Daytime Divas: Excavating Queerness on Argentinean Television And Film

This dissertation reevaluates the long held claim that popular and formulaic Latin American media reinforces heteronormative values. In order to revert and complicate this notion, I include the role played by audiences in how they read such content vis-à-vis the industrial technological complex, as well as the ideological subtexts present in the product. By incorporating a queer lens which sets out to identify markers, signs, and sentiments that index same-sex desires and identities, I construct a model from which to read media products as they break form strictly heteronormative milieus. The media archive examined here is situated within the years of 2010-2011, coinciding with gay rights legislation, such as the passing of same-sex marriage in Argentina. I analyze the relationship between these social changes in relation to the media industries in order to assess how the extension of rights towards sexual and gendered minorities operate and build consent through their use of media outlets. My archive includes telenovelas, films, day-time talk shows, and film reviews from Argentina and Brazil as a means to identify and highlight the queer signs that make up the core of their narratives. The model of queer readings that foregrounds the media products from the years 2010-2011 will be used to reassess programing produced in various periods of Argentinean television history, in order to elucidate how shows in other historical periods also embedded their texts with queer signs. Ultimately the project seeks to expand the limits of Latin American media by incorporating the role of sexual minorities as audiences who challenge through their readings seemingly normative media content.