Andrew W. Mellon Fellows in the Humanities

Moira Fradinger

Class of Spring 2020

Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Department of Comparative Literature

Yale University

Re-Imagining The Human: Argentina’s Innovation in Gender Politics and Its Global Impact

In her Academy project, Fradinger will study the cultural and political debates as well as artistic production surrounding the groundbreaking 2012 Argentine legal reform that de-pathologized gender identity and sexual diversity. The legislation was unique in that it allowed for changes in gender identity to be carried out without the legitimization of medical or judicial institutions,
sparking global discussion about the articulation of gender and sexuality. Several countries in Latin America and Europe have adopted the Argentine model, translating it to fit their national contexts. “We live in a time when the global conversation about gender is changing rapidly and at many levels,” Fradinger writes. “I explore Argentina’s contribution to a new thinking about gender identity and sexual politics, democracy, the family, heterosexuality, female reproduction, and in more general terms, the human as such.” While focused on Argentina, her book has a comparative chapter on European countries that now have similar laws. Fradinger also explores the earlier influence of Austrian, German, and French sexuality studies and psychoanalysis in Argentina. Here, however, Fradinger highlights the current circulation of knowledge from the South to the North, reversing the usual association of the North with technical innovation and the South with the export of raw materials. Argentina ended up as leader in sexual rights, Fradinger argues, because Argentina’s radical reforms emerged out of the particularities of the country’s decadeslong human rights movement, mental health reforms, and the specific politics of sexuality-based interest groups.

Moira Fradinger is an associate professor of comparative literature at Yale University. She grew up in Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, and Venezuela, completing her Licenciatura in psychology at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, with a specialization in psychoanalysis and the treatment of psychosis. Fradinger started her career as a psychologist in Argentina, working in clinical practice with psychotic patients in public hospitals. She was also on staff in Argentina’s National Ministry of Health and Social Action at the Under-Secretary for Women’s Affairs, and taught at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. She completed her MA at the Institute for Social Studies in The Hague, and PhD in comparative literature at Yale University, where she joined the faculty in 2005. Fradinger is the author of Binding Violence: Literary Visions of Political Origins (Stanford, 2010). She is finishing a book on twentieth-century Latin American rewritings of Antigone and an anthology of five dramatic re-imaginings of Antigone plays she translated into English (from Haiti, Argentina, Colombia, Uruguay, Peru, and Brazil). She has also started a new book project on contemporary Argentine gender debates and their global impact, and another on Latin American Third Cinema.