BENEDICT HOFF, Reprojecting the City: Urban Space and Dissident Sexualities in Recent Latin American Cinema . Oxford: Legenda. 2016. 174 pp.

In his new monograph Benedict Hoff provides close readings of four South American films, devoting a chapter to each: Un año sin amor (Anahí Berneri, Argentina, 2005), La virgen de los sicarios (Barbet Schroeder, Colombia/France/Spain, 2000), Amarelo manga (Cláudio Assis, Brazil, 2002) and Madame Satã (Karim Aïnouz, Brazil/France, 2002). In the Introduction and Postscript he frames the discussion of the primary corpus with a focus on Rodrigo Bellott’s Dependencia sexual (Bolivia/USA, 2003), a film that explicitly deals with the images and politics of heteronormative and queer sexualities with a global perspective, contrasting the contexts of cities of the minority and majority worlds. Hoff’s preferred geopolitical terms are indicative of his approach to the films and their representations of sexuality that aims to avoid commonplace assumptions of identity formation radiating from centre to periphery. In a concise and persuasive introduction, Hoff states that whilst he is aware of the dangers of critical othering that overestimates the agency of marginalized groups, his intention is to ‘relocate the so-called ‘periphery’ to the centre of things’ (11). His examination of the politics of ‘dissident’ sexual identities produced within their geographical environments of Buenos Aires, Medellín, Recife and Rio de Janeiro is driven by questions connected to the effects of capital and globalization. A question that he returns to in all of the chapters is set out in the Introduction: ‘Does the queer body stand here for “liberation”, or “the liberation of capital to achieve its aims?” ’ (4; Hoff cites José Quiroga’s Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America [New York & London: New York U.P., 2006]).