Narrativization and sexual subversion: considerations on Puig, Abreu and Bayly

Abstract

This paper aims at analyzing in a contrastive way three representative novels of the problematic of the male homosexual identity in Latin America: Manuel Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña (Ar­gentine, 1976), Caio Fernando Abreu’s Onde andará Dulce Veiga? (Brazil, 1990) and Jaime Bayly’s No se lo digas a nadie (Peru, 1994). The articulation of a queer epistemology allows us to think about textuality as a place of dramatization of a politic fiction that questions the heteronor­mative patterns of sex and gender, and proposes a strategy of resistance based both on bodies and pleasures and on politics of representation and reinvention of masculinities and femininities. Taking feminist assumptions, narratology and queer theory/epistemology as theoretical basis, it is made a critical reading of these novels, which are presented against the heteronormative model and invest in the subversive potential of a place of enunciation in the literary discourse marked by difference and resistance to the heteronormative disposals of regulation of sexual identities. At last, the contradictions and impasses that emerge from the novels are analyzed, particularly in which concerns questions of race, class and gender, as well as the potentialities and problematic points of a queer poetics as a place of cultural intervention.