Intertexts

Queer Theory, Sexuality, and Women’s Writing from Latin America: The Example of Cristina Peri Rossi Rosemary Geisdorfer Feal T h e U n i v e r s i t y o f R o c h e s t e r When we wish to speak of sexuality and women’s writing from Latin America, can we get there from queer? This basic question is one that Iwill answer throughout this essay, at times directly and at others obliquely, as I address some of the issues surrounding queer theory with relation to feminism and to the field of Hispanism. Ihave chosen to focus on the writing of Cristina Peri Rossi for my illustrations, in part because of the contradictions implicit in the endeavor: her work conforms so well to paradigms from North American queer theory, but her particular circum¬ stances are prototypically “Latin American.” At one point Iwanted to call the kind of analysis Iam doing “perverse readings,” in the tradition of Mandy Merck and Teresa de Lauretis. Merck extends the meaning of perverse from “deviant sexuality” to “broader opposition to what is expected or accepted” (2), whereas de Lauretis performswhatshecallsaneccentricinterpretationofFreud’stheoriesof sexualitybyvmderstandingperversetomean“notpathologicalbutrather non-heterosexualornon-normativelyheterosexual”(xiii).Equallyusefulis Kaja Silverman’s formulation of the “perverse look” in aLacanian frame¬ work: she defines it as the look that swerves away from what is valorized, and instead attaches itself to that which is marginal. Another strategyof“perversereading”isonethatBonnieZimmermanhasdescribed as the operation acritic performs on atext when she seeks to read against cultural norms: a“perverse reader is one highly conscious of her own agency,whotakesanactiveroleinshapingthetextshereads,”whoresists heterotexts’ by privately rewriting and thus appropriating them” (89). not easily dislocated from their original home in the psychiatric paraphilias. Owing to its greater conceptualrichness,queertheorymayfunctionbetterastheumbrellaterm to describe avariety of strategies with which to approach the study of literature and culture.^ Amongthoseworkinginqueertheory,twocriticshaveproducedstudies that are particularly interesting for Hispanism at this time. In “Sexualities without Genders and Other Queer Utopias,” Biddy Martin notes that within feminism, gender “is assumed to constitute the ultimate ground of m o s t U ( But the negative connotations of “perverse” are 5 1 L 5 2 I N T E R T E X T S (women’s) experience,” and has “come to colonize every aspect of experi¬ ence, consigning us, once again, to the very terms that we have sought to exceed, expand or redefine” (105). Queer theory, in contrast, “seeks to complicate hegemonic assumptions about the continuities between ana¬ tomical sex, social gender, gender identity, sexual identity, sexual object choice, and sexual practice” (105). But, she argues, “lesbian and gay work fails at times to realize its potential for reconceptualizing the complexities of identity and social relations” when it “implicitly conceives gender in negative terms.” The result is an “escape from gender, usually in the form of disembodiment and always in the form of gender crossings” (105). That is, Martin sees an avoidance in queer studies of that which is marked “female.” But Martin points the way out of the gender/sex trap that threatens to stultify queer studies by suggesting that we ought to work toward “diminishing our sense of gender’s grasp on us, focus on exposing as an effect, an imposition, astylization, even an expression of more fundamental psychological and social dynamics” (119). Her concluding recommendation is one that we might take especially to heart in Hispanism: Isuggestwemakegenderidentitiesandexpressionsthesiteofclosereadingsthat work to expose the infinitely complex and shifting dynamics, both psychic and social, that such identities and expressions both obscure and illuminate so that gender—and “femininity,” in particular—becomes apiece of what feminist and queertheoriestogethercomplicateandputintomotion.(120) I t InherworkMartinhasbeenparticularlysensitivetothoseshifting dynarnics, both psychic and social, and has accordingly looked at questions of racial identities as imbricated with sexual identities. Yvonne Yarbroejarano s“Expanding the Categories of Race and Sexuality in Lesbian and GayStudies”discussestheplaceofracewithinqueerstudies,which,she claims,“mightaswellcallthemselves‘whitelesbianandgaystudies’”.(125) in North America unless amultiracial awareness informs their selfconceptualizations . For her, “queer” should not erase “lesbian "nor espe¬ cially “lesbians of color,” especially since a“significant piece of the theo¬ retical groundwork that could and should serve as the foundation of lesbian andgaystudies”(125)hasbeencreatedbythinkerssuchasGloriaAnzaldua ,CherrieMoraga,AnaCastillo,andotherwomenofcolor(Audre Lorde...