In the 1960s, Latin America emerged as a key political and cultural site of the Cold War. While translation’s role in promoting Latin American literature in the U.S. is well documented (Mudrovcic 1997; Franco 2002; Iber 2015), the circulation of gay-themed works remains underexplored. This exploration is particularly relevant considering that in less than ten years (1968-1979), and only a decade after the Lavender Scare, the first queer Latin American were translated in the U.S. (Balderston and Maristany 2005). Moreover, these translations were often subsidised by the Rockefeller’s Center for Inter-American Relations (CIAR), a non-governmental Cold War apparatus (Cohn 2012). It could thus be argued that Castro’s—and the USSR’s—homophobic agenda enhanced the representational currency of these homosexual-themed, experimental Latin American novels, which entered an emerging (Rubin 2012) and polarised (Baer 2021) Western canon of World Literature. My project examines how such translations were shaped by Cold War cultural policies and by broader identitarian shifts in the West, namely the gay liberation movement (Stoffel 2025).

Within this broader frame, this talk focuses on Manuel Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña (1976) and his decision to work with male translators for the versions he collaborated on. The novel, though set in Argentina, stages Cold War anxieties around communism and homosexuality to put to the test the notion of masculinity. I argue that Puig’s choice echoed the novel’s plot on a meta-translational level to stage a performative politics of translation as becoming-woman (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Sotirin 2011), where linguistic intimacy resists Cold War models of translation as soft power. Influenced by the Third Worldist current of gay liberation, Puig and his translators extended this framework by placing language itself—and thus translation—at the centre of a transnational queer agenda, anticipating, in this way, genealogies of translation and gender performativity usually dated around the twenty-first century (Maier 1984; Bermann 2014).

Javier de la Morena-Corrales is a Ph.D. candidate in Translation Studies at Kent State University. His research lies at the intersection of translation history and literary translation. He serves as the book review editor for Translation and Interpreting Studies: The Journal of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association (ATISA). He is also the Spanish translator of McKenzie Wark’s General Intellects [Intelectos Colectivos; 2023] and is currently preparing the translations of Wark’s Sensoria: Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century and Frederick Rolfe’s 1898 short story collection Stories Toto Told Me.