In contraposition to notions such as “transgression” or “marginality”, the idea of “dissidence” points towards the dismantling of binary figures and concepts that shape canonical readings of Argentinean literature. Literary writings on gender and sexual dissidence—especially after the second half of the 20th century and the first decades of 21st century—not only decenter heteronormative models  (masculine/feminine; hetero/homosexual; transgender/cisgender) but also drag with them a number of constitutive configurations of Argentinean cultural imagination, such as nationalism/cosmopolitanism, Peronism/antiperonism, lettered/non—lettered, etc. This essay analyzes a series of literary texts (from Manuel Puig´s El beso de la mujer araña to Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s Las aventuras de la China Iron) in which sexual and gender opacity interrupts and displaces normative binarisms—at the same time bodily and cultural—showing the way in which the languages of dissidence set the ground for other cultural, as well as political, imaginaries.

Through a reading of the fanbase response to Sally Wainwright’s 2019 BBC/HBO adaptation of the Anne Lister diaries, Gentleman Jack, this chapter asks the following questions: what is at stake in bringing the diaries to the screen, and how does the process of adaptation queer time? In the case of Gentleman Jack, many fans will have experienced the adaptation as the original. With her glamorous androgynous wardrobe, her butch walk and her seductive presence, Suranne Jones’s Gentleman Jack not only rewrites history for a contemporary audience, but also queers our temporal relationship to the past. This chapter analyses how the fans’ intensive affective response to Gentleman Jack - variously described as a form of community building, of self-discovery, and of mourning and loss - merges the fictional and the original archive in productive ways. In this dialogue between the present and the past, the Lister archive continues to forge a queer trajectory that highlights the losses and gains of an occluded and rediscovered queer history. Wainwright’s refashioning of the Lister diaries for today’s television audience has in fact led us back to the ‘phenomenon’ that Lister was in her own time and to a new understanding of the importance of Lister for today.

Chapter 5 considers texts in which music acts upon queer bodies to subject them to temporal flux or dislocation. Reading such texts through the lens of both Victorian evolutionary accounts of music’s origins and contemporary theory’s concern with ‘queer temporalities’ makes it possible to better articulate the tropes of backwardness and retrogression that attach to those queer desires awakened by music. In Browning’s ‘Charles Avison’ music’s association with both the evolutionary primitive and sexually abject presents a challenge to the teleological impetus underpinning Victorian ideals of progressive time. Similar motifs also emerge with particular prominence in stories relating to the figure of Pan by Machen, Forster and Benson. Here, the music of Pan unleashes queer desires that act upon bodies to subject them to the reverse flow of evolutionary time. In Forster’s text, Pan’s queerness is also made evident in the narrator’s paranoid fixation with masturbation, revealed in the text’s obsessive patterning of images invoking tactile contact. For Benson, Pan’s music leads his protagonist towards a queer sexual encounter that is simultaneously alluring and horrific.