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Sexing Literature: Writing Beyond Bodily Borders

Sex is fundamental. This essay analyzes the deep entanglements between artistic expression and

sexuality in the early poetry of Salvador Novo and Xavier Villaurrutia. Lynn Margulis and Dorion

Sagan define biological sex as follows: “At the most basic level, sex is genetic recombination...

The broad biological meaning of sex simply refers to the recombination of genes from separate

sources to produce a new individual.” Building off this definition, I propose that sex, at the most

basic level, is a process of assembling and re-codifying. It refers to multiple processes that include

a diverse range of individuals, who together, produce new singularities. In this sense, sexuality is

not limited to genitalia, or even to a social framework of erotic practices. Instead, it is a process of

creation common to all sorts of things. Sexuality is an emergence of something ‘more,’ of

something ‘else’: a new body. Sex should not be limited to the living. On the contrary, this

expanded definition of sexuality is useful for studying writing experiences that are not confined to

living and non-living things, and physical and non-physical objects. In particular, I argue that

writing literature, in itself, is sexual experience. This is what I call “Sexing Literature.”