Foster, David William. Queer Issues in Contemporary Latin American Cinema.(Book Review)

Foster, David William. Queer Issues in Contemporary Latin American Cinema. Austin: U of Texas P, 2003. 186pp. ISBN 0-292-70537-9

As David William Foster indicated in his Preface, Queer Issues in Contemporary Latin American Cinema is his fourth book on Spanish American and Brazilian films of the last quarter century. In the previous three he studied various aspects of the motion pictures from the major film-producing countries of the region: Contemporary Argentine Cinema (1994), Gender and Society in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema (1999) and Mexico City in Contemporary Mexican Cinema (2001). In these books Foster approached at times questions of gender or of same-sex relations, but we should also remember two other seminal works on the literature of the latter area for which he was responsible: his own study Gay and Lesbian Themes in Latin American Writing (1991) and the large volume that he edited Latin American Writers on Gay and Lesbian Themes: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook (1994). These two texts, which I reviewed for Chasqui in 1994 (23.1) and 1996 (25.1) respectively, blazed the path for further research in the controversial field of gay and lesbian studies.

The use of the word "queer" in his current title was chosen with a specific purpose. This was not merely for the "in-your-face" shock value which was first associated with this term when it appeared several years ago. …