In Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890–1910 (2019) Joseph M. Pierce analyzes how the family structure inherently sits outside normative heteropatriarchal structures that it claims to establish. By analyzing cultural productions—literary texts, family albums, private writings, and critical essays—from the aristocratic Bunge siblings, Pierce develops the notion of a “queer kinship,” which orients the body through structural norms that not only conform to but also challenge and point toward new sorts of kinship “that may not yet exist” (16). Through a broad cultural analysis, Pierce asserts that the family structure is, at its core, already queered because of its various relational contradictions. It is in view of this tension that Pierce develops the book's five chapters, proposing a productive intersection of queer studies and Latin American studies that moves away from essentialist paradigms.
Chapter 1 thinks through how the literary writing of the eldest sibling, Carlos...
