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As queer studies continues to expand, its scope and methods have become sites of contestation and revision. Now, more than ever, queer critique must respond to the particularly located, material realities of gender and sexual difference, and Carl Fischer’s Queering the Chilean Way is an excellent example of how to do such responsive, resounding work. At the juncture of queer studies, masculinity studies, and literary and cultural studies, Fischer takes fifty years of Chilean history (1965–2015) as a temporal frame, showing how discourses and politics of “exceptionalism” became malleable tools of biopolitical control—but also, crucially, sites of queer resistance. The major contribution of Queering the Chilean Way is that it breaches the circular logic upon which patriarchal and nationalist discourses often depend: the illusion that normative histories, practices, and bodies are simultaneously exceptional—and because of that, desirable—and constitutively necessary—and because of that, familiar, unremarkable. Fischer’s monograph is judicious and incisive, well-thought-out and carefully argued, and it marks a significant contribution to the emerging body of Latin American queer studies literature.
The book is divided into an introduction and five chapters. To approach the period in question, chapters focus on smaller temporal segments, which correspond generally to shifts in cultural and political regimes, and progress chronologically. Despite this sequential ordering, Fischer demonstrates how the idea of progress—tied to modernization and neoliberal capitalist accumulation—is constantly undermined by the cultural objects he analyzes. The introduction defines the parameters and scope of the study, opening with the particularly salient example of how economic, gendered, and political exceptionalism converged in the 2010 rescue of 33 miners, an event transmitted globally and interpreted locally as evidence of Chile’s capacity to respond to the future in exceptional ways. The concept of exceptionalism, as defined by Fischer, harnesses these three elements (economics, sex/gender, and politics) and relates to the ordering of public and private spheres of social action. “[A]n inherently violent...