Cleaning the Window: The Sanitization of Male Homosexuality in Ventana Gay

Abstract

From a Foucauldian perspective, this article examines the discursive production that sustains processes of sanitization and normalization of male homosexuality in Colombia during the 1980s, through an archaeo-genealogical analysis of printed archives. To this end, it analyzes the functioning of discourses in the magazine Ventana Gay, the first mass-circulation publication in the country written by and for homosexual men between 1980 and 1984. The article shows how certain enunciative strategies seek to produce an “entendido”, hierarchized, and normalized subject, inscribed in an ambiguous dynamic of inclusion and exclusion, always in relation to the modes corresponding to a “healthy” society, that is, heterosexual, morally regulated, and socially legitimized. Through the analysis of diverse statements, discursive regularities are identified which, in their polyvalence, make it possible to understand the split between homosexualities and the establishment of a biopolitics within the subject itself, who self-regulates his own sex, sexuality, and health through discourses of bodily control, self-care, and individual responsibility. In this way, the article contributes to studies on sexuality, archives, subjectivity, and power in Latin America from a critical and situated perspective.