Difficult genealogies. Punk countercultures, negative affects and queer archives in Buenos Aires post-dictatorship

Abstract

In this paper we ask ourselves about the singular characteristics of those genealogies forged from the contact between punk counterculture and sexual dissidence in the city of Buenos Aires, and we recover in our reflection not only the pronounced fragility of their materialities and the precarious economies of their circulation, but also the unequal relations of symbolic power that politically devalue such connections by replicating subalternizing stigmas that conceive such forms of countercultural political-sexual action as erratic, inorganic, ephemeral, combustible, reticent or too opaque for the normative matrices of straight politics. We want to focus on the critical challenges that these conflicting materialities introduce to the imaginative horizons of queer archival politics, to approach forms of organization and contact with the past that can contain, harbor or be hurt by the insubordinate potency of those negative sexual utopias created in the heat of the frictions between musical dissonances, radical body politics and convulsive imaginaries of sexual difference.