Neobugarrón : Heteroflexibility, Neoliberalism, and Latin/o American Sexual Practice chronicles the cultural modifications of a distinct male-male sexual practice in Latino/a America and the Caribbean during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Historically this practice has been embodied in the figure of the bugarrón , an ostensibly heterosexual man who has sex with other men but who is presumed to take the dominant role exclusively. An ambiguous figure, the bugarrón --who is neither clearly gay nor simply straight--has for decades eluded comprehension by anthropologists and epidemiologists, as well as by public policy experts in the Americas and around the globe. A host of local terms describe practitioners of bugarrón sex in different parts of the Americas: cacheros (Costa Rica), mayates (Mexico), hombres normales (Argentina and Chile), and bugarrónes (Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic). During the late 1980s, bugarrón sexual practice was problematized in public debates over HIV/AIDS prevention and health risks. Surveillance of bugarrón practitioners intensified because they were typically regarded as a troubling vector of HIV transmission between heterosexual and homosexual communities. My research suggests that this ambiguous entity mutated into what I am calling the neobugarrón , a neoliberal market-oriented actor who used the traditional sexual practice as an optimizing strategy for manipulating the forces of globalization during the 1990s. Now, at a crucial historical juncture when some version of LGBTQ rights has been expanded across the Western hemisphere, the bugarrón has become a virtually extinct category.

Bugarrón activity may still take place occasionally, but the term''s former signification is disappearing from cultural use. Today, more often than not, the term bugarrón refers to men who sell sex to gay tourists. Just as a simulacrum displaces the real, so has the neobugarrón displaced the bugarrón . I contend that sexual practices that did not develop into a unique sexual "identity" have a history worth documenting, especially as their traces in our contemporary world are disappearing. It is necessary to record this Latin American sexual practice as it is poised on the cusp of extinction. This book chronicles the twists and turns of a failed understanding of male-male sexuality, while also providing an account of how the neobugarrón is key for comprehending the relationship between capital and sexuality in the Americas. This project has been influenced by works in queer studies that analyze shifting sexual arrangements. While queer scholarship has provided some frameworks for understanding a nonexclusive sexual practice in Latin America, bugarrón as a discarded sexual type does not fit these interpretive models very well.

Instead of arguing that transvaluation of failure into success is something that "queers" excel in doing, this book reconsiders methodological mishaps, ethnographic misreadings, historical gaps, cinematic absences, and their various interpretations as opportunities for thinking discursive blindness. It is necessary to revisit the historical, theoretical, and philosophical work of George Chauncey, Arnold I. Davidson, Michel Foucault, Alfred J. Kinsey, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in order to recover an ethics for interpreting discarded concepts and vanishing ways of thinking about sexual practices. In his lectures Subjectivity and Truth (2017), Foucault differentiated anthropology and ethnography from the kind of thinking about sex that drives his project. He argues that his work should be understood as "the history not of sexual behavior, of sexual practices, but of reflection on sexual practices." A historian does not have access to sexual practices themselves, only to discourses that reflect on those practices. Reflecting on sexual practices means for him thinking through "the way in which sexual practices emerge within a cultural or normative consciousness.

" Neobugarrón seeks to reflect on the ways in which a neobugarrón subjectivity emerges in discourses of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Whereas traditionally bugarrón stood for a type, a figure, constructed from a sexual practice, neobugarrón reflects the self-packaging, or self-making, of a neoliberal subjectivity.