"It's not the place, it's not the cities nor the countries: it's the people who make you happy or unhappy."
Camila Sosa Villada is the author of the recent best-seller “Las Malas” ("The Bad Ones"). She's not only a writer but also an actress: she worked in the movie "Mía" (2011) and the theatre production "Carnes tolendas, retrato escénico de un travesti" (2009).
She studied Communication and Theatre in her native province of Córdoba. In an interview for Filo News, she stated that her intention when writing the book had been "to talk about travestis in spiritual terms." However, she added that "the empty spaces left in travestis' stories" were lost in editing.
In "Las Malas" (2019), she narrates the life of a travesti freshly arrived in the capital city of Córdoba to study. She has also published a poem anthology titled "La novia de Sandro" (2015), an autobiography titled "El Viaje Inútil" (2018) and the novel "Tesis sobre una domesticación" (2019).
LGBTIA+ stories, told by their protagonists (and available on Netflix!)
A few months ago, the Argentine film "Las Mil y Una" was added to the Netflix catalog. This drama tells part of the story of Iris, a 17-year-old girl who starts to experiment with her sexuality in her low-income neighborhood in the province of Corrientes.
The production took place entirely in said province, starring a federal cast. However, for some residents, the movie was so controversial that they even set up an online petition to censor it, as they considered it "made the neighborhood look bad."
Director Clarisa Navas states that the film wasn't created around conversations with the local LGBTIA+ community but born from her own experiences: "It goes beyond conversations. I think we have our own experiences, living a certain kind of life, that makes conversations unnecessary. We are part of it. Most of the cast has gone through similar situations, I know I have, and many people from the technical team, too. I believe we painted a picture from that perspective: from having experienced it."
Last August 6, the organization Traductoras e Intérpretes Feministas en la Argentina (where many professionals of our team are active members) held a debate as part of its series of sessions "Theory behind the Script." Having previously received and shared materials on topics such as compulsory heterosexuality as a political system, the lesbian existence, internalized lesbophobia and the lesbian continuum, attendees talked about the film and its ties to feminist theories.
National Pride Month in Argentina
In the collective imagination, the concept of being trans tends to be linked to the binary identities of men and women (people who were assigned the “opposite” gender at birth). However, gender actually refers to the internal sense of self of each person, whose external expression can be in line or not with societal expectations. This includes non-binary people, who are not men nor women, genderfluid people, travestis and people of any other identity that does not fit in the binary boxes.