¿Entiendes?: Queer Readings, Hispanic Writings 9780822399483

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ilntiendes!

Edited by Michele A ina Baraie, Jonathan Goldberg, Michael Moon, and Eve Kosofiky Sedgwick

ilntiendes! Queer Readings) Hispanic Writings Edited by Emilie L. Bergmann and Paul Julian Smith

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS Durham and London 1995

© 1995 Duke University Press

All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 00 Typeset in Galliard by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

To Spanish-speaking lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals

Contents

Acknowledgments xi Paul Julian Smith and Emilie L. Bergmann

Introduction

1

ONE Re-Loading the Canon Mary S. Gossy

Aldonza as Butch: Narrative and the Play of Gender in Don QuiJote 17 Daniel Balderston

The "Fecal Dialectic": Homosexual Panic and the Origin of Writing in Borges 29

TWO (Neo) historical Retrievals Jorge Salessi

The Argentine Dissemination of Homosexuality, 1890-1914 49 Oscar Montero

Julian del Casal and the Queers of Havana 92

THREE Nationalisms) Ethnicities) and (Honw) sexualities Agnes 1. Lugo-Ortiz

Community at Its Limits: Orality, Law, Silence, and the Homosexual Body in Luis Rafael Sanchez's 'jJum!' liS

viii Contents Arnaldo Cruz Malave

Toward an Art of Transvestism: Colonialism and Homosexuality in Puerto Rican Literature 137 Jose Quiroga

Fleshing Out Virgilio Pifiera from the Cuban Closet Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano The Lesbian Body in Latina Cultural Production

168

lSI

FOUR Biographical Constructions) Textual Encodings Licia Fiol-Matta

The "Schoolteacher of America": Gender, Sexuality, and Nation in Gabriela Mistral 201 Sylvia Molloy

Disappearing Acts: Reading Lesbian in Teresa de la Parra John K. Walsh

A Logic in Lorca's Ode to Walt Whitman

257

FIVE Queer Readers/Queer Texts Suzanne Chavez Silverman The Look that Kills: The "Unacceptable Beauty" of Alejandra Pizarnik's La condesa sangrienta 281 Luz Maria Umpien-e

Lesbian Tantalizing in Carmen Lugo Filippi's "Milagros, Calle Mercurio" 306

SIX Call to Theory/Call to Action

BradEpps Virtual Sexuality: Lesbianism, Loss, and Deliverance in Carme Riera's "Te de ix, amor, la mar com a penyora" 317

230

Contents ix

DavidRomtin Teatro Viva!: Latino Performance and the Politics of AIDS in Los Angeles 3+6 ]osePiedm Nationalizing Sissies

Index 411 Contributors 427

370

Acknowledgments

This collection would not have been possible without the enthusiastic collaboration and encouragement of the contributors and Duke University Press. We would like to express our gratitude to Eve Sedgwick, who encouraged us to submit the collection to Series Q. From his warm response to our initial inquiry, Ken Wissoker supported the project and he and Jean Brady shepherded it through the technical details of production. Jean, Ken, and Ken's assistant Richard Morrison have earned our gratitude for making this collection a reality. We would also like to thank George Yudice and Benigno Sanchez-Eppler for their detailed critical readings of each essay. We are grateful to the Committee on Research, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the Center for Latin American Studies, the Graduate Division, and the Center for German and European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, for providing funding to defray some of the production expenses of the book. The editors wish to thank Eleta TrejoCantwell for her excellent organization of the index. At a crucial deadline during final preparation of the manuscript, Charlotte Rubens was generous with her time and technical expertise; we are deeply grateful for her unfailing humor and friendship. Through the efforts of Billy Bussell Thompson, we are able to include John K. Walsh's essay "A Logic in Lorca's Ode to Walt Whitman" which was written four years before his death in 1990. We thank the University of Chicago Press for permission to include Jorge Salessi's essay, "The Argentine Dissemination of Homosexuality: 1890-1914," previously published in the Journal ofthe History ofSexuality. The Frumkin/Adams Gallery granted permission to reproduce Arnaldo Roche Rabell's painting "For the Record: The Eleventh Commandment" to accompany Arnaldo Cruz-

xii

Acknowledgments

Malave's essay. For the illustrations to Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano's essay, we thank Marcia Ochoa for permission to reproduce her photographs from the series "(sometimes it's the little things that give you away)" and from the triptych "La Ofrend a"; and Esther Hernandez for her serigraph, "La ofrenda," from the cover of Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned UsAbout. We also thank Selma Margaretten and Tomas Rodriguez RapUn for locating and providing a reproduction of Rodriguez Lozano's drawing to illustrate John K. Walsh's essay. Finally, we would like to thank all the students and colleagues who expressed unqualified enthusiasm for the volume. Their response shows how much has changed within the few years since lesbian and gay studies have come into existence.

,Intiendes!

Paul Julian Smith and Emilie L. Bergmann Introduction

Questions of Homosexuality-Questions of Identity and Community