Global Porn Boom and the Latin American Late Cold War: The Case of Perú and Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s

This presentation—based on a paper co-authored with Santiago Joaquin Insausti, Posdoctoral Fellow at UNAM in Mexico—will examine the history of pornography during the late Cold War in Argentina and Peru through a comparative Latin American approach. On one hand we will dive into an exploration of magazines combining porn with dissident politics and new urban cultural trends during the late 1970s and the 1980s. On the other, we will ground the analysis of these magazines in a wider history of porn in throughout Latin America as discussed by the existing bibliography. The late Latin American Cold War was a dire and auspicious time for porn. Dire because repressive regimes represented a challenge for the circulation of any representation, auspicious because the emergence of new urban cultures, transnationalization and new technologies gave a boost to mass access to porn. This is a tension that only a transnational comparative approach can reveal in its full complexity. This work will examine four magazines combining porn and politics at the turn to the 1980s: the Peruvians Zeta and Cinco and the Argentines Viva and Shock. These magazines stemmed from previous editorial developments, some of which had nothing to do with porn. In the late 1980s there was a shift in genres in both countries. In Perú the porn boom shaped the emergence of the new “chicha” journalism still alive and influential to this day, such as in the case of El Popular. In Argentina new exclusive porn publications such as Destape, as well as specialized gay porn like Diferentes, emerged later in the decade. This paper will discuss the genre drifting as it first gave origin to the porn boom and later transformed it into other genres.