Remembering everything? Techno-optimisms and digital debris

Chloé S. Georas Santos
2016 | Brill

An already prototypical image of the internet is that of a universal repository for the patrimonial heritage of humanity. As early as 1967 Benjamin Kaplan foreshadowed what was to come when he asked us to imagine how computer networks would be capable of storing the complete trove of human knowledge and artistic expressions of the past. Even at the ARPANET stage, when the origins of the internet were still being developed by military interests concerned about nuclear survival (namely, the U.S. Department of Defense) and M.I.T., collaborators echoed Kaplan’s foresight when they stressed that computer networks would be a repository of cultural memory. Here we can appreciate the impetus to a global archive. Great optimism marks these visions of how technology will preserve the past for future generations. The promise of the internet has been profoundly democratic in its potential capacity to remember absolutely everything given that there is ‘enough storage to remember it all.’ But will ‘everything’ actually be remembered equally? In this chapter I discuss the ‘translation’ of traditional institutions of memory (TIM) to the virtual world and propose the ‘internet-museum’ metaphor to explore how the historical and cultural record of the world is accumulated and filtered on the internet. This sets the stage for me to address the debate surrounding the ‘completeness’ of the digital historical record and to explore the possibilities of what I call the disobedient ‘internet-museum.’

Trans* Legalities: Preliminary Study of Files on the Recognition of Trans* Identities in Peru

Carlos Zelada, Carolina Neyra-Sevilla
2019 | Brill

In the present article, the authors propose a novel methodology for the identification and analysis of the speeches made by plaintiffs and judges in cases involving the recognition of trans* identities. Both conclude that these actors converge from rigid binary, pathologising and genitalising discourses, making very few references to the most recent contributions that the law and social sciences have made to the understanding of gender identity.

Sexuality, Law, and Religion in Latin America: Frameworks in Tension

Juan Marco Vaggione
2018 | Brill

One challenge opened by contemporary sexual politics in Latin America is to rethink
the relations between religion and law. The debate on the regulations of sexuality,
reproduction or the family makes visible the complex interconnections between
religious worldviews and the legal system. Particularly, how the secularization of law
has been compatible with an imbrication process in which law traduces and conserves
catholic sexual morality into secular regulations. The article offers an analysis of the ways
in which stakeholders in conflict over sexual and reproductive rights in Latin America
mobilize religion and the law to pursue their agendas. First, the article considers the
main strategies implemented by the feminist and sexual diversity movements in order
to overcome the power and influence of the Catholic Church on lawmaking processes.
Although these movements tend to share an anti-clerical standpoint, they present a
complex and dynamic construction of religion. Second, it presents different adaptions
by Catholic sectors in defense of a natural sexual order. In their quest to influence state
legal systems, these sectors deploy a dynamic and strategic understanding of religion
and its impact upon public and legal debates. Building upon these considerations, the
article contributes to the question of the complex articulations between religion and law
in contemporary Latin America.

Francis and ‘Gender Ideology’: Heritage, Displacement and Continuities

Juan Marco Vaggione
2016 | Brill