The brothelization of gender and sexuality in late twentieth-century Latin American narrative and film

The brothel has an important role in Latin American literature and film. The fictional brothel is expected to produce gender in both men and women, but these gendered identities are placed at the extremes within the bordello. This gender extremism creates opposition, or gender transgression, in the characters of twentieth-century Latin American narrative and film. Here I map the brothelized iteration of both genders through prohibitions, taboo, abjection, and violence within various texts and films. Much of the discipline of this cultural production of gender rests on the body. The body must bear the mark of its gender or the character risks violent consequences. Fatness plays an important role in this sexual economy, because fatness destroys gender, pushing the subject toward an androgyny that other characters reject or hate. Though the brothel has been studied before, it has not been analyzed from this gendered perspective.