminism surging within Latin America and other parts of the world, and at the same time they provide a perspective on the sexual counterrevolution being waged by religions on a global scale. This plebeian prose offers insight into the current conservative reaction to desire politics and minoritary movements such as feminism and LGBT rights and the contradictions inherent to neoliberal appropriations of these struggles (for example lean-in feminism, identity politics and the right-wing LGBT). Perlongher’s texts give us the tools needed to understand the fascism rippling through our world and to formulate a radical critique of the new Alt-Right’s focus on identity and nationalism.

Perlongher theorizes on ecstasy, on the sacred and the profane, and on desire as a transformative force. His writing centres on the body as a battlefield and desire as a force of desubjectification, of escape from the self, and of social micropolitical transformation through the orgiastic, in his youth, and through the mysticism of Santo Daime (a syncretic Amazonian religion characterized by ritual use of ayahuasca) in his later years as he battled AIDS and the sexual counterrevolution it spurred in the 1980s and 1990s.

We may find the key to understanding this complex work at the intersection of poetry and philosophy: Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of power and becoming are the lens through which Perlongher views the political dimension of history. Sexual experience is configured in micropolitical terms, as a mutation of subjectivity, as the basis for all social transformation. Perlongher’s neo-baroque poetics lead us to the juncture where the plane of the body meets the plane of expression (the plane of desire and the plane of language), through his poetry as well as through his formulation of a political language that breaks down institutional discourse.

Perlongher was first of all an activist, and his political experience is central to understanding his work and his legacy. He was born in a suburb of Buenos Aires in 1949 to a working-class family of Italian descent with whom he had a complicated relationship. He graduated with a degree in sociology from the University of Buenos Aires, where he had his first taste of activism in a Trotskyist organization, Política Obrera [Workers Politics]. This experience didn’t last long given the leftist homophobia of the 1970s (which considered nonnormative sexuality as an imperialist capitalist perversion) and he was pushed out of the group for being an ‘effeminate fag’. In 1971, at the age of twenty-two, he and some other students founded the Eros group, an anarchist-Trotskyist collective, which formed part of the historic Frente de Liberación Homosexual de la Argentina [Argentine Gay Liberation Front]. Founded in 1971, the FLH was the first LGBT group in Latin America, and its radical proposals continue to inspire young activists across the region. Through a feminist revision of Marxist theory, the FLH viewed the sexual revolution as a necessary, unavoidable aspect of the social revolution, and decried the patriarchy as a construction that led to capitalism, not the other way around, as maintained by the left and by revolutionary Peronism. These other leftist groups believed that the patriarchy was an effect of capitalism: with the advent of a classless society, together with the end of capitalism, the patriarchy would automatically fall. However, this theory did not match the historic reality of the Cuban revolution or the USSR, where the fall of capitalism did not signify the fall of the patriarchy, proving, in the eyes of the FLH, that it was possible, although contradictory, for an economic system to move towards socialism while maintaining right-wing morality and sexist oppression. For the FLH, the sexual revolution implied destruction of the sexual division of labour that assigned specific and hierarchical functions based on gender, guaranteeing the exploitation of women and feminized bodies. Despite their differences, the FLH always tried to align itself politically with Peronism and leftist revolutionaries, without much success.

Armed organizations proliferated in a context of political violence inflicted to varying degrees by military dictatorships and authoritarian democracies. Beyond the fight for sexual and ideological liberation, the FLH diverged from the armed revolution where the concept of the body and its uses were concerned, as well as in its methodology and its relationship to the times. In the 1970s, the bodies of armed militants were tacitly expected to serve political ends: the revolution required an ethic of individual sacrifice for the good of the future. It might be useful to clarify that in those years in Argentina, on the left and the right alike, a revolution was brewing, only to be squashed by a totalizing counterrevolution, culminating in brutal state-sponsored terrorism that left a broken country and a sinister record of 30,000 persons disappeared at the hands of the last civil–military–ecclesiastic dictatorship (1976–83).

Within this context, Perlongher’s political and erotic notion of the desirous body was considered subversive since it applied revolutionary objectives to the present, not to some imagined revolutionary future. The revolution began in the subject’s very body. To the extent that the sexualization of bodies constitutes a fundamental alienation, nonheteronormative sexual practices have critical value: artistic explorations of the body offered an alternative to the territorialization (genitalization) of the body with obligatory reproductive ends. Following this notion, the Eros group launched a fierce criticism of the heteronormative family, an institution they believed should be destroyed along with capitalism to produce a new society (and avoid the calque of the heterosexual model onto the homosexual lifestyle, as occurred with marriage equality, which Perlongher criticized thirty years before we’d ever dreamed of its existence). For the Eros group and the Gay Liberation Front, freedom from the patriarchal ideology of the body and desire would come through social change. Years later, Perlongher outlined some of these early theories according to Guattari’s concept of micropolitics to create a deliberate politics of effeminateness. It’s important to note that these initial attempts to politicize pleasure and desire and to focus on difference over identity are central to the later development of queer politics in Latin America, more closely linked to activism than to the academy, producing theories through political action and not the other way around. The tide of popular feminism in Latin America today should be conceived of in this same way: the time for revolution is the present and the individual’s body is the first field of political exploration.

The figure of the ‘marica’ or ‘loca’ is fundamental to understanding the experience of homosexuality in Latin America, characterized in the 1970s by clandestine encounters and secret sexual orientations in times of intense political and moral repression. Homosexual practices in public spaces were limited, in terms of locus of action as such, to public restrooms, private parties and the urban circulation of desire in the form of casual ‘cruising’. The predominant subjects in this hidden promiscuous practice were the so-called maricas or locas (effeminate homosexual males) and the chongos (masculine male not identified as homosexual who occasionally engages in homoerotic relations). This traditional model of invisible, often promiscuous, male homosexuality in Latin America, found in every country on the continent, was quite different to the Anglo-Saxon model of gay identity, widespread in the 1980s, which would later be adopted in Latin America as a means of gaining visibility and acceptance, normalizing the gay identity in a misogynist, racist and classist way, as Perlongher noted in several of his essays. The Eros group in particular, within the FLH, proposed in the 1970s ‘an anarchist revolution of the order of desire’ and defended the figure of the flamboyant, androgynous marica, who destabilized models of masculinity and femininity, and who was defiant in face of judicial and military order, as seen in the text ‘History of the Argentinian Gay Liberation Front’.

Perlongher’s essays, throughout his career, although especially during the 1970s and early 1980s, defended the marica as a countercultural resistance to machismo, to the extent that the marica voluntarily assumes feminine attributes: becoming homosexual and becoming woman. Here we may see the intersection of philosophy, politics and eroticism at the centre of Perlongher’s intellectual life. Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of becoming provided the foundation upon which he analytically laid out the subversive nature of microfemininity as a disruptive aspect of the marica, historically conditioned by the experience of the dictatorship and within the context of a specifically Latin American sexuality. These concepts would prove fundamental to his poetry, to his anthropologic research, his life’s work, and to his political activism against identity stabilization, all of which takes the body as location of application of authority but also of subversion.

In 1976, with the intensification of repression leading up to and immediately following the civil–military–ecclesiastic coup, the FLH was forced to suspend its activities and dissolve. Perlongher himself ran into trouble with the law, not due to his political activism, but because of the police’s strict moral vigilance, which led to an illegal search of his home after a report of ‘bothersome noise’ (he was listening to Pink Floyd with another male, a minor), which turned up traces of marihuana and led to a three-month prison sentence.

In 1978 Perlongher began his relationship with Brazil as it transitioned to democracy, first visiting on holiday and later settling there in what he called ‘sexual exile’. He was unable to bear the dictatorship in Argentina which was characterized by systematic arrests, disappearances and torture inflicted by the government on disobedient bodies, and by the intense militarization of everyday life and of customs in general. Brazil at the time was at the end of its long military dictatorship (1964–85), experiencing a transition to democracy they called the ‘opening’, with amnesty offered to political prisoners and the exiled. It was a period of ‘softening’ of repression, as the government was more preoccupied with stamping out popular armed organizations than with controlling the lives of individual dissidents. Focused on the systematic destruction and annihilation of guerrillas and the revolutionary left, the dictatorship overlooked the insurgent power of alternative forms of politicization that began to proliferate in the form of identity struggles, which Perlongher called ‘minoritary becomings’: feminism, Black Power, LGBT Pride, the hippie movement, indigenous rights, counterculture youth, etc. This implied a displacement of the struggles centred on class differences to a focus on the cultural differences that produced inequalities (mainly racism and machismo, but also ageism). Among the youth, a new form of counterculture began to spread, the result of tropicalism, a field of micropolitical experimentation known as desbunde. The desbunde (from the Portuguese bunda, arse) was a kind of ethical, aesthetic and political opening up of the Brazilian youth, flashing their arses at the establishment. At the same time, it was a form of subjective resistance against not only the dictatorship, but also conservativism and hypocrisy, and the microfascisms typical of the colonialist and patriarchal Brazilian society. The desbunde consisted of a politicization of the everyday, a vibrant vanguard that broke down the prevailing subjectivity through experimentation with alternative lifestyles, nonnormative sexuality, the use of psychedelic drugs to alter perception, and essays on new forms of community.

Perlongher was immediately seduced by the Brazilian desbunde and by its proposed revolution against the worn-out model of 1970s leftist social change. The attempts at subjective transformation to incite social change immediately shared the methodology of the extinct FLH, which became a source of inspiration and radicalization when it was imported to Brazil during the transition to democracy. From his first trips to the country, Perlongher brought the FLH’s ideas with him through its organ of communication, the journal Somos, and in 1978 a group of Perlongher’s writer friends founded Brazil’s first gay and lesbian group, called SOMOS in homage to the FLH.

Perlongher’s anthropologic research, some of the first studies on marginal groups, with which his own experience made him familiar, allowed him to establish a concept of identity that drew on the notions and practices of urban anthropology. In 1981, he was awarded a scholarship to study for a Master’s degree in anthropology at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in São Paulo. There he began field research on male prostitution, probably the first person in the discipline to convert his sexuality and his contact with marginal territories into a research subject and field of study. In his thesis, later published as the book O Negócio do Michê [Male prostitution in São Paulo], which quickly became a bestseller in the genre, Perlongher critically analysed the construction of the gay identity, and the differences inherent to the Latin American model marica/chongo (bicha/bofe in Portuguese), in the monetization of passions and the libidinization of capital. This study into the destabilizing nature of masculine homoerotic desire and his scrutiny of the corresponding inequalities and differences prove that Perlongher’s work was a fundamental precursor to queer studies on a global level. Some of these studies, published as short essays, appear in the ‘Desire and Politics’ section of this book: ‘Lust and Violence in the World of the Night’, ‘Corporal Order’, ‘Avatars of the Boys of the Night’.

Once he’d settled in the Brazil of ‘Minoritary Becoming’, an essay in which he ponders his own experience seen through Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical concepts of becoming and micropolitics, Perlongher joined the SOMOS group, already divided by an internal conflict that would become a classic for the LGBT movement: autonomy or affiliation (in this case, with the budding Partido dos Trabalhadores led by the young unionist Lula, who years later would become the most popular Brazilian president in history, today unjustly held as a political prisoner). Perlongher took sides in this conflict, always in favour of weaving political alliances, in particular to denounce the neoliberal normalization and appropriation of the gay identity which began in the 1980s, particularly after the AIDS crisis when the gay ghetto became a place of stigmatization and isolation. Perlongher anticipated thirty years of debate on identity, warning of the implicit misogyny and foreseeing the production of new laws and exclusions. Ferocious critic of gayness as identity, once the SOMOS group dissolved around 1984, his political interests turned to feminism, smuggling its notions into his letters and articles which blurred the lines between specific ideologies and struggles.

His disenchantment with gay activism, which can be read in ‘The Disappearance of Homosexuality’, ran parallel to his connection to the plane of the sacred through his mystic experiences with Santo Daime, a syncretic Brazilian Amazonian religion that was in vogue among intellectuals in the 1980s. The rituals of Santo Daime consist of ingestion of ayahuasca (prepared from roots and vines with high hallucinogenic content), which fosters collective mystic visions as a form of indigenous shamanic healing, amplification and intensification of spiritual perception, connection to other dimensions and life forms (vegetable and animal) and of transcendence of the individual. Santo Daime, which is also the name given to the sacred substance, offers a means of desubjectification, and this is perhaps the aspect most relevant to Perlongher’s critical thinking: overcoming the objectifying rational and colonial categories of western thought and its phallic, anthropologic biases. The leaving of the self and escape from societal pressures are key to political action in the sense that they blast away the pillars upholding the capitalist system. His abandonment of the orgy in favour of transcendent ecstasy as a vehicle to escape the self was contemporary with (even slightly prior to) his illness.

In 1989, at a research centre in Paris, where he spent nine months doing a PhD in sociology at the Sorbonne, he was diagnosed with AIDS. In 1987, he’d published the book O que é Aids? [The ghost of AIDS], which he later criticized as a work written from a healthy perspective. In it, he denounced the control of the body that AIDS in particular implied as a form of taming the nomadic sexual practices and destructive passions that characterized the revolutionary nature of masculine homoerotic desire, domesticating it out of fear, using latex as a hygienic barrier to the exchange of bodily fluids and privatizing the urban circuits of desire (saunas, gay clubs, etc.)

His diagnosis in 1989 caused him to return to Brazil after that ‘senseless deterritorialization’ in Paris, where he turned to the study of mystic ecstasy, profane and sacred, until his death in 1992. This line of investigation led him to a review of mystic literature and its relationship to the baroque phase of the Spanish Golden Age and to his creation of an eccentric minoritary baroque mysticism.

Perlongher explored his political, erotic and mystical interests using poetic language, giving more conceptual and perceptive weight, fullness and density to his ideas. His work as an essayist overlaps with his vast poetic work, published in the books Austria-Hungría (Tierra Baldía, 1980), Alambres (ed. Último Reino, 1989), Parque Lezama (ed. Sudamericana, Buenos Aires, 1990), Aguas Aéreas, El chorreo de las iluminaciones, Caribe Transplatino, in a bilingual edition (Iluminuras, São Paulo, 1991). His poems express his experience, despite the dearticulation of all referential intention, and prioritize language, summed up in the following central procedures: baroquization, proliferation and defilement of cultural materials, primacy of the signifier.

Perlongher worked language with the care of a goldsmith: words were tools he employed like a skilled artisan to polish and sculpt his poetry, but also his theories and criticisms, as can be read in the essays of the ‘Muddy Baroque’ section of this book, displaying his search for a poetic prose with which to postulate on language.

Throughout his career, he developed a poetics he called neobarroso, in a word play that substitutes the C from neobarroco (neo-baroque) with an S, in allusion to the barroso (muddy) banks of the River Plate in Buenos Aires. The neobarroso is a particularly Argentine and distorted version of the great Latin American neo-baroque of the twentieth century, linked to local formulations of the queer which celebrate effeminateness, poverty and the glamour of the subaltern (to the point that in Brazilian slang, ‘baroque’, in the feminine form – barroca – means queen). In the neobarroso, we find the erudition of vanguard Spanish literature blended with the colloquial slang of the ‘fag from the neighbourhood’, as Perlongher liked to say, forging ‘a baroque of the trenches’: poetic language as a revolutionary weapon.

For the tradition of the Latin American locas, madwomen, as effeminate gay men were called, the neo-baroque is a stylistic code and a symbol of belonging. Perlongher explored this Latin American incarnation of the queer (before such a concept existed) in his book Caribe Transplatino. Poesía naobarroca cubana y rioplatense [Sandy beaches to muddy Delta: An introduction to Cuban and Argentine neo-baroque poetry].¹

For Perlongher, the baroque was a latent force in the Spanish language, which found its Golden Age in seventeenth-century Spain and its subversive, queer Latin American splendour in the second half of the twentieth century. The neobarroso, or muddy baroque, an ‘exuberant explosion of artifice’, has a secret methodology: harvest material from the historic experience, such as political slogans, as Perlongher does in his now classic story ‘Evita Lives’, or in the poem ‘Corpses’, and drag them through the mud of the River Plate to create an iridescent gem, gleaming with profane illumination. Perverting the material, subverting and sensualizing the language to politicize it, inject it with libido, articulate the plane of the body through language, carnivalize it, dismember realism and its pretension of instrumentality, baroquize the kitsch and camp. The perversion (subversion) of language is the corporalization of writing. As Nicolás Rosa wrote, poems are not sexual metaphors but hot sex. The recurring question is: how does one sensualize writing? How does one join the plane of expression with the plane of the body? To sensualize the language is to liberate the semantic xorá, to create a linguistic force, which registers the acts of the body. And this effect is created through reading: the accumulation and iteration of sounds that produce the sensation of bodily fluids. Perlongher told us to ‘Suck, lick, this swelling of Spanish’. The neobarroso, dripping with murky fluids, is the descent of the neo-baroque from the crystalline waters of the Caribbean to the muddy bottoms of the River Plate, the subversion of the signifier with respect to the signified, the transgression of linguistic law. A revolution in writing that deemphasizes significance and reference, that evades manipulative and objectifying language. Unnatural effeminacy and feminization, exaggerated eroticism oozing from the baroque machine, sullying the discipline of work and utilitarian morals with its ethic of excess and voluptuousness.

While Perlongher refused to let his poetry be exploited by reality, his poetics were influenced by his political experience. Poetry was a space for production of a politicized language in the sense of its desirous corporality: a language that translated political discourse through transformative impulses experienced at the level of the body, through a willingness to conceptualize a de-autonomizing movement, a rejection of the purely aesthetic in favour of an understanding of poetry as something vital and therefore political, a guerrilla language.

Not only was Perlongher one of the founders of the LGBT movement in Latin America; he was also a fundamental ally for feminism and a precursor to queer politics through his insistence on deidentification as an emancipating political strategy. He was queer before queer existed, as seen in notions on the relationship between inequality and difference, and in his concept of the body as location of ideological inscription and sexist violence, but also of subversive acts (in this sense, in a deliberate anachronism, his defence of flamboyant marica madwomen and transsexuals can be read as his contempt for the compulsive obsession with identification).

Perlongher liked to refer to himself in the feminine, and he allied himself with women, lesbians, drag queens and transgender persons: the entire rainbow of locas, as a broad and inclusive category which in Latin America was complementary to the notion of queer, highlighting local characters linked to feminization and poverty. He was a pioneer in formulating an explicit poetics and politics of madwomen (it was the linguistic and poetic correlation of that sexuality gone mad that interested him more than homosexuality itself, the unleashing of desire, the liberation of all sexualities, the thousand sexes, as can be read in the essay ‘Loca Sex’). He founded a discursivity specific to the language of the locas that would be worth introducing into other languages to contaminate them and make them go mad. One of the aims of the translation presented in this book is to penetrate the English with this South American madness, to drive the imperial language insane with the thousand intensities and accents of all the locas that inhabit and agitate the world.

Prosa Plebeya, originally published in 1997 (and republished in 2013) was conceived by Osvaldo Baigorria and Christian Ferrer as a homage to their recently deceased friend and as a map to Perlongher’s thinking, organized around the topics that mattered to him most. The ‘Desire and Politics’ section collects what are perhaps the most powerful and disruptive texts with which Perlongher smuggled the democratic ideas from the Brazilian desbunde into the timid postdictatorial underground scene in Argentina. Brazil at that time was a party, and Néstor the guest of honour. As he revelled in the Brazilian ‘racial democracy’ (much more imagined than real), he imported and exported ideas across the border. From this artificial paradise that would not last long thanks to the rapid institutionalization and neutralization of identities, followed by the final blow that AIDS would deal to this sexual revolution, Perlongher intervened in the alternative local circuits, introducing the first strains of a new democracy into his letters and texts published in feminist, anarchist and countercultural journals. Many of these essays rigorously analyse, in a literary style, the numerous configurations of machismo in Argentina which configure various forms of violence: ‘Microfascism is contained in each gesture, in each detail of the masonry of “normal” masculinity … Machismo = Fascism, read an old slogan of the tiny Gay Liberation Front in Buenos Aires. Perhaps the soldier-like semblance of the macho male is an indicator of the fascism that fills his head’, he ventured in ‘A Marica Is Murdered’, his now classic analysis of homophobic violence, written almost as a neobarroso treatise. Through his chronicles, interviews and articles on sexist violence, Perlongher inaugurated in Argentina a new field, later categorized as urban anthropology, the study of marginal territories for which his personal experience was the subject of investigation, the zone of articulation and the site of social transformation. These writings provide the elements needed for an analysis of fascism from a feminist and queer perspective.

For Perlongher, the political alliance between locas of all stripes constituted a revolutionary cell, something that threatened the patriarchy. From this fundamental connection, the second edition of this book gave us ‘Don’t Lift the Lid, We’re on Shaky Ground’, a feminist essay on abortion (topic of urgent relevance in today’s world). ‘Cover Up, Girl’ is the title of an essay that denounces, not without humour, the maintenance of the dictatorship’s repressive practices even after democracy. One of Perlongher’s favourite phrases, ‘Cover Up, Girl’, should be pronounced with the tone of a provincial aunt. He was giving his female friends two pieces of advice: girl, dress with decency or you could get mistaken for a ‘whore’; and: when you do behave indecently, use protection (a ‘cover’ – saquito – was a condom). Néstor repeated this phrase in letters to his feminist friends, ordering them to fuck, like madwomen).

If in his poetry the voice gives over to a transvestite desubjectification, this becoming can also be read in the unpublished ‘Brazil: The Transvestite Invasion’ (1985), which anticipates the emergence of a group that years later would cause a stir in international queer politics. Perlongher denounced the dictatorship’s repression, maintained even after the return to democracy, and questioned homosexual identity (an obsession throughout his work), such as in ‘Loca Sex’, where he introduces Deleuze and Guattari’s theory as an antidote to the fixation with identity, or ‘The Disappearance of Homosexuality’ (1991), his ‘goodbye’ text, which points to a new means of desubjectification: mystic ecstasy as a way to escape the self (something he’d previously sought through more orgiastic and less spiritual means). In this last line of production, the book includes a section entitled ‘Anthropology of Ecstasy’, which collects his reflections on Santo Daime and its mind-expanding mysticism.

The ‘Muddy Baroque’ section shows another essential element of his poetry: the establishment of a contemporary Latin American canon, which stretches silver bridges between bodies of work, linking writers such as Manuel Puig, Leónidas and Osvaldo Lamborghini, Reinaldo Arenas, José Lezama Lima, Severo Sarduy, Tamara Kamenszain, Anturo Carrera, Glauco Mattoso and Haroldo de Campos. This canon would prove to be of fundamental importance for posterior generations, who rediscovered Latin American literature as ‘insane writing’, as radical language.

Under the scholarly-military title ‘The Argentine Falklands’, we find essays on the war that express notions of sexual and national identity, body and territory, notions that today would be considered queer and which are especially important now as the issue of the Falkland Islands is being revisited in Argentina and the United Kingdom alike. In these texts, as well as in ‘Cuba, Sex, and a Bridge to Buenos Aires’, Perlongher challenges intellectual leftist thought to dismantle its patriarchal foundation.

The ‘Eva Perón’ section of this book is dedicated to another of Perlongher’s obsessions: the most important loca in Argentine history, its most powerful madwoman, and its most wanted body, the corpse of the nation. Glittering like a macabre gem, the scandalous story ‘Evita Lives’ is a classic among cursed, clandestine, censured writing.

‘Miscellaneous’ is a sampling of Perlongher’s literary texts, both prose and poetry, in which literature and history strike up a very unique relationship. Standing out is the now classic ‘Corpses’, possibly the most celebrated poem written during the Argentine dictatorship and the most iconic example of the neobarroso, displaying Perlongher’s poetic prowess in all its splendour.

The complexity of Perlongher’s poetic-political thought discourages a reading of his work through generic pre-established classifications, but invites us to synch our bodies to the vibrations that undulate from his texts, connecting and activating zones of the collective political body. Streetwise philosopher, political provocateur, erotic activist, linguistic militant: Perlongher can ultimately be conceived as writing in an erotic-political form – a language of the trenches where posterior generations of madwomen will continue to build barricades and throw out grenades that may explode into a new language.