The Queer Body in Translation: Visual Archives, Sexual Dissidence, and Refraction in Latin America

Abstract

This article explores how the so-called “erotic ceramics”, crafted by pre-Columbian cultures, may be read as non-verbal intrassemiotic translations of queer dissidence in Latin America. Far from passive archaeological artifacts, these tridimensional images operate as visual archives that precede both Western graphic regimes and the historiographical grammar of sexuality. They translate embodied affects and erotic gestures untethered from reproductive logic and binary norms, offering alternative imaginaries of desire and existence. Here, Moche pottery is approached not as a singular artifact but as a language – a gesture of survival that resists colonial erasure by inscribing forms of dissident life long before modernity named or pathologized them. Finally, drawing on the theory of refraction, we interrogate the colonial mechanisms that have silenced and erased the “queer” content of these artifacts, with particular attention to the intersemiotic readings promoted by the Museo Larco. We examine how colonial empires have normalized, reinterpreted, and distorted dissident visual archives through a refractive regime that converts pre-colonial memories and identities into forms of translation and pathology.