Neobugarr: Heteroflexibility, Neoliberalism, and Latin/o American Sexual Practice - Hardcover

by Ram E. Soto-Crespo (Author)

How should we understand the bugarr, a man who has sex with other men while regarding himself as heterosexual? Reaching beyond queer and gay studies, Ram E. Soto-Crespo's research suggests that this paradoxical figure mutated into what he calls the "neobugarr," a neoliberal market-oriented actor who used the traditional sexual practice as an optimizing strategy for manipulating the forces of globalization during the 1990s.

In Neobugarr: Heteroflexibility, Neoliberalism, and Latin/o American Sexual Practice, Soto-Crespo chronicles the cultural modifications of bugarr, a distinct male-male sexual practice in Latin/o America and the Caribbean, during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Working with and against Foucault and Kinsey to examine diverse works from anthropology, literature, cinema, and social media, he investigates a wide array of bugarr sources, ranging from previously underexamined multimedia to ethnographies, fiction, films, and beyond. These works constitute a neobugarr archive and attest to a sexual practice currently metamorphosing on the cusp of extinction. Soto-Crespo's analysis challenges conventional understandings of "heteroflexible" sex between men and reveals a hitherto unnoticed transformation in neoliberal ecologies of bugarr sexual practice.

Author Biography

Ram E. Soto-Crespo is Professor of English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and author of The White Trash Menace and Hemispheric Fiction and Mainland Passage: The Cultural Anomaly of Puerto Rico.