Séminaire du CRIDUP: Geographies of Sexualities in a non-metropolitan space of Argentina. The case of Bahía Blanca

Présentation José Ignacio Larreche (Universidad Nacional del Sur, Argentine)

Generally, the socio-sexual processes in Latin America are analyzed and explained from the big cities, coinciding with the national capitals. In the case of Argentina, this is not an exception and the city of Buenos Aires concentrates the largest volume of studies and spatial references about the LGBT community, transforming today into a kind of “mecca” for both argentines and foreigners.

However, in medium and small cities things have also happened in relation to this social dimension. Bahía Blanca is located in the south of the province of Buenos Aires, in a strategic position that connects the pampean region with the patagonian one. It has approximately 300,000 inhabitants and stands out for being the main urban node in this sector of the province. Here, the military and religious forces in conjunction with an elitist society did not prevent the construction of spaces by the LGBT collective that maintained a permanent relationship with Buenos Aires. In the analysis of this geography of sexualities, the focus is on the spatialities of gays and lesbians, taking into account the night, the urban landscape, the manifestations, the neighborhood and the game of mobilities with the argentine capital.

The non-metropolitan space is a key scale to understand the complexities of sexualities in a country as large and diverse as Argentina, breaking with the rural-urban binary. This represents one more challenge for the federalization of the experiences that in Argentina are an outstanding debt.