Professional Documents
Culture Documents
ARGENTINA
M o v e m e n t To w a r d s t h e
Closet in a Global Time
M AT T H E W J . E D WA R D S
Series Editors
Licia Fiol-Matta
Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies
Lehman College
Bronx, New York, USA
José Quiroga
Emory University
Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Aims of the Series
The series will publish book-length studies, essay collections, and read-
ers on sexualities and power, queer studies and class, feminisms and race,
post-coloniality and nationalism, music, media, and literature. Traditional,
transcultural, theoretically savvy, and politically sharp, this series will set
the stage for new directions in the changing field. We will accept well-
conceived, coherent book proposals, essay collections, and readers.
Queer Argentina
Movement Towards the Closet in a Global Time
Matthew J. Edwards
University of Missouri
Kansas City, Missouri, USA
Queer Argentina began a long time ago, before I knew who the authors
and artists discussed in the following chapters were, and when I was not
thinking of Buenos Aires, but rather traveling to Montreal and Mexico
City, Santiago de Chile and Atlanta. This has always been a project about
feeling uncomfortable at home. Yet I need to thank my family and friends
for letting me leave, and allowing me to return; for hearing my stories,
and repeating them as their own. But most of all for their support as I
continue to move.
There are many people who have formed part of this story as it began
to take shape. The conversations I was able to have with them and the
inspiration I was able to take for myself, from them, has been invaluable
in gaining the courage to speak about what I see, hear, and feel. In par-
ticular, I need to thank María Mercedes Carrión who, many years ago,
spoke to me candidly about how to express my thoughts over coffee in
Salamanca—I still hear your advice; Karen Stolley, who, not only listened
to this project come to life in conversations and over email exchanges
but also commented on a number of these chapters in their earlier ver-
sions—your patient guidance and support go well beyond these pages,
just as does my gratitude; and José Quiroga, whose questions, from the
beginning, have made me think about why it was so important for me to
talk about Queer Argentina, and not simply marginality in other times and
places—our conversations continue to motivate me to develop an inde-
pendent critical voice.
I am thankful to have had many people listen to me speak about these
authors and artists when I was unsure of how to do so. Michael Moon,
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Copi’s early sketches of his Seated Woman. The support I have received at
the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and specifically from the College
of Arts and Science, and the Department of Foreign Languages and
Literatures has been constant and has provided necessary stability in order
to work on a project founded on (my own) unsure movements. In particu-
lar, I would like to thank the University of Missouri’s Research Board for
recognizing the value of time and for funding a sabbatical that permitted
me to finish this manuscript.
A very special thank you to Fedérico Botana, Raúl Colombres, and
Josefina Ros at the Fundación Landru, for their kindness and patience,
and for allowing me to reproduce images of Copi’s cartoons in these
pages. Naty Menstrual, I am so grateful for your continued support and
engagement with this project. In particular, thank you for allowing me to
include your artwork alongside my discussions of it. Nicólas Fernández
and Marieta Vazquez, thank you both for taking amazing pictures—they
are beautiful.
Arriving in Queer Argentina admittedly has been a difficult journey
that has required a certain amount of sustained and prolonged struggle.
Because of this I am most thankful to those who have come along with
me. They know that I am not easy to travel with. Thank you for your
patience, for your energy, for your strength: without it I would not have
left home.
CONTENTS
2 Interested in Copi 27
Index 195
xi
LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 2.1 Literary Estate of Copi, Raúl Colombres. Tía Vicenta 2.29 (1958) 32
Fig. 2.2 Literary Estate of Copi, Raúl Colombres. Tía Vicenta 2.30 (1958) 33
Fig. 2.3 Literary Estate of Copi, Raúl Colombres. Tía Vicenta 2.32 (1958) 33
Fig. 2.4 Literary Estate of Copi, Raúl Colombres. Tía Vicenta 2.36 (1958) 34
Fig. 2.5 Literary Estate of Copi, Raúl Colombres. Tía Vicenta 2.28 (1958) 34
Fig. 2.6 Literary Estate of Copi, Los pollos no tienen sillas (Buenos
Aires: El cuenco de la plata, 2012) 10–11 37
Fig. 2.7 Literary Estate of Copi, Los pollos no tienen sillas (Buenos
Aires: El cuenco de la plata, 2012) 68 38
Fig. 2.8 Literary Estate of Copi, Los pollos no tienen sillas (Buenos
Aires: El cuenco de la plata, 2012) 31–32 39
Fig. 2.9 Literary Estate of Copi, Los pollos no tienen sillas (Buenos
Aires: El cuenco de la plata, 2012) 16–17 41
Fig. 4.1 Gabriel Levinas El Porteño, 1.1 (1982), 32 100
Fig. 5.1 Fernando Varas Toledo (Naty Menstrual), personal
photograph, 2013 130
Fig. 5.2 Fernando Varas Toledo (Naty Menstrual), personal
photograph, 2013 132
Fig. 5.3 Fernando Varas Toledo (Naty Menstrual), gift to author
(M.J. Edwards), 2013 132
Fig. 5.4 Fernando Varas Toledo (Naty Menstrual), gift to author
(M.J. Edwards), 2013 136
Fig. 5.5 Naty Menstrual, Batido de trolo (Buenos Aires: Milena
Cacerola, 2012). Cover page 150
Fig. 5.6 Naty Menstrual, Batido de trolo (Buenos Aires: Milena
Cacerola, 2012). 13 151
xiii
xiv LIST OF FIGURES
roles both on and off stage. The microphone raises each senator’s voice
above the murmur of performative preparations and forces each to be
considered in isolation. Any formal reaction to the speakers must wait, as
ritualized stage directions insist that communication and heated debate be
performed through a slow, disconnected process where detailed mono-
logues replace the fragmented, back-and-forth exchange of natural argu-
ment. What remains at the end of the pageant is a unique sequence of
complete ideological affirmations—chronologically situated, in their tran-
scribed version, in Congress’s libretto.
As the debate inside Congress began, the theatrics that once character-
ized the lively protests, confrontations, and emotions in the public sphere
were safely reduced to the notes set out before each senator in an open-
faced archive. Solid, clear, immutable, the story each senator possessed
gave form to a philosophical discussion on the place of tradition and the
consequences of change. Unlike the oscillating negotiation of power that
characterizes glances and gestures in the public forum, the story laid out
before each senator served as a guide to social interpretation; epistemo-
logical systems of knowledge founded on clarity gave order to the pages.
The debate began with Senator Liliana Alonso de Negre (Bloque
Justicialista of San Luis). She had been charged during the preceding
month with the holding of meetings throughout the nation to poll pub-
lic opinion regarding same-sex marriage. Alonso de Negre had hosted
a total of 17 sessions—eight in Buenos Aires and nine in different pro-
vincial cities—and had filmed and transcribed over 100 hours of debate.
Her brief introductory words describing this experience were followed
by a 10-minute video synthesis of these discussions. Although the video
Alonso de Negre presented has been criticized widely by the national
media as propagandistic and superficial,2 what interests me here is not her
problematic use of multimedia, but her concluding words, uttered after
approximately 60 minutes on Congress’s center stage:
mismo reconociendo diferencias con el otro sexo y con las personas adultas
desarrollando hábitos de bienestar corporal, asumiendo el cuerpo como
fuente de sensaciones, comunicación y placer como una identidad sexual
libre de elementos de género discriminatoria. Esto no lo comparto, señor
presidente.
Mi mayor preocupación es el impacto que va a tener sobre la edu-
cación. En el manual figura un niño y una niña desnudos y cositos para ir
aplicándoles en cada uno, depende de cómo uno quiere construir el sexo,
la construcción sexual. Acá dice: Debemos cuestionar las características con-
sideradas culturalmente como propias de uno u otro sexo…Cuestionar. Esto
está preparado para los chicos del primario. Cuestionar las características
consideradas culturalmente como propias de uno u otro sexo, cuidando no
reforzarlas y desarrollando actividades de compensación que contribuyan a
eliminar estas actitudes y comportamientos discriminatorios, favoreciendo
con ello la asunción positiva de la identidad sexual.
Acá está eso que estaba mostrando: figuras con las partes del cuerpo.
Entonces, las van llenando los chicos, depende de lo que quieran ser: hom-
bre o mujer, nena o varón.
Esto es lo que más me preocupa de este proyecto de ley: qué va a ser la
educación sexual a partir de ahora. Porque ahora no hay una sola sexuali-
dad. Ahora vamos a tener que enseñarles también a nuestros niños qué es
el lesbianismo, qué es gay, qué es bisexual, qué es transexual. Les vamos a
tener que enseñar eso a los niños. Ya no les vamos a enseñar únicamente
hombre y mujer. No cómo nacemos hombre y mujer, sino que les vamos a
enseñar, a partir de esta ley y de lo que está en este manual del Ministerio de
Educación, que el sexo es una construcción social.3
(My concern is not with the ability of homosexual people, if they want to
get married, get married, but with how this affects third parties. I am wor-
ried about what we are going to do with sexual education, because after this
project, sexuality is constructed.(…) What I do not agree with is this manual
that the Minister of Education of the Nation begins to hand out now, pro-
posed to be called “Affective-Sexual Education within Primary Education.”
I don’t agree with that. The manual suggests that the objectives [of sexual
education in primary education] are [for children] to understand the body
and become conscious of its growth and recognize the differences with the
other sex and with adults while developing habits of physical well-being
that understand the body as the source of sensations, communication and
pleasure, as a sexual identity free from gender discrimination. I don’t agree
with this, Mr. President.
My greatest preoccupation is the impact this will have on education.
The manual shows a boy and girl naked, with things that can be applied
to each according to how they would like to construct their sex, the sexual
4 M.J. EDWARDS
Finalmente, quiero decir dos cosas más. Una: creo que, además, damos una
respuesta no solamente a aquellos que reclaman por los derechos. Estoy
pensando en ese joven o en esa joven que, en la pubertad o en la adolescen-
cia, está definiendo su orientación sexual; que la ha descubierto. Porque no
es una elección voluntaria. No es deliberado. No se elige ser homosexual o
10 M.J. EDWARDS
policy change on the gay marriage front is the result of the ability of gay
and lesbian activists to weave extensive and affective networks in their push
for policy reform and to convince policy makers of the merits of their policy
objective in a manner that resonated with larger social debates. Key to policy
reform was the permeability of the political system by networks in support
of gay marriage and the lack of veto points by opponents. In the case of
Argentina, such permeability was significantly facilitated by the existence of
socially progressive state allies belonging to left-leaning parties, especially
smaller ones.16
Bazán’s book itself comes complete with a list of works cited and alpha-
betized index and is organized in thematic sections. His thematic narra-
tive is guided by chronological time and by a narrative voice that weaves
its way in and out of a variety of genres and myriad primary sources. The
encyclopedic entries and extensive endnotes support a technical engage-
ment with the past that fades as the reader loses track of the difference
between fact and fiction, past and present. Here, queer historiography is
at its best as Bazán insists on blurring the narrative and discursive limits
traditionally associated with historical prose and locates the queer subject
within chronological ambiguity.
By contextualizing the “invention of homosexuality” in Argentina on
a global scale, Bazán engages queerness in a direct dialogue with other
historical traditions. As he traces its tale from the biblical mythology of
Sodom and Gomorrah right through to the arrival of the Spanish in the
New World, the narrator serves as historical translator, interpreter, and
guide to the often-overlooked gay protagonists of these stories. While
chapter thematics create chronological scaffolding, the stories Bazán tells
permit the homosexual subject to multiply from within an otherwise nor-
mative perception of time to populate other symbolic systems.
Bazán’s discussion of fin de siècle Argentina, for example, presents a
sort of coming-of-age story where the homosexual enters into maturity as
Social Enemy Number One. The story of Aurora, in particular, weaves a
historical circuit that joins contemporary historiography by authors Donna
Guy and Jorge Salessi with primary texts like Archivos de Psiquiatria,
Criminologia y Ciencias Afines (Archives of Psychiatry, Criminology, and
Like Sciences) (Buenos Aires 1902) by military psychiatrist Francisco De
Veyga and José Ingenieros. Bazán’s role as queer historiographer identifies
the doctor–queer patient relationship documented in De Veyga’s reports
as a repository for queer stories, for queer history:
The social and sexual order that language carries within it, and of which
insult is one of the most pointed symptoms, produces the subject simul-
taneously as subjectivity and as subjection-subjectivation—that is to say, as
a person adapted to all of the socially instituted rules and hierarchies. Gay
subjectivity is thus an ‘inferiorized’ subjectivity, not only because of the infe-
rior social position in which gay people find themselves in society, but also
because that very society produces those subjects: it is not a question of, on
the one hand, a preexisting subjectivity, and, on the other, a social imprint
that comes along later to deform it. The subjectivity and the social imprint
are one and the same: the individual ‘subject’ is produced by the interpella-
tion, that is to say, by the cognitive (and therefore social) structures of which
it is the vector.20
The process that Eribon describes here reveals the important place nor-
mative historical narratives hold within traditional notions of subject for-
mation. Interpellation, as Eribon describes it, understands the subject as
the product of a normative past. The insult, when used, evokes a domi-
nant historical narrative, told from and activated within the present via the
dominant discourses that position homosexuality and the gay man within
marginality. Marginal subjectivity thus depends not only upon the name-
calling process but also on the name’s meaning as defined by dominant
epistemologies. How we speak about the past, just as much as what we
speak about, is essential to creating marginal subjects; our language forms
the foundation upon which the limitations that restrict social movement
are created.
The insult, here, is understood as a mechanism for establishing and
distinguishing power hierarchies. What happens, then, if we alter the con-
text of the insult’s use? What happens if we understand it outside of this
historical narrative of power relations and as part of the initial expression
of desire that marked Aurora as part of a queer community? If Eribon’s
insult were used to express a push toward passion or as part of the codified
language of affection (“dirty language” in the bedroom or street corner,
for example), would it not assume a totally different significance, founded
upon a totally different historical narrative—one that tells of physical and
emotional ecstasies as opposed to mechanisms of inferiority? Could we not
16 M.J. EDWARDS
(more importantly here) provides a guide and model for further queer
recognition to take place. By instructing the reader in the ups and downs
of queer existence, La historia lectures on how to engage not only with the
LGBTTIQ communities but with marginal stories as a whole. As a manual
on engaging with social alterity, Bazán’s text and its methodology extend
well beyond queerness.
QUEER IS HERE
Despite its unique character, Argentina’s public interest in queer peo-
ple, places, and things cannot be separated from the nation’s most
recent military dictatorship and its transition into democratic gover-
nance in the early 1980s. 23 Neither can it be separated from the events
of December 2001, when public outrage over Argentina’s economic
crisis and sky-high unemployment rates caused massive public pro-
tests and political instability, leading ultimately to the resignation of
President Fernando de la Rua on December 20. The ties that joined
this later economic crisis to the military government in power from
1976 through 1983 have since solidified the widespread criticism of
the country’s dominant political and economic discourses, and have
helped welcome marginal subjects into popular debates and discus-
sions. While the testimony of political prisoners and victims of mili-
tary repression remains the focus of political and media elites, the
vast quantities of video and textual accounts of De la Rua’s ousting
in 2001 continue to argue for the power and validity of independent,
non-normative epistemologies. Aside from this treasure trove of his-
torical content stands the explicit, ongoing work of grassroots orga-
nizations like the Madres y Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo (The Mothers
and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo) and Los escraches (The
Taggers), who utilize silent protest and spray-painted tags, respec-
tively, to call for justice and insist that the political repression and
institutionalized violence related to the dictatorship be remembered
critically. The individual efforts of journalists, authors, and activists
have collectively helped to educate the general public on near-forgot-
ten historical events, and thus fight against social amnesia and state-
driven confusion.
The debate over the legalization of same-sex marriage, held in
Argentina’s Congress on July 14, 2010, is emblematic of the country’s
ongoing efforts to increase civil liberties. A clear connection can be
20 M.J. EDWARDS
traced between the views expressed by the senators in this debate and
other attitudes and activities associated with recent economic crises and
the post-dictatorial era. The discussion that took place that day formally
exemplified Argentina’s institutionalized desire for inclusion and integra-
tion of marginal subjectivities into dominant discourses. However, the
nature of the debate that took place also suggests that engaging marginal
discourses requires and results in epistemological change. Humor, rather
than severity—chaos, rather than clarity and order—have become impor-
tant markers characterizing Argentina’s open attempts at understanding
queer subjectivity. The instability surrounding same-sex marriage pushed
Senator Agustin Rossi, for example, to learn more—to read, and eventu-
ally imitate and admire, the stories told by queer author Osvaldo Bazán.
By including Bazán’s work in the congressional hearings, Rossi made of his
Historia de la homosexualidad en la Argentina a guide to further engaging
not only the pasts of LGBTTIQ communities but marginal subjectivity in
its entirety. Bazán’s text thus became a model for reading queer systems
of knowledge through the unverifiable and confidential nature of personal
experience; his opinions, speculations, and assumptions were revealed to
be essential elements to his narrative, providing valuable insight into mar-
ginal subjectivities by systematically outing their otherwise hidden and
codified stories and traditions.
Overall, the debate on same-sex marriage in Argentina formalized a
cognitive path that leads from a thematic interest in marginal subjectivity
to an attempt to understand that subjectivity: from the location of queer
cultural production to the creation of a (queer) pedagogical model that
encourages epistemological reflection and hopes for ideological change.
It is this cognitive path and its consequences that I attempt to trace in the
present book. Many critics have addressed “what it means to be queer”
and have shed important light on the characteristics of queer subjectivity.
In the chapters that follow, I take this work in a slightly different direction;
I extrapolate and broaden queer theory by asking “What does it mean to
be interested in queer people, places, or things? What are the implications
of the traffic that we observe moving back and forth, in and out of ‘closet’
epistemologies?”
Each of the following chapters attempts to expand upon the obser-
vations presented in this introduction by exploring the implications sur-
rounding explicit, open interest in all things queer. Each chapter breaks
open closet epistemologies to discuss a corpus of queer people, places, and
INTRODUCTION: SAME-SEX MARRIAGE AND THE COLLECTIVE MOVING... 21
things whose success, notoriety, and popularity over the past three decades
indicate a larger cultural movement dedicated to learning about queer sto-
ries. The queer entities I discuss range from new editions and publications
of the otherwise-censored works of queer artists, to the Centro Cultural
Ricardo Rojas of the University of Buenos Aires, to newspapers including
Pagina/12 and Clarin, to a new generation of independent editorials that
have collectively helped ignite and maintain interest in works of, by, and
about queer characters.
The lengthy protocol associated with the legalization of same-sex
marriage that I touched on in this introduction, together with the
more recent passing of the Gender Identity Law of 2013, suggests that
queer culture in Argentina has developed a dedicated following within
the general public. The time, energy, and patience involved in over two
decades of political activism on the subject of marriage equality is proof
in and of itself of the public’s dedication to these issues. Moreover, the
financial commitment exhibited by both the public and private sec-
tors to purchase queer-themed artistic production and found landmark
institutions like the Oscar Hermes Villordo Library and Museum dem-
onstrates the concrete reality of Argentina’s investment in all things
queer. By tracing queer interest through the chapters of this book, I
hope to unpack somewhat the thought process that connects contem-
porary interest in marginal subjectivity to the search for alternative
systems of knowledge—a search inspired by the indeterminate network
of relationships that mutually supports and creates interest in queer
culture.
Chapter 2 opens by presenting a concrete example of the public
interest in queer culture in Argentina: a 1988 conference series given by
César Aira at the University of Buenos Aires on the artistic production
of cartoonist, author, and actor Copi, titled Cómo leer a Copi or “How
to read Copi.” The conference itself addressed the life and times of Copi
(Raúl Damonte Taborda) and suggested the benefits of approaching his
body of work through certain biographical moments and themes, such
as exile and sexuality. However, above and beyond making a clear con-
nection between marginal ideologies and queer cultural production, the
conference positioned Copi himself as a central axis to such debates. The
chapter takes Aira’s own investment in the subject matter as its guide,
exploring the innovative representation of marginal lifestyles through
the first representations of Copi’s famed cartoon character, The Seated
22 M.J. EDWARDS
NOTES
1. Formal petitions for legalizing civil unions between same-sex couples
began December 11, 2002, when the Comunidad Homosexual Argentina
(CHA) sent an open letter written by its president, César Cigliutti, to
Argentina’s 70 ministers (diputados). The petition was brought before the
Senate on May 18, 2010 as a proposal, written by Eduardo Di Pollina, for
the modification of the Civil code in order to include same-sex
marriages.
2. See Bruno Bimbi, Matrimonio igualitario: intrigas, tensiones y secretos en el
camino hacia la ley (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 2010), 452–506, for a detailed
description of the debates leading up to and including the events of July 14,
2010. His narrative follows Alonso de Negre via testimonial accounts of
participants, summaries of related newspaper clippings, and textual records of
the proceedings (Bimbi 425–506). The video shown by Alonso de Negre
was posted by Noticias del Congreso Nacional (NCN.com) on Youtube in
INTRODUCTION: SAME-SEX MARRIAGE AND THE COLLECTIVE MOVING... 25
Interested in Copi
Perhaps even more interesting than the power dynamics of Aira’s lec-
ture series, however, is the fact that “Cómo leer a Copi” took place at
all. The very event itself attests to the growing celebrity of César Aira in
the realm of Argentine literature in the late 1980s, to the point where his
rising fame justified him hosting a lecture series on another author. It is
astonishing that the prestige associated with Aira’s name as guest speaker
at the University of Buenos Aires was significant enough to warrant four
separate lectures on Copi’s theme (indeed, it was the prestige of this event
that brought me upon his study of Copi as well). Undoubtedly, it was
public interest in César Aira and his own literary production that brought
people to this lecture series in the first place—yet this should not be taken
to signify that the public did not also come to listen particularly to Aira’s
comments on Copi. Much like Aira himself, the Argentine literary public
of the time was both invested in and capable of encountering the unfamil-
iar—Copi, in this case—and of understanding Copi’s life story and artistic
production as legitimate objects of interest and study.
In Tiempo Pasado, Beatriz Sarlo traces what she deems a recent shift in
the way marginal subjects are treated in post-dictatorship Argentina. Since
Argentina’s transition to democracy in 1983, Sarlo argues, the marginal
subject has quickly become the center of intellectual and juridical investiga-
tion. The marginal being is regarded as exceptional: “se distinguen por una
anomalía (el loco, el criminal, la ilusa, la posesda, la bruja), porque presen-
tan una refutación a las imposiciones del poder material o simbólico” (they
are distinguished as an anomaly [the crazed, the criminal, the dreamer, the
possessed, the witch] because they refute the impositions of material and
symbolic power).1 This quote highlights an interesting contrast between
Sarlo’s approach to marginality, which at once negates the voice of the
political margins and questions the place of (and for) the contemporary
intellectual, and the stance of Aira himself. Sarlo recognizes the validity of
the marginal subject only through its own objectification, as the subject of
intellectual research. Aira, on the other hand, presents himself as part of a
collective, an intimate member of an inseparable body-politic, searching for
cultural difference. Positioned at the vanguard, Aira’s movement toward
Copi identifies the margins as a place of interest, a topic of discussion,
rather than an object to be held, to silence, to observe. Indeed, Aira quickly
lets Copi speak for himself, assuming a secondary position as observer of
his cultural legacy. The (re)presentation, the retelling of Copi’s story in
order to convey who and what Copi was to the interested, and uninformed
public, then, came to define the central goal of this lecture series.
INTERESTED IN COPI 29
that defined the magazine’s philosophy, carving out a space for his sketches
among a collage of other cartoons and sharp textual commentaries. In Tía
Vicenta’s pages, Copi drew men, women, children, and animals and spoke
of their inevitable encounter with dominant discourses. Whether it be the
image of a grown man who discovers that he too is confined by the same
glass enclosure that reduces his model schooner to a bottled collectible5
(see Fig. 2.1), or Argentina’s national icon, the cow, posing symbolically in
military garb for a photo shoot6 (see Fig. 2.2), Copi’s cartoons raise ques-
tions from the outset about the hidden dynamics of social relations.
Within the images shown here, the dominant male finds himself liter-
ally encapsulated by his own cultural place and time, while the female cow
illustrates, in a gender-conscious move, that authority itself is as variant
and indeterminate as (and indeed, is ultimately decided by) the clothes
on one’s back. Through his cartoons, Copi seems to question the impact
dominant discourse has on representation itself. Over and above his own
personal experience, the subject is presented in these initial cartoons as
being openly critical of hegemonic forms of representation.
It was here too, in the pages of Tía Vicenta, that Copi gave birth to
the character that would later come to define him as an internationally
recognized cartoonist. Here, we find the first sketches of a middle-aged
woman with straight, shoulder-length hair, a large nose, and beady eyes,
who forces the viewing public to contemplate implicit issues of gender,
economic, and political power relations.7 Whether this character is seen in
a selfless, servile role (milking a cow only to present the animal, and not
herself, with the beverage),8 (see Fig. 2.3), or as victim of the violence
Fig. 2.1 Literary Estate of Copi, Raúl Colombres. Tía Vicenta 2.29 (1958)
INTERESTED IN COPI 33
Fig. 2.2 Literary Estate of Copi, Raúl Colombres. Tía Vicenta 2.30 (1958)
Fig. 2.4 Literary Estate of Copi, Raúl Colombres. Tía Vicenta 2.36 (1958)
in one fell swoop. It is on her chair, for example, that she sits comfort-
ably revealing to an anxious male suitor that her face is but a reflection of
the carnival-style mask—used simultaneously to encourage mystery and
disbelief and subvert hegemony. While her partner’s awestruck gesture
questions her deceit, Copi’s protagonist proudly smiles, affirming herself
in a unique act that embraces her teetering stance as both beauty and
beast. Mimicking Mikhail Bakhtin’s description of carnival, where laugh-
ter is capable of reinventing and inverting social order, the chair becomes
a throne and Copi’s seated protagonist the King of her own social iden-
tity. Yet Copi’s protagonist manages to avoid the repetition and rebirth
implicit within the carnivalesque tradition by making it clear that it is the
chair, and nothing else, that assigns authority. For Copi, the chair quickly
becomes the symbolic pedestal upon which social and political institutions
set their ideals, aspirations, and requisite limitations. Redirecting attention
from the dominant sociopolitical subject—the male suitor, in this case—
to the liberties associated with positions of privilege—the taunting smile
permitted by the chair—allows Copi to allegorically push his audience
to understand location (both spatial and temporal) as central to defining
power relations and subject formation.
In light of the social commentary his art was already creating, it was
certainly no coincidence that, in 1962, Copi decided to leave Buenos
Aires and the institutionalized repression of the Ongania administration
to establish himself permanently in Paris. While Tía Vicenta continued
with its humoristic mission until its closure in 1965, Copi’s female pro-
tagonist and the stories she told emigrated with the artist, garnering inter-
national acclaim upon their debut in 1964 in Paris’s political magazine
Le Nouvel Observateur. Copi’s protagonist presented herself “como la
Sara Bernhardt de la historieta, la filósofa de la burguesía. Pero por sobre
todas las cosas e[ra] la observadora de un mundo cada vez más convul-
sivo, cada vez más decadente” (like the Sara Bernhardt of the comic strip,
the philosopher of the bourgeoisie. But more than anything else, she was
an observer of an increasingly convulsive, increasingly decadent world).11
Together, Copi and his female protagonist found their place in print, on a
chair, alongside contributions by Roland Barthes and Jean-Luc Goddard
as well as the daily news. Exile, by way of Le Nouvel Observateur, was not
synonymous with marginal social standing, but represented a unique place
within the French national popular culture.
By 1966, Copi had become a well-respected cartoonist, and alongside
his weekly place in Le Nouvel Observateur he had published two collections
36 M.J. EDWARDS
of drawings: L’humour secret (1965) and Les poulets n’ont pas de chaises
(1966). In all of these works, Copi offered up to his public the same
female protagonist who sat—comic strip after comic strip—calmly on her
chair, awaiting the action that her author was to bring her way.12 In many
cases, the chair itself became the thematic guide for the conversations,
framing the struggles and debates held within the comic strip’s panels. But
it was not the chair alone that provided the thematic pull to Copi’s narra-
tive. Instead, many of the stories focused on the sitter: who sits on Copi’s
chair is a question that takes on great social significance in his cartoons.
Much like the implicit question asked by his anthology’s title—Les poulets
n’ont pas de chaises (Chickens do not have chairs)—his comics demand to
know why a woman, or any other sexually marginalized subject, deserves
to occupy a central position not only within Copi’s cartoons, but more
importantly, within social frameworks as a whole.
For Copi, the question of who sits on the chair brings into focus a series of
social norms that revolve around the figure of the patriarch. It is this patri-
arch that he truly wishes to question. By giving the woman the chair, Copi
gives her much more than the central role in his narrative. When this chair
is separated from the ever-so-significant kitchen table—where night after
night we see the traditional hetero-social roles sit down for dinner—Copi’s
protagonist acquires a formal role outside expected normative settings. The
chair upon which Copi’s spinster sits is located outside, in the public sphere,
distanced from her traditional place within the house. Although this chair
must not be confused with the dominant male’s throne, its presence in the
outside world nevertheless serves as a disruption to the foundation upon
which such dominant positions are situated. By insisting on the female’s sto-
ryline (and, in particular, on the chair that she possesses), Copi reveals the
imperfections, confusions, and instability present within normative frame-
works. If the patriarch is completely absent from Copi’s cartoons, where is
his throne? If he is sitting at the head of the table, who is with him? And,
if the public sphere is being occupied by leisure-seeking females, just who
made the meal he is eating? The centrality of Copi’s traditionally marginal-
ized protagonist opens up a series of doubts, concerns, and anxieties sur-
rounding the private lives of otherwise dominant public icons and—without
casting judgment—corrupts the purity of such spaces and identities.
Despite this subtext, Copi’s cartoons are not (explicitly) concerned
with dominant social figures. Instead, Copi’s focus rests primarily on the
foundation of social hierarchies that support, uphold, and define differ-
ence culturally: represented, in this case, by a chair. By situating narrative
INTERESTED IN COPI 37
Fig. 2.6 Literary Estate of Copi, Los pollos no tienen sillas (Buenos Aires: El
cuenco de la plata, 2012) 10–11
attention on the chair, Copi’s work turns traditional power structures into
an object of jest, located at the center of a debate about who is able and
willing to sit upon that icon.
Consider the situation in Fig. 2.6, for instance. The female protagonist
settles into her usual place of leisure, silently watching as another character
enters the frame.13 Mirroring the book’s title, the figure that enters is a
chicken, which proceeds to ask why it doesn’t have a chair. The question
is negotiated by the woman and the chicken, who together determine that
the chair should belong to the one that accomplishes the functional pur-
pose of the cartoon: to make people laugh. Now the question becomes,
of course: who makes people laugh? Copi brings his characters through
a simple causal calculation of who does what, deciding that the woman
doesn’t make people laugh—although perhaps the simple act of separating
a recognizable character from her even-more-recognizable chair is funny
in itself. On a deeper level, however, what the cartoon ultimately points
fun at is the struggle for social protagonism engaged in by marginalized
subjects. The joke does not truly lie in “who” sits on the chair, but instead
in the fact that the chair doesn’t really mean anything when it is divorced
from the current struggles for its occupation.
38 M.J. EDWARDS
Fig. 2.7 Literary Estate of Copi, Los pollos no tienen sillas (Buenos Aires: El
cuenco de la plata, 2012) 68
In another strip in the same collection, the chicken, the woman, and
her chair are all thrown out of Copi’s narrative frame (see Fig. 2.7).14
When the struggle for the chair is itself deemed boring or just not funny
by its author, the protagonists literally lose their jobs and are forced out
of the storyline. Scattered with market-oriented thematics, this comic
paints a clear picture of the struggle for narrative protagonism: where the
weak—and definitely not funny—story lines are substituted (much like a
lazy worker) for different (more appealing/productive) narratives. In this
strip, the apparent conflict established earlier between the chicken and
the female protagonist vanishes, giving way to class-based loyalty. Here,
the two characters unite under the watchful eye of the narrative panop-
ticon in order to achieve the desired comical product.15 However, much
like the mediocre joke told by the female protagonist earlier that left
her sitting on the floor, Copi literally sends his counterproductive work-
ers packing. Although the strip is complete, we are left with the daunt-
ing thought of Copi sitting on his own chair, immersed in the power
relations of this cartoon world. There is a close link here between Copi
himself and the chicken and woman, both of whom clean out their desks
INTERESTED IN COPI 39
Fig. 2.8 Literary Estate of Copi, Los pollos no tienen sillas (Buenos Aires: El
cuenco de la plata, 2012) 31–32
40 M.J. EDWARDS
respects. First of all, the question, “Are you a chicken or a duck?” implies
that the chicken can only choose to be one of the two, either a chicken or
a duck. It is a question that, when posed, restricts its interlocutor to two
options for self-identification in society. At the same time as it prevents
the chicken from defining itself in its own terms, the question forcefully
imposes acceptable, pre-established social identities for the chicken to fol-
low. The framing of the question, therefore, not only requires the chicken
to adhere seamlessly to the woman’s notion of what it is, but also dictates
and normalizes all of the chicken’s future actions, proscribing them within
what the woman has defined as the chicken’s social limitations.
However, as the strip continues, the chicken rejects these limiting social
definitions, labeling itself a pheasant (faisán) (notably “peacock” [paon]
in the original French edition).17 When the “chicken” affirms that it is a
“pheasant/peacock,” it blurs any normative characteristics associated with
its traditional role as social protagonist. The result is a new subject forma-
tion, not externally imposed, but outlined thoughtfully as an independent
endeavor that not only includes the naming of oneself, but, in the con-
text of the French original, also the necessary spreading of one’s wings
(intriguingly, in a symbolic parade of colorful feathers that anticipates the
rainbow of Gay Pride). This comic strip becomes emblematic of a debate
central to Copi’s own artistic production, viewed in terms of the repeated
tension over who or what can sit on the chair and why. This cartoon, like
the others, questions how one occupies that chair, and what sitting in a
central position permits or prohibits when it comes to social representa-
tion and a subject’s agency.
In one particularly noteworthy cartoon, these same issues of narrative
expression, subjectivity, and normative limitations consolidate themselves
into a single coherent storyline (see Fig. 2.9a, b). Here, this same female
protagonist sits beside a little pond, only to have her tranquility disrupted
by a fish that jumps out of the water and takes her spot on the chair.18 At
first glance, this strip seems to tell the comical tale of a woman who tries,
to no avail, to catch a little fish. However, as Copi has shown us, the non-
(hetero)normative storylines that swim beneath his comics’ surface are
much more complex. Copi begins this comic strip, as he does so many, by
establishing the protagonist’s continued struggle to stay on her chair. The
story (again, typically for Copi) is then intersected by the new, unknown
story of another character: in this case, a fish. As the two narratives collide,
INTERESTED IN COPI 41
Fig. 2.9 Literary Estate of Copi, Los pollos no tienen sillas (Buenos Aires: El
cuenco de la plata, 2012) 16–17
the fish is quickly integrated into the original storyline and becomes one of
many characters who have sought to rob Copi’s protagonist of a chair that
she has claimed in previous cartoons. However, in a departure from the
narrative structure of Copi’s other strips, here, the woman not only loses
her spot on the chair through the fish’s intrusion, but, upon diving into
the water, actually becomes part of the fish’s untold reality herself. In the
final sequence, Copi’s famous female protagonist is pulled underwater and
out of the narrative limits of the cartoon, leaving in her place unanswered
questions about her new experiences in an otherwise mysterious world.
The fact that the visual field remains focused on the fish in the chair and
does not deviate in order to follow the woman into the water reaffirms the
lesson: that speaking about any character as a social subject requires that
that character exist within the already established and well-documented
narrative. Dominant systems of knowledge are posited here as limitations
and restrictions on the understanding of subject formation. Social mobil-
ity, change, and flexibility are irrelevant, for they are invisible.
42 M.J. EDWARDS
drawing and drawing. Copi draws with the actors, and this way of con-
ceiving theater allows him to be creator of a language).21 As Rosenzvaig
describes this unique, personalized language, he identifies a poetics of
marginal representation particular to Copi’s work: “Él logró trasvolar sus
imágenes como dibujante para hacer de la letra un dibujo, una imagen ver-
tiginosa. La historia de un cómic se resuelve en pocos cuadros, en pocos
cuadros se cuenta una historia. No está interesado por aclarar el pasado de
sus personajes ni de dónde vienen” (He was able to fly over his images as a
cartoonist so as to make of the written word a drawing, a dizzying image.
He is neither interested in clearing up his characters' past nor speaking of
where they are coming from.)22 Cultural histories reinforce the develop-
ment of normative guidelines that push toward social cohesion, and Copi
rejects this. For Copi, marginal realities are characterized by epistemologi-
cal movement and, as such, naturally break with the rigidity of normative
forms of representation.
In Loretta Strong (1974), which premiered May 30, 1974 at the Theatre
Gaîté-Montparnasse in Paris, the symbolic quality of the text surpasses the
limits of social performance, rendering the representation of marginal (hi)
stories an impossible endeavor.23 In the play, Copi’s protagonist, Loretta,
leaves a distraught planet Earth in search of an alternative place to live
where she can harvest gold. The piece is a delirious monologue that traces
Loretta’s odyssey through a series of one-sided, continuous telephone
conversations with numerous people, animals, and aliens, both on and off
her spaceship, exposing the audience to her self-induced, profit-oriented
social alterity.
Loretta Strong is immersed in the incoherence and miscommunica-
tion of exile and cultural transition. Her circumstances force her to speak
from the margins, from the end of worldly realities—and this proves to be
a strange and uncomfortable task. However, as the protagonist searches
for a stable connection and stable communication, she discovers the
freedom of being in between. Unable and unwilling to follow traditional
foundational narratives of civilizations modeled after the sinful union of
Adam and Eve or the abusive cultural impositions of territorial conquest,
Strong explodes outward into a space of her own. Once again, coming out
acquires new meaning, marking an alternative symbolic system and a turn
away from cultural expectations.
The play begins by questioning the performance of gender. In an inter-
view with José Tcherkaski, Copi explains how his friend and director, Jorge
Lavelli, was faced with the critical decision of choosing the actor who
44 M.J. EDWARDS
—¿Bueno? ¿Bueno?
—¡Perdí el control!
—¿Linda? ¿Linda?
—¡Linda, estoy explotando!
—¡Ay, carajo, tengo que volverme a pegar solita!31
INTERESTED IN COPI 47
(Hello? Hello?
I’ve lost the controls!
Linda? Linda?
Linda, I’m blowing up!
Oh shit, I’ll have to put all the pieces of me back together myself!32)
Here Loretta’s abject body articulates through its brokenness the con-
sequences of being alone, being other, as she is forced to make herself
over. The loss of control literally breaks Loretta down and blows her up:
her marginality is a distinct operational hazard. In Taylor’s English trans-
lation of the play, Copi’s “control” is objectified, made tangible by the
“lost controls” that seem to lead to Loretta’s social/spatial fragmentation.
Rosenzvaig’s description of Loretta Strong as Copi’s “most childish play”
seems spot on in this case: losing a remote control is irresponsible and
typical of young children.
However, the parallel between Strong’s actions and those of children
strips the context of some of its significance. Rosenzvaig explains that,
as in children’s games, in Loretta Strong “[u]na mesa puede ser una
cápsula espacial; un teléfono, un sacacorchos y un revolver de plástico,
una metralleta intergaláctica. Todo está permitido en el mundo de
los niños. El futuro remoto brinda con el pasado remoto; la frontera
es la infancia” (a table can be a space capsule; a telephone a bottle-
opener, and a plastic hand-gun an intergalactic firearm. Everything is
possible in the world of children. The remote future binds with the
remote past; the border is childhood).33 Children are viewed nega-
tively in Rosenzvaig’s analysis as underdeveloped, unrealistic; yet, if
we accept Strong’s behavior as similarly childish, we can do so only in
the sense that childhood embodies, as Rosenzvaig suggests, a liminal
space, defined by anxious glances toward adulthood. In this context,
the child’s desire to grow up, its uncomfortable place within “devel-
opment” and its eagerness to mature—to arrive at a particular end
point—parallels Strong’s position on the margins of normative (adult)
society.
Despite her confusion and her desire to stay connected with Linda,
Loretta Strong never does reach her destination. She never does plant her
gold or reap the rewards of economic stability and community networks.
Just past the halfway mark in her trek through social marginalization,
Loretta Strong decides to stay put.
48 M.J. EDWARDS
—¡Ya no se ve!
—¡Voy a cambiar de canal!
—¿Bueno, bueno, bueno, Linda?
—¿Qué dice?
—¡Está loca esa mujer!
—¿Qué intermedio?
—¡No hay intermedio! (108)
—¡Tome las pepitas de oro y váyase sola a comprar sus helados, yo me quedo
aquí a leer el programa!
—¡Ay, cállese, y váyase sola!
—¡Señorita, un helado!
—¿Dónde estará?
—¡Es sorda!
—¿Me oye?
—¡No grite así!
—¡Señorita un helado!
—¿Bueno, bueno, bueno, bueno?
—¡No sé, Linda, no sé!
…
—¿Bueno? ¿Bueno?
—¡Voy a entrar de nuevo!35
(Take the nuggets and go and buy yourself a choc ice! I’ll stay here and read
the program!
Oh, shut up, and go by yourself!
One choc ice, please, Miss!
Where is she?
Miss?
She’s deaf!
Can you hear me?
Don’t shout like that!
One choc ice, please, Miss!
Hello, hello, hello, hello?
I don’t know, Linda, I don’t know!
(…)
Hello? Hello?
I’m coming back!36)
(CON)TEXTUAL INTERESTS
César Aira’s 1988 lecture series, “Cómo leer a Copi,” formally confirmed
public interest, on a regional level, in Copi’s artistic production. However,
interest itself in Copi was at this point nothing new. The success and rapid
international distribution of Copi’s cartoons alone provides a measure
of the energy that surrounded Copi’s work from early on in his career.
In France, the popularity of Copi’s cartoons was reflected in numerous
Parisian magazines. After initial publication in Le Nouvel Observateur in
1964, Copi’s cartoons were seen in Hari-Kiri and Charlie Hebdo in 1972,
in Libération in 1979, and in Gai Pied in 1984; over the same period, his
work was compiled in five French editions: L’humour secret (1965), Les
poulet n’ont pas des chaises (1966), Le dernier salon où l’on cause (1973),
Et moi, pourquoi j’ai pas une banane? (1975), Le monde fantastique de
gay (1986). The simultaneous and overlapping nature of Copi’s cartoon
production suggests that his work was a frantically consumed and sought-
after good. People wanted to look at his cartoons, read his stories. Copi’s
Seated Woman gained international acclaim, quickly crossing the Atlantic
and appearing in New York’s Evergreen Review, a literary magazine that
published authors like Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Malcolm
X, as well as English translations of works by Antonin Artaud, Roland
Barthes, Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges, and
Pablo Neruda. In 1969, Copi’s first English-language compilation was
released by Grove Press. When his 1976 presentation of Loretta Strong as
part of the bicentennial celebrations in New York’s Off-Broadway theater
district is placed alongside these textual success stories, it is clear that Copi
was a vital object of interest.37
INTERESTED IN COPI 51
Copi’s first novel, Le bal des folles (The Queen’s Ball), also illustrates this
phenomenon. In this work, Copi himself proves to be advertently aware
and conscious of the appeal of his marginal discourses, subjects, and sto-
rylines.38 He serves as both author and protagonist, welcoming followers
to join his adventure in love, passion, violence, and literature, in a process
that identifies social, judicial, and sexual marginality as points of increasing
cultural interest.
The story begins in Paris, approximately a week before October 16,
1976—the day the author claims to have finished this novel. Immediately,
Copi is confronted by his editor, who is seeking reimbursement for a loan
and wants Copi to hurry the production of his next novel as repayment.
The editor expresses his desire to publish a novel about homosexuality
and, more specifically, about Copi’s intimate relationship with a lover
named Pierre, who has just recently passed away. This opening sequence
brings with it a thematic orientation, a prologue of sorts that locates inter-
est in Copi’s art within a market-driven framework where celebrity is not
only assigned according to profit gained, but according to the author’s
knowledge of and ability to convey queer experiences.
According to Copi’s editor, queerness sells—and it surely did in post-
1968 Paris. In The Pink and the Black: Homosexuals in France Since 1968
(1999), Frédéric Martel describes the search for a revolutionary means of
understanding sexual equality as a hypersexualization of the gay self. In
particular, citing activist and author Guy Hocquenghem, Martel describes
sex as a discursive focal point within homosexual communities during this
historic moment:
love lost. The editor’s original petition helps to understand the interest
identified by Copi as both financially and culturally motivated.
While interest in homosexuality helped inspire the public’s enthu-
siasm for Copi’s work, the initial sequence of Le bal des folles outlines
a marginal identity that extends well beyond the author-protagonist’s
sexuality. After his conversation with the editor, Copi recalls his rela-
tionship with Pierre and mourns his lover’s death. It quickly becomes
evident that the outlined publication terms are not welcome. “¿Una
novela sobre homosexuales? ¿Pierre en una novela sobre homosexuales?
Me siento indignado. Salgo de casa de mi editor decidido a no escri-
birla” (A novel about homosexuals? Pierre in a novel about homosexu-
als? I feel outraged. I leave the editor’s home having decided not to
write it.).40 Copi’s disregard for his editor’s proposal reveals him to be
defiant not only of traditional authority figures but also of the pressures
of economic solvency. Neither debt nor unemployment worries Copi.
In place of these dominant frameworks, Copi provides a different set
of guidelines: one that not only changes the projection of the story to
be told but also expands, and breaks through, any structural walls that
would otherwise stand in the way of how his protagonist defines himself
socially. Copi explains: “Estás a punto de inventarte una novela para
ti solo.(…) ¿Hay algo más íntimo que la novela de Pierre? El cuerpo
de Pierre, pienso” (You are about to invent a novel just for you…Is
there anything more intimate than a novel about Pierre? Pierre’s body,
I think.).41 Traditional social narratives are clearly judged unable to
tell the story of the author-protagonist’s intimate relationship with
Pierre; indeed, at the beginning of the third chapter (titled Confesión,
“Confession”), Copi formally notifies the reader that this novel, its
author, and, consequently, its readers, will follow a different path.42
Les diré de antemano que lo que van a leer es una novela policíaca, que hay
varios crímenes y dos culpables, pero nada de policía (es algo que no soporto
en las novelas policiales) y por tanto, tampoco castigo. Y aquí lo que les
propongo para el primer día de trabajo (pues ustedes van a trabajar conmigo
en busca del placer cuando los crímenes ocurran, sin que les proponga, por
supuesto, otro placer que el completamente intelectual).43
(I’ll tell you right now that what you are about to read is a detective
novel, there are a few crimes, a couple of guilty parties, but no police [it’s
something that I just can’t stand in detective novels] and as a result, neither
INTERESTED IN COPI 53
is there punishment. And this is what I am proposing for the first day of
work [well, you are going to work with me in the search for pleasure when
these crimes take place, without me proposing to you, of course, any other
pleasure that the purely intellectual].)
Here, Copi distances himself and his work from his editor’s proposed the-
matics. However, this move does not detract nor dissuade from society’s
investment in his story. On the contrary, as Copi deviates from the edito-
rial guidelines, his text becomes more explicitly desirable and dependent
upon public interest. Instead of a tale of homosexuality, love and desire,
Copi writes about (and stars in) a tale of crime, confession, and guilt. This
symbolic shift from identification as gay to identification as guilty, despite
his assurance of the absence of such a social qualifier, deliberately associ-
ates both queer sexuality and Copi’s own work with an encompassing
marginality—one that includes all social spheres, not just gender or sexu-
ality. This shift in genre also explicitly includes and implicates the reader,
and the editor himself, in the telling of queer tales, naming them as private
investigator, priest, and judge to Copi’s criminal acts and confessions of
(homosexual) sins.
As the above fragment illustrates, Copi’s narrative openly addresses
the reader as an active and necessary participant, very different from
the silent voyeur imagined by the editor. For Copi, it is the reader that
gives his story narrative and textual cohesion. In fact, after explain-
ing that this text is his third attempt at telling his tale,44 Copi insists
that the reader not only doubt the foundation of this very text, but
also doubt the authority associated with authorship itself. The possibil-
ity that the text being read is the third of three versions deliberately
raises doubts in the readers’ minds—about the existence of additional
versions, about the validity of the information conveyed—and lends a
fleeting quality to Copi’s tale. The ambiguity surrounding the text as
a changing document emphasizes not only the varying levels of author-
ity that exist in the creation of literary texts, but also the meaning and
truth behind social, sexual, and judicial guilt. The reader is directed to
question the significance of the missing prior versions and the extent
to which Copi’s desires are being met in the present version. What
has altered the content of the version at hand? While Copi declares
his inability to clearly recall the prior versions of his story, the lack of
continuity between texts alters the very definition of a “version,” and
54 M.J. EDWARDS
Son las noticias de la una. Desde la edición de las once del France-Soir
Marilyn ha doblado a su madre en popularidad, no han descubierto todavía
que es su hija. Si, en las informaciones de última hora: ¡la francesa encerrada
en Roma por tráfico de drogas es la hija de la vidente de Bd. Magenta! Por
informaciones marginales se descubre que la francesa ha sido actriz, pasan
un trailer de sus películas publicitarias con la boa. ¿Estén relacionados ambos
casos? ¡Sí! Noticia de última hora: el asesino de la madre parece ser el marido
de la francesa encarcelada. Un salto bastante inesperado, el presentador no
sabe muy bien cómo tomarlo: hay que improvisar para poner a videntes
y traficantes de drogas juntos en una misma noticia, eso no se ha hecho
nunca. Pronto encuentran el lazo de unión: yo. Un dibujante humorístico
completamente drogado, enseñan diapositivas de mis dibujos, una foto del
café-teatro en que he trabajado de travestí, otra foto vestido de oso en una
fiesta, otra mía de pequeño en una playa, ninguna se me parece, por este
lado no tengo que temer.47
(It’s the one o’clock news. Since the eleven o’clock edition in France-Soir,
Marylin has become twice as popular as her mother, although they haven’t
56 M.J. EDWARDS
discovered that she is her daughter. Yes, they have now, in a news flash:
The French woman jailed in Rome for drug trafficking is the daughter of
the clairvoyant from Magenta Blvd! Marginal sources reveal that she was
an actress—they show a trailer of her promotional films with her boa. Are
these two cases related? Yes! An update reveals the mother’s murderer seems
to be the husband of the jailed French lady. An unexpected turn; the news
broadcaster doesn’t quite know how to take it: one has to improvise in order
to place fortune-tellers in the same news piece as drug traffickers, this has
never been done before. Soon they discover the point of connection: me. A
completely high cartoonist, they show slides of my drawings, a picture of the
café-theater where I have worked in drag, another of me at a party dressed as
a bear, one of my own of when I was little, at the beach, none of them looks
like me; in this regard, I have nothing to worry about.)
seminars push us to read Copi, to access his books, anthologies, and news-
print cartoons and get lost in the blurred lines of marginal subjectivities.
By accessing Copi’s work, Aira argues, we can use the marginal subjectivity
he speaks of as a point of departure from which to understand dominant
social frameworks and reflect critically on their impact.
NOTES
1. Beatriz Sarlo, Tiempo Pasado: Cultura de la memoria y giro subjetivo,
una discusión (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno, 2005), 17–8.
2. It should be noted that the title of both book and lecture reflect an aware-
ness of the interplay between reading and subjectivity. In the lecture we
are learning “how to read Copi,” where reading is in direct reference to
interpretation and understanding. In the book, in order to access Aira’s
discussion of Copi, we must literally read the book entitled Copi. The
clever detail of this symbolic transference insists on the relevance of the
themes.
3. César Aira, Copi (Buenos Aires: Beatriz Viterbo, 1991).
4. Raúl Damonte Taborda, Ayer fue san Perón, 12 años de humillación argen-
tina (Buenos Aires: Gure, 1955). Included in Damonte Taborda’s book-
length essay is a series of newspaper editorials that document his exchanges
with Perón.
5. Copi, “Man in Bottle,” Tía Vicenta, 2, no 29 (1958). (title is mine).
6. Copi, “Cow in Military Garb,” Tía Vicenta, 2, no 30 (1958). (title is
mine).
7. For additional images, see Edgardo Russo, In La historia de Tía Vicente,
(Buenos Aires: Espasa Calpe, 1995), 47, 144–47.
8. Copi, “Milk,” Tía Vicenta, 2, no 32 (1958). (title is mine).
9. Copi, “Pacifier,” Tía Vicenta, 2, no 36 (1958). (title is mine).
10. Copi, “Masked woman,” Tía Vicenta, 2, no 28 (1958). (title is mine).
11. Susana Freire, “Un trono para ‘La mujer sentada’,” LANACION.com :
Archivos, Espectáculos, March 21 (1998). Web. Feb. 15, 2007.
12. The cartoons originally appeared in Le Nouvel Observateur between 1964
and 1966. They were reunited in Les poulet n’ont pas de chaises (Paris:
Denoël, 1966). This edition was reproduced in Los pollos no tienen sillas
(Buenos Aires: El cuenco de la plata, 2012), using translations into Spanish
by Copi. The English compilation of the same name, Chickens don’t have
chairs (New York: Grove Press, 1969) does not reproduce the same com-
ics as the earlier editions. For the purpose of this study, I use the Spanish
edition of the collection; I include my own translations into English when
necessary.
58 M.J. EDWARDS
13. Copi, Los pollos no tienen sillas (Bueno Aires: El cuento de plata, 2012),
10–1. (And why don’t I have a chair? / Chickens don’t have chairs / But
you are always sitting down / And who is it that makes the people laugh?
/ Me / I am the one that makes the people laugh! / Let’s see? / )
14. Copi, Los pollos, 68–9. (Shh, we’re already in the drawing! / Do some-
thing funny! / No / But we’re going to lose our job! / You do something
funny! / Boo! Boo! Boo! / I told you!).
15. See Eduardo Romano, “¿Y usted de qué se ríe?” El interpretador, 30 (2007),
http://www.elinterpretador.net/30EduardoRomano-YUstedDeQueSeRie.
html. Romano comments on this same strip as he draws attention to the act
of enunciation: that is, to say, that the critical moment of the comic lies in its
circular nature: it begins and ends on the same question of how to make people
laugh. As Romano suggests, the circular nature of this strip also points
toward the presence of a narrative that literally falls back onto (and watches)
itself.
16. Copi, Los pollos, 31–2 (Are you a chicken or a duck? / Can’t you tell that
I am a pheasant? / Of course I can!).
17. Copi, Les poulets, np.
18. Copi, Los pollos, 16–7 (Oh, my little hook’s worm is so delicious).
19. David Bradby and Maria M. Delgado, The Paris Jigsam: Internationalism
and the City’s Stages (Manchester: Manchester UniversityPress, 2002), 4.
20. Frédéric Martel, The Pink and the Black: Homosexuals in France Since
1968. Trans. Jane Marie Todd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999),
90.
21. Marcos Rosenzvaig, Copi: sexo y teatralidad (Buenos Aires: Bilbos, 2003),
17.
22. Rosenzvaig, Copi: sexo y teatralidad, 21.
23. It must be noted that the Spanish translation of Loretta Strong being used
here was provided by Luis Zapata and uses Mexican idioms. Unlike the
majority of Copi’s work, which was published in Spanish by Barcelona’s
Anagrama, this version of Loretta Strong is part of the recent boom of
translations of Copi’s texts published by independent presses in Argentina
(Adriana Hidalgo, El Interpretador, Mansalva) and Mexico (Milagro).
24. José Tcherkaski, Habla Copi: homosexualidad y creación (Buenos Aires:
Galerna, 1998), 79.
25. This fragment of the interview suggests that Copi himself directed the first
showing of Loretta Strong. However, Luis Zapata, in his Spanish transla-
tion, as well as Copi’s own brother Jorge Damonte, both cite Javier Botana
as director (117).
26. Copi, “Loretta Strong,” El homosexual o la dificultad de expresarse, Trans.
Luis Zapata (Mexico: El Milagro, 2004), 89.
INTERESTED IN COPI 59
27. Copi, “Loretta Strong” Plays Volume 1, Trans. Anni Lee Taylor (London:
John Calder, 1976), 99.
28. Luis Zapata, “Copi más vivo que nunca,” El homosexual o la dificultad de
expresarse. By Copi (Mexico: El Milagro, 2004), 12.
29. Copi, “Loretta Strong,” 90.
30. Copi, “Loretta Strong,” Trans. Anni Lee Taylor, 100.
31. Copi, “Loreta Strong,” 102.
32. Copi, “Loreta Strong,” Trans. Anni Lee Taylor, 113.
33. Rosenzvaig, Copi: sexo y teatralidad, 113.
34. Copi, “Loretta Strong,” Trans. Anni Lee Taylor, 118.
35. Copi, “Loretta Strong,” 114.
36. Copi, “Loretta Strong,” Trans. Anni Lee Taylor, 125–6.
37. See “Play Lists 1976, June 17,” La Mama ETC Archives, http://www.
lamama.org/archives/year_lists/1976page.htm.
38. Copi, Le bal des folles (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1999). I work with the
Spanish version and provide my own English translations. See Copi, El
baile de las locas, 3rd Ed. Trans. Alberto Cardín and Biel Mesquida
(Barcelona: Anagrama, 2000).
39. Martel, The Pink and the Black, 47.
40. Copi, El baile, 13.
41. Ibid.
42. The twelve chapters of Copi’s novel are all given titles. In order of appear-
ance, they are: Pietro Gentiluomo, Confesión (Confession), La rival (The
Rival), La serpiente de Nueva York (The Snake from New York), Ibiza, La
bola de cristal (The Cristal Ball), El Mediterráneo (The Mediterranean),
Rue des Tríos-Portes (Tríos-Portes Road), treinta y tres (Thirty-three), El
vapor (Vapor), La amnesia (Amnesia), Con el corazón en la mano (With
My Heart in My Hand), La última pissotiere (The Last Pissotiere). The
titles themselves guide our reading of the novel in thematic blocks and
attest to the fragmented quality of the text.
43. Copi, El baile, 19.
44. Copi, El baile, 7.
45. Copi, El baile, 16.
46. Ibid.
47. Copi, El baile, 106.
48. Copi, El baile, 121.
CHAPTER 3
HEARING DISABILITY
Manuel Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña (Kiss of the Spider Woman)
(1976) takes place within the intimate confines of a prison cell and tells
the story of two men, Valentin and Molina, who have been condemned
for their respective political and sexual dissidence. For Valentin, the leftist
revolutionary, and Molina, an openly gay man, incarceration represents
an explicit obstacle. They are forced to be there, and forced to stay. Their
condemnation and identification as dangerous subjects removes them
from normative social engagement and literally marks them unable, dis-
abled, and unfit to be seen in the public sphere. Their jail cell does not
simply limit their actions: it hides them, covers the two men over, shad-
ing them from view. It is a space of juxtaposition, forcing its inmates to
confront the dichotomy between in and out, public and private, marginal
and dominant; the prison’s walls, hallways, and windows make explicit the
limitations of these socially disabled individuals and insist that marginal-
ization depends upon their discursive and physical inability to cross over.
Manuel Puig’s decision to engage, to share these inmates’ marginal
story—that is, their story of marginality—highlights the discursive, ideo-
logical, and geographic distances that separate dominant traditions from
social alterity. In joining the prisoners’ respective political antagonism and
sexual marginalization and pairing them against the overarching cultural
hierarchy (represented here as the penitentiary system), Puig necessarily
—A ella se le ve que algo raro tiene, que no es una mujer como otras. Parece
muy jovén, de unas veinticinco años cuanto más, una cara un poco de gata,
la nariz chica, respingada, el corte de cara es… más redondo que ovalado,
la frente ancha, los cachetes también grandes pero que después se van para
abajo en punta, como los gatos.
—¿Y los ojos?3
(—Something a little strange, that’s what you notice, that she’s not a woman
like all the others. She looks fairly young, twenty-five, maybe a little more,
petite face, a little catlike, small turned-up nose. The shape of her face, it’s…
more roundish than oval, broad forehead, pronounced cheeks too but then
they come down to a point, like with cats.
—What about her eyes?)4
By opening his novel with this fragment, the author immediately distances
himself from the structural and thematic framework of the prison narra-
tive. In its lack of narrative contextualization and dramatic scaffolding,
the unmediated dialogue positions Puig—and with him, the institutions
of authorship, traditional authority, and the able body—on the outside of
prison-cell communication, marginal discourse, and disabled community
structures. The prison walls negate the participation of the omniscient nar-
rator and erase the stabilizing effects of stage directions as Puig is reduced
to a scribe for this already established conversation.
Emilio de Ípola describes prison-house communication, in his book
La bemba: acerca del rumor carcelario, as a fragmented process dependent
upon the untimely, paused, and interrupted circulation of information
from one cell to another. During Argentina’s most recent military dicta-
torship, spanning from 1976 to 1983, prison life was decidedly marked by
misinformation, as well as by rigid norms of order and conduct that insisted
upon a variable, unsure, and unpredictable existence for the prisoner. De
Ípola understands rumor, in this context, as both an escape and a trap: it
provided the possibility of working against systematized disinformation
64 M.J. EDWARDS
disseminated by the authorities while at the same time capturing the pris-
oner within its seductive communicative network.5 Rumor itself includes
the creation and circulation of a message that changes constantly accord-
ing to its usefulness: as a rumor becomes irrelevant it is thrown away,
forgotten, but never ceases to exist.
In Puig’s prison, however, there is no circulation of messages and
meaning, and definitively no contact between inmates beyond the cell’s
walls. The conversation between the two protagonists is uniquely private
and structured. Throughout the novel, the two men’s time in the cell
is largely uninterrupted. The story that is told centers around Molina’s
memory narrative, which recreates six different films.6 Rather than pres-
ent prison life as chaotic, Puig’s tale projects communicative tranquil-
ity, social engagement, and ideological intermingling. Although, like de
Ípola’s rumor, Puig’s prison narrative rejects authority, it becomes a dis-
cursive space around which the two cellmates define survival as collabora-
tive within the crippling grasp of authority.
In the Argentine context, authority has traditionally gone hand in hand
with elite notions of authorship. According to Doris Sommer, narrative
was conceived as a temporal building block in Argentina’s subjective foun-
dation, where “writers were encouraged both by the need to fill in a his-
tory that would help to establish the legitimacy of the emerging nation
and by the opportunity to direct that history toward a future ideal.”7
Nineteenth-century intellectuals such as Juan Bautista Alberdi, Esteban
Echevarria, and José Mármol, together with former president Domingo
Faustino Sarmiento, represented the lettered struggle to mold their ideal-
izing words around the concept of a true, modern Argentine nation. The
authors and politicians, united in one figure, populated this empty socio-
political space by naming and identifying a new community via a symbolic
system that they themselves created. Julio Ramos adds that “writing—by
its general and homogenizing operation—remained a fundamental model
for the rational(izing) project.”8 The intellectual’s role has traditionally
been to establish and reinforce social difference in order to help progress,
and project the nation toward a promising, modern future.
However, the story that emanates from Puig’s prison cell clearly pro-
hibits such a narrative role from developing. Instead of penning the path
toward (post)modernization, Puig removes himself from the narration
altogether—and, in doing so, allows for shared storytelling and narra-
tive collaboration to emerge as counterpoints to normative traditions. In
the initial sequence cited above, Valentin listens to his cellmate recreate
DISABLED ATTRACTIONS IN KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN 65
Jacques Tourneur’s 1942 film, Cat People, in which a young woman dis-
covers that she is part woman, part feline, and belongs to a community
of “cat people’” from eastern Europe. As the dialogue continues, the two
protagonists work together to build the storyline, contextualizing it, add-
ing relevance and necessary insight. Molina’s story follows the young lady
to the zoo, where she intends to draw one of its animals, a panther. As
she approaches the cage, the animal begins to pace and become anxious.
Valentin interjects: “¿El animal no la puede oler antes?/—No, porque en
la jaula tiene un enorme pedazo de carne, es lo único que puede oler. El
guardián le pone la carne cerca de las rejas, y no puede entrar ningún olor
de afuera, a propósito para que la pantera no se alborote,”9 (“Couldn’t
the animal smell her before that?/—No, there’s a big slab of meat in the
cage, that’s all it can smell. The keeper drops the meat near the bars, and it
blocks out any smell from outside, that’s the point, so the panther won’t
get excited.”10). As the protagonists collaborate, the storyline becomes
thicker; the additional details deepen the narrative trajectory, adding wig-
gle room and multiple points of interest and reflection to the filmic repre-
sentation. Here, collaboration is shown to be loose, accommodating, and
spacious, in juxtaposition to the thin, tight trajectory plotted by authority
and authorship.
Molina’s capacity to tell the story “as he sees it” reveals a way of engag-
ing subjectivity and social difference outside any fixed, definitive structure.
The story of the cat-woman advances through intermittent question-and-
answer sessions, moments of doubt and reconciliation, and, at times,
discord between the two cellmates. However, with each subsequent inter-
jection and each exchange, Molina and Valentin fold parts of themselves
into the movie that is being told. Their piecemeal autobiographies reach
a climax as Molina attempts to describe the relationship that has formed
between the cat-woman and a young, handsome architect. As he is try-
ing to explain to Valentin why the couple cannot become romantically
involved, Valentin asks him: “—Vos te das cuenta de lo que pasa, ¿no?”11
(“—You get what’s going on, don’t you?”12). This question interrupts
the movie and prefaces a tangential discussion about how to narrate a
story from two different perspectives. Valentin follows his initial question
with the following justification for his interruption: “—No, me gusta la
película, pero es que vos te divertís contándola y por ahí también yo qui-
ero intervenir un poco, ¿te das cuenta? No soy un tipo que sepa escuchar
demasiado, ¿sabés, no?, y de golpe me tengo que estarte escuchando cal-
lado horas,”13 (“No, I like the picture, but you have the fun of telling it
66 M.J. EDWARDS
and I just want to chime in once in a while too, see what I mean? I’m not
the type who knows how to sit around and just listen all the time, you get
what I mean? And all of a sudden I have to sit quiet, listening hours on
end.”14). For the first time, Valentin expresses his interest in participating
in the movie’s narration in explicit terms. He wants an active role in this
memory narrative. Valentin enjoys expressing his opinion on all sorts of
events and issues. He is an opinionated sort of person. He must speak. He
must be heard. Valentin’s insistence on participation with the collective
formation of this filmic representation therefore goes hand in hand with
who he is. His desire to participate is exactly that: a desire and a character
trait that now defines him. In this sense, Molina’s movie narrative has
become an emergent means for another marginalized, silenced voice to be
heard and understood.
Molina’s response to Valentin’s inquiry and sought-after participation
is likewise revealing. With it, we not only gain insight into the explicit
function of the filmic recreation but we also witness an essential piece
of Molina’s own person. To Valentin’s request, Molina responds, “—Yo
creí que te servía para entretenerte, y agarrar el sueño,”15 (“I thought it
helped you pass the time, and fall asleep.”16). The memory narrative—
indeed, the entire interaction between the two cellmates—is understood
by Molina here as an escape from their imprisonment. But the story does
not merely penetrate the jailhouse walls: it suggests a space for happi-
ness and rest within the confines of the prison cell. Molina’s response to
Valentin implies that, without the movie narrative, neither happiness nor
rest is possible. It also reveals his own perceived role within this evasion of
normative limitations. Molina sees himself as an access point to a differ-
ent world—a world where pleasure and relaxation counter the effects of
legal punishment. He also considers himself to be providing access to this
same world for his cellmate: pleasure and relaxation are dependent upon
Molina’s accommodation and servitude within the storytelling role. While
Valentín wants to speak, Molina wants to serve, to help and to accom-
modate his cellmate. In this way, the movie narrative represents a scaf-
fold upon which each cellmate creates his own story, and, in effect, his
own way of engaging with and understanding their subjective formation.
The movie that is created through this process offers a drastic counter to
the prisoners’ own real life stories and their tale of social marginalization.
Personal history and fiction offer mutual points of access to and engage-
ment with each other’s worlds.
DISABLED ATTRACTIONS IN KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN 67
—Let’s see…I don’t know, a really good person. A lovely lady, who gave her
husband every happiness and her children too, always managing everything
perfectly.
—Do you picture her doing housework?
—No, I see her as impeccably attired, a dress with a high collar, edged in
lace to cover the wrinkles in her neck. She has the marvelous thing of certain
respectable ladies, which is that little touch of coquettishness, beneath all
the properness, on account of her age, but what you notice about them is
the way they go on being women and wanting to please.
—Yes, always impeccable. Perfect. She has her servants, she exploits people
who can’t do anything else but serve her, for a few pennies. And clearly,
she felt very happy with her husband, who in turn exploited her, forced her
to do whatever he wanted, keeping her cooped up in a house like a slave,
waiting for him—
—Listen…
—waiting for him every night, until he got back from his law-firm, or from
his doctor’s office. And she was in perfect agreement with the whole system,
and she didn’t rebel, and she fed her own son the same crap and now the son
runs smack into the panther woman. Good luck with that one.18)
The collective reconstructed narrative of the movie opens the doors of the
prison cell and allows the cellmates to lose themselves in a captive story
that reveals not only the mysterious romance between a New Yorker and a
mythical cat-woman but also each of the protagonists’ own personal histo-
ries. In this excerpt, Molina’s original description of the male protagonist’s
mother matches his own set of ideals. The woman he describes is neither
a part of the movie narrative nor his own past, but instead a reflection of
what he deems to be the perfect elderly woman. His description of her is
a part of himself, and discussing the film periodically with Valentín allows
this information to decorate the original storyline, to make its characters
larger, more complex, as they become parts of Molina himself.
Valentin, likewise, complicates and expands the storyline with his inter-
jections. In this case, the ironic tone attached to his words—describing the
mother as part of an unjust socioeconomic structure—attacks Molina and
diverts the trajectory of the movie, inscribing its telling within a context of
inequality and social revolution. Valentin’s interjection redirects the nar-
rative experience and overlays the calm, happy, carefree state Molina has
crafted with the complex consequences of social hierarchies. As he injects
his bile into the narrative, the film’s images dissolve and the two pro-
tagonists are brought back to the cell that holds them. Valentin no longer
DISABLED ATTRACTIONS IN KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN 69
wishes to engage with Molina, but instead wants to enlighten him and shift
his seemingly confused social perspective. He begins this undertaking by
insisting that he knows everything about his cellmate, even without having
been told anything at all.19 “—Bueno, te conté que estoy acá por corrup-
ción de menores, con eso te dije todo, no la vayas de psicólogo ahora,”20
(“Well, I told you what I’m in for, corruption of minors, and that tells
it all, so don’t start playing the psychologist now.”21). Both Molina and
Valentin understand what “corrupting minors” means. It is part of a social
code that they know well and recognize as part of the normative clas-
sification and condemnation of homosexuality. Valentin continues their
discussion by inserting Molina into the plot structure. “—Vamos, confesá
que te gusta porque fuma en pipa,”22 (“—Come on, admit it, you like him
because he smokes a pipe,”23), he asserts with regard to the architect. At
this point, the movie narrative has become inseparable from the discussion
of contemporary social frameworks. And when Valentin takes over the
narration the next day, the movie is confirmed as a space for collaboration,
cohabitation, and debate.
Here Molina’s fiction creates an imagined space where the cellmates coex-
ist. Like the jail cell itself, the movie narrative incorporates and houses
Valentin’s subversive political ideology as well as Molina’s homosexual
desire. And while the sharing of (narrative) space is not always marked by
happiness—indeed, it is more often mired in frustration and debate—the
storyline proves accommodating. Collaboration allows for the incomplete
story to go on, for the two cellmates to engage with their marginal posi-
tioning, and for the boundaries imposed by normative regulations to be
perforated: for life to continue.
Puig’s novel is an exercise in the praxis of marginal engagement—
and of the ways in which ex-centric subjects insert themselves into social
DISABLED ATTRACTIONS IN KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN 71
After briefly reassuring Molina that his memory will return, Valentin
becomes immediately engaged with the fragmented narrative. Even before
Molina begins his attempt to reconstruct the remaining pieces of the film,
his sketch of events excites his cellmate. Valentin is truly engaged with the
narrative, and yet does nothing to complete it, to fill Molina’s missing sec-
tions. In fact, the empty spaces, the sketchy overview of events provides
Valentín with a place of entry, a spot to participate.
72 M.J. EDWARDS
The movie continues uninterrupted over the next two pages. Here,
Molina describes with strange precision how the cat-woman discovers that
her now-husband is having an affair and turns into a panther to avenge this
wrongdoing. During the episode, Valentín becomes notably distracted:
The scripted dialogue makes explicit the theatricality of the interclass social
engagement in which each participant is rigidly positioned according to
status and access to power. The classificatory tags that name their roles
mark this scene as a telegraphed social theater that subjugates each charac-
ter, always already, within a set of preestablished standards and guidelines.
Personal names are rendered irrelevant as social roles govern the situation
and predetermine each actor’s actions and attitudes within preestablished
cultural codes.
Within this structure, only the powerful move and have the ability to
move others. Unlike in the prison cell, where there is no mobility, no
chance to change or be changed—where disabilities are permanent—
on the outside, (hetero)normativity permits and requires movement. In
the warden’s office, allegiance to dominant traditions is represented in
the coming and going of information. Molina is asked to infiltrate the
local leftist rebellion by reporting details of the group’s whereabouts, its
members, and its future projects (gleaned from his cellmate, Valentín)
to the warden. In return, the warden promises freedom, thereby con-
firming mobility as a desired accessory. Here, the heterosexual framework
becomes the only path to follow.
When the warden suggests that the meeting should be explained to
Valentín as a visit from Molina’s mother in order to keep the real deal a
DISABLED ATTRACTIONS IN KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN 79
secret, Molina protests that his mother’s visits come accompanied with
parcels and packets of food, goods, and supplies. The warden immediately
takes down a list of groceries to buy.
Here, Molina feels right at home. The pensive tempo of his speech,
punctuated by pauses, suggests a relaxed atmosphere as he gives way to
change, modification, and correction—in contradiction to his name-tag,
“Procesado,” which recalls his marginalized role within this drama as a
social outcast. As the sequence progresses, the office space gives way to
the domestic sphere, where Molina and the warden share the duties of the
prison-house. In this reading, the warden does the shopping and Molina is
left to care for the prisoners, to watch over them and to report any wrong-
doings, making of the jailhouse a traditional domicile, with the dominant
heterosexual male atop power relations as patriarch to cultural interaction.
This holy matrimony soon comes to a close, though, when Puig’s prison
narrative reasserts itself and the thread of the story reverts once more to
marginality. Upon Molina’s return to the cell, all his obligations to the war-
den seem to disappear as the package of groceries he requested is coopted
to care for his ill cellmate (whose food has been poisoned by the prison
authorities as a measure to improve the gathering of intelligence). Rather
than further the persecution of counterculture insurgency, the groceries
give life to and nourish an ill Valentin, completely disabled by dominant
80 M.J. EDWARDS
KISSING IN THE DARK
Upon his cellmate’s return, Valentin immediately understands the arrival
of the supplies as evidence of Molina’s mother’s visit. Although he con-
tinues to recover from his last bout of diarrhea (induced by the prison’s
intentionally contaminated food), Valentin expresses his eagerness to
share in the excitement of taking inventory, together. The scene is one of
collective joy and excitement, where the sharing of resources and the giv-
ing of gifts reconstructs the communal nature of the work done together
narrating Molina’s films.
—Callate vos, apestado. Hoy acá se empieza una nueva vida, con las sábanas
casi secas, tocá…Y todo esto para comer. Mirá, dos pollos al espiedo, dos,
¿qué me contás? Y los pollos son para vos, eso no te puede hacer mal, vas a
ver que enseguida te componés.
—Jamás lo voy a permitir.
—Hacelo por mí, prefiero no comer pollo pero salvarme de tus olores,
inmundo de porquería…. No, en serio, te lo digo, vos tenés que dejar de
comer esta puta comida de acá y vas a ver que te componés. Por lo menos
hacé la prueba dos días.
—¿Te parece?...
—Claro, hombre. Y ya cuando estés bien…cerrá los ojos, Valentín, a ver si
adivinás. Decí.
—Qué sé yo…no sé…
—No abras los ojos. Esperate que te doy a tocar a ver si caés. A ver…tocá.
—Dos tarros…Y pesaditos. Me doy por vencido.
—Abrí los ojos.
—¡Dulce de leche!
—Pero para eso hay que esperar, una vez que te sientas bien, y esto sí nos lo
comemos entre los dos.48
(—Look what I’ve got!
—No!...your mother came?...
—Yes!!!
—But how great…Then she’s feeling better.
—Mmm-hmm, a little better…And look at what she brought for me. I
mean, for us.
—Thanks, but all of that’s for you, no kidding.
—You be quiet, you’re convalescing, remember? Starting today a new life
begins…The sheets are almost dry, feel…and all this food to eat. Look, two
roast chickens, two, how about that? And chicken is perfect, it won’t upset
your stomach at all. Watch how fast you get better now.
—No, I won’t let you do that.
—Please take them. I don’t care for chicken anyway. I’ll just be glad to do
without any more stink from you and your barnyard…No, seriously, you
have to stop eating that damn stuff they feed us here. Then you’ll start feel-
ing better in no time. At least try it for a couple of days.
—You think so?...
—Absolutely. And once you’re better then…close your eyes, Valentin. See if
you can guess…Come on, try…
—How do I know? I don’t know…
—-No peeking. Wait, I’ll let you handle it to see whether you can guess.
Here…feel.
82 M.J. EDWARDS
This scene paints a clear contrast with the scripted interaction in the
warden’s office, where roles and responsibilities were sharply divided
according to the heteronormative framework in which the father/warden
frequents public places and the mother/Molina and her children/Valentin
are restricted to (prison)household lifestyles. In the prison cell, on the
margins of normative interactions, the disabled, immobilized prisoners are
safely separate from the able-bodied heteronormative subject, and their
joy, caregiving, collective movement (within local parameters), and com-
munal action can go undetected.
When Molina asks his cellmate to close his eyes in anticipation of the
best part, the two engage, objects are exchanged, and excitement shared.
Above and beyond Valentin’s euphoric reaction upon discovering the
delicious caramel spread (represented as a fruit-based treat in the English
translation to Puig’s text), this episode captures a moment in which an
undetectable affective relationship is established. The ellipses that scat-
ter Puig’s textual representation of the episode suggestively cover-over
Molina’s hiding of the special food, his movements toward Valentin, and
his passing of the jars to be assessed. Here Molina’s attentive care also
moves with the jars, just as Valentin gratefully receives much more than
food. After having unpacked and organized the bag’s contents, the two
establish dietary guidelines and begin to eat.
—Es que vos no sabés, después de los dolores me viene un vacío al estómago
que me muero de hambre.
—Escuchame, vamos a ver si nos entendemos. Yo quiero que te comas el
pollo, no, los pollos, los dos, con la condición de que no pruebes la comida
del penal, que es la que te hace mal, ¿trato hecho?
—De acuerdo. Pero y vos, ¿te quedás con las ganas?
—No, a mí la comida fría no me tienta. De veras.
........................
........................
—Sí, me cayó bien. Y fue buena idea la manzanilla más temprano.
—Te tranquilizó los nervios, ¿no es cierto? A mí también.50
DISABLED ATTRACTIONS IN KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN 83
(—But you don’t realize, my stomach feels so empty when the pains stop
that it’s like all of a sudden I’m starving.
—One minute, let’s get this straight. I expect you to eat the chicken, no,
chickens, both of them. One condition, though, that you don’t touch the
prison chow, which is making you so sick. Is it a deal?
—Okay…But what about you? I won’t let you just sit around and drool.
The two rows of dots in the original Spanish text, and the space left in
blank in the English translation, mark a pause in conversation, a silence
in the cell: a place of pure action. Although such pauses are scattered
frequently throughout Puig’s text, here the pause is uniquely symbolic;
here, the warden’s food is savored, shared back and forth, along with
smiles, nods, and helpful hands. As the plates are symbolically scrapped
clean, silence becomes subversive as the warden’s wishes are likewise swept
into the trash. In this context, the simple act of caring for the disabled,
of the two protagonists’ quietly filling their stomachs and hearts with
healthy food and loving gestures, is read as counterculture and distinctly
queer. Silent affect avoids detection and helps construct a local, intimate,
community-based social interaction in contrast to the cacophony of het-
eronormativity, with its logic of noise in which subjects are heard and their
words documented, traced, and scripted. In contrast to this normative
hubbub, the silence of this sequence permits queer feelings to flow, their
warmth supporting the disabled and mobilizing the marginalized subject
within a unique community outside the traditional social/family structure.
As the two prisoners enjoy their dinner, caregiving is confirmed as a
queer framework for social interaction. The cellmates’ silent affections
continue to separate prison lifestyle from dominant able-bodied culture
even when the meal comes to a close and Molina is informed that, despite
his insistent loyalty to his cellmate, he has been granted permission to
leave the prison and (re)enter public sphere. Freedom—going out into
the public sphere—no longer appeals to him; he is comfortable where he
is. “—No sé, tengo miedo de todo, tengo miedo de ilusionarme de que
me van a soltar, tengo miedo de que no me suelten. …Y de lo que más
miedo tengo es de que nos separen y me pongan en otra celda y me quede
ahí para siempre, con quién sabe qué atorrante…”52 (“I don’t know, I’m
84 M.J. EDWARDS
And in effect, Molina has nothing to hide. Valentín sees everything, as long
as he is by his side in the prison cell. Molina’s inability to express himself
is read as an insistence that this exchange be understood intimately, from
within the local, close-up, closed-up space of their cell. In this context,
words are, again, not enough. While Puig’s text envisions Molina covering
his face (maybe with his head in his lap?), its representation of marginal
interactions remains incomplete. The silences on the page imply that some-
thing is missing; the rest must be imagined, the ellipses decoded. Here,
silence and hiding go hand-in-hand and together insist on the separation
between marginal and dominant spaces, disabled and able-bodied textuali-
ties and systems of knowledge, queer and heterosexual frameworks.
In the prison cell, it is now nighttime and the lights have been turned
off. The two cellmates continue to discuss Molina’s possible departure
from the prison narrative and Valentin continues to sooth his cellmate’s
anxieties. Up until this moment, caregiving has been one-sided, with
Molina’s bedtime stories, grocery packages, and kind disposition tending
to Valentín’s numerous psychological and physical woes. This evening,
however, the idea of leaving his prison cell, and his disabled relationship
with Valentín, has made Molina ill.
—Get into what group? I tell you I don’t understand any of those things,
and I don’t believe in them very much either.
—Then you have no right to complain.
—Let’s just…stop talking…
—Come on…don’t be that way…Molina.
—No… don’t touch me…
—Can’t a buddy even pat your back?
—It makes me feel worse…
—Why?...Come on now, say something. It’s time for us to be honest with
each other. Really, Molina, I want to help you, tell me what’s wrong.57)
—-Por un minute solo, me pareció que yo no estaba acá, …ni acá, ni afuera…
—…
—Me pareció que yo no estaba…que estabas vos sólo.
—…
—O que yo no era yo. Que ahora yo…eras vos.62
(—For just a second, it seemed like I wasn’t here…not here or anywhere
out there either…
—…
—It seemed as if I wasn’t here at all…like it was you all alone.
—…
—Or like I wasn’t me anymore. As if now, somehow…I …were you.63)
Feeling each other, the two become one, and their literal and symbolic
embrace confirms the queer, subversive, countercultural nature of collabo-
ration within marginalized communities. In a beautiful moment of mutual
support, Molina is able to imagine the two of them free from the crippling
pressures of heteronormativity. In the dark, when words are the only thing
heard and understood, silence represents a subversive push against surveil-
lance and the dominant mechanisms of repression and social confinement.
Understood as a continuation of the silent sharing of food, this sequence
of silences confirms the inmates’ break with the warden’s proposed fam-
ily structure. Instead of the wife and unruly child reaping the rewards of
the patriarch’s hard work, their role-play becomes that of the homosexual
affair. Here, permanent family life is consciously substituted for the insta-
bility implicit in the sexual encounter between the two inmates, which
marks queer affective platforms, once again, as a space for epistemological
deviation.
This intimate scene of sharing and marginal coexistence is undoubt-
edly the high point of Puig’s prison narrative. From here, Molina is soon
released and tragically killed as he attempts to integrate himself into the
leftist, revolutionary struggle, while Valentin, still in jail, brings the novel
to a close with a trance-like inner monologue that recalls Molina’s filmic
reconstructions. Presenting his imaginings as a coping mechanism to help
him withstand his now more severe and intense torture sessions, Valentin
speaks of a “mujer araña,” a Spider Woman, whose web has entangled his
presence, seduced him, and defined his marginal existence throughout
this story.
The two characters’ separation from Puig’s prison narrative and their
symbolic reintegration into normative frameworks marks an end to the
DISABLED ATTRACTIONS IN KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN 89
support system that allowed for their marginalization, their disabled social
position, to be sustained and cared for. As life within the prison cell is
juxtaposed to reality on the outside, the cell’s marginal, queer position-
ing becomes the obviously preferred time and place, a desirable socio-
cultural ethos. The prison cell is confirmed as home to contemporary
notions of social alterity, where peaceful coexistence, sharing, and collabo-
ration contrast with the violent reception of marginality within normative
frameworks.
And, while Molina and Valentin find solace within their shared confine-
ment and their mutual social disability, Manuel Puig insists on telling their
story. In El beso de la mujer araña, the author approaches marginal sub-
jectivity from the outside, finding within that subjectivity a necessary focal
point, a place of interest, a topic of discussion. The marginal perspective
of the contemporary prisoner is marked here as important, interesting,
and inspiring. Puig’s place as scribe to the prisoners’ conversations forces
consideration of how marginalized communities negotiate their location
as other, despite and as a result of the pressures that emanate from the
powerful. As Puig documents prison life, enclosure and disability become
epistemological guidelines that insist on collective engagement in order to
move (from) within marginal existence.
NOTES
1. Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability
(New York: New York University Press, 2006), 28.
2. McRuer, Crip Theory, 30–1.
3. Manuel Puig, El beso de la mujer araña (New York: Vintage Books, 1994),
9.
4. Manuel Puig, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Trans. Thomas Colichie (New
York: Vintage Books, 1991), 3.
5. Emilio de Ípola, La bemba: Acerca del rumor carcelario (Buenos Aires:
Siglo veintiuno, 2005), 16.
6. These films include Cat People (1942) by Jacques Tourneur; Destino, a
Nazi propaganda film invented by Puig, based loosely on Die grobe Liebe
(1942); a rewriting of The Enchanted Cottage (1946) by John Crommwell;
a film about a racecar driver, entirely invented by Puig; a movie based on
I Walked with a Zombie (1943), also by Jacques Tourneur: and a film that
follows the tradition of the Mexican Cabaret films with Agustín Lara,
María Félix and María Antonieta Pons, but does not follow any one in
90 M.J. EDWARDS
particular. See Roxana Páez, Manuel Puig: Del pop a la extrañeza. (Buenos
Aires: Editorial Almagesto, 1995), 92–3.
7. Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin
America (Berkley: University of California Press, 1991), 7.
8. Julio Ramos, Divergent Modernities: Culture and politics in Nineteenth-
century Latin America, Trans, John D. Blanco (Durham, Duke University
Press, 2001), 20.
9. Puig, El beso, 9.
10. Puig, Kiss, 3.
11. Puig, El beso, 21.
12. Puig, Kiss, 15.
13. Puig, El beso, 21.
14. Puig, Kiss, 15.
15. Puig, El beso, 22.
16. Puig, Kiss, 15.
17. Puig, El beso, 22–3.
18. Puig, Kiss, 16–7.
19. Puig, El beso, 23.
20. Ibid.
21. Puig, Kiss, 17.
22. Puig, El beso, 23.
23. Puig, Kiss, 17.
24. Puig, El beso, 24–5.
25. Puig, Kiss, 18.
26. Puig, El beso, 38.
27. Puig, Kiss, 33.
28. Puig, El beso, 40–1.
29. Puig, Kiss, 34–5.
30. Puig, El beso, 41.
31. Puig, Kiss, 35.
32. For further discussion, see Patrick O’Connor, Latin American Fiction and
the Narratives of the Perverse (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and
Patricia Santoro, “Kiss of the Spider Woman, Novel, Play, and Film:
Homosexuality and the Discourse of the Maternal in a Third World
Prison,” in Framing Latin American Cinema: Contemporary Cultural
Perspectives. Ed. Ann Marie Stock (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1997), 120–40.
33. Guillermina Rosenkrantz, El cuerpo indómito: Espacios del exilio en la lit-
eratura de Manuel Puig (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Simurg, 1999), 36.
Note, my translation follows.
DISABLED ATTRACTIONS IN KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN 91
STANDING ON THE THRESHOLD
Over time, the closet’s role as the home for sex- and gender-based differ-
ences has clarified. And while its symbolic walls were erected in a move to
shelter and protect queer subjects marked as outsiders, its presence has also
stimulated the development of dynamic epistemological systems that offer
alternatives to traditional social interaction, communication, and under-
standing. Once-closeted performances are now understood as reifying
the flexibility of contemporary subjectivity. Within these performances,
social mobility is situated as a necessary survival mechanism, a means of
resistance against pressures to conform, reform, and deform sexual, racial,
economic, and political difference.
The metaphor of the “closet” naturally evokes impressions of darkness,
enclosure, and marginality, which in turn take on new life as queer allego-
ries. In their most recent works, contemporary theorists Jack Halberstam,
Heather Love, Elizabeth Freeman, and José Esteban Muñoz collectively
regard the closet as an ontological space necessary to understanding life
outside the routinized “9 to 5,” as a state-of-being apart from the clean,
ordered directionality associated with suburban notions of family-oriented
normalcy.1 For these theorists, queerness has become the foundation for
life outside the norm, away from dominant ideologies’ (re)productive
guidelines fostered by heteronormative capitalist frameworks. The closet
offers the failed, the backward, and the misunderstood a space to connect
Grounded in his own personal queer identity, Muñoz in his study moves
quickly cross-country and through time to pinpoint noteworthy stops in
(his) queer formation. Muñoz reveals closet experiences as inseparable
from alternative media, cultural genres, and urban sprawl; as Miami, Los
Angeles, and New York come together, the particularities of his narrative
diminish, allowing his personal tale to merge with others’ stories of other-
ness defined well beyond sexual desire. His discussion of social and cul-
tural marginality is defined by his engagement with queer culture, with his
own experiences, and with his rejection of simplistic normative accounts
of queer subject formation. From within the context of his own queer
experience, Muñoz describes subject formation as a process in constant
flux, where mapping queerness involves rethinking chronological time in
favor of circular temporalities, and geographic positionality in terms of
affective hotspots.
María Moreno, Argentine journalist, cultural critic, author, and pro-
fessor at the University of Buenos Aires, is similarly interested in queer
cultures and the reevaluation of closet experiences in a way that criti-
cally engages the (hetero-)norm. However, unlike Muñoz, who speaks
from an openly queer position, Moreno engages queer communities
and closet experiences from the outside, within contemporary feminist
paradigms.
Moreno’s first texts appeared in Buenos Aires in the late 1970s, within
the cultural restraints of the military dictatorship, and were originally
published in cultural supplements and underground, alternative maga-
zines. These texts gave voice to a skeptical female subjectivity, weary of
the limitations associated with the domestic sphere, traditional gendered
role playing, and the consequences of male-centered hierarchies. In the
subsequent decades, her chronicles and cultural criticism have traversed
social landscapes, traditions, and public opinion and have made of her
a recognized observer and flaneur of contemporary times and spaces.
96 M.J. EDWARDS
A MARGINAL POSITION
In the early 1980s, marginal sexualities and desires were tied to social
condemnation and the Cultural Revolution. Intricate repertoires, codi-
fied systems of communication, and detailed social networks were essen-
tial elements in the expression of nonnormative gender roles, including
queer, lesbian, trans, and feminist social identities. In a groundbreak-
ing study, Fiestas, baños y exilios: los gays porteños en la última dictadura
(Parties, Tea Rooms and Exile: Buenos Aires’ Gay Community in the Last
Dictatorship) (2001), Flabio Rapisardi and Alejandro Modarelli discuss
queer community formation during the political and ideological repres-
sion of Argentina’s most recent dictatorship (1976–1983), situating that
community formation within hidden homosexual desire and a network of
unique public spaces, including bathrooms, alternative movie houses, and
underground club circuits, where queer sex was had. The open expres-
sion of queer desire depended upon the evasion of the institutionalized
mechanisms of repression. Everything was possible if the time was right:
“Era cuestión de saber dónde había peligro y entonces evitarlo” (It was a
question of knowing where the danger was, and avoiding it).4 During
the dictatorship, Rapisardi and Modarelli argue, queer closets manifested
themselves through elaborate public networks that, much like Muñoz’s
cruising, allowed for the silent, unnoticed circulation of homosexual
desire throughout the social.
María Moreno personally observed the queer counterculture described
by Rapisardi and Modarelli, and her experience led her to push during
the transition to democracy for a distinctly more visible representation
of sexual and gender-based marginality. Her central role in the creation
and edition of the political magazine alfonsina (1983–1984) positioned
Moreno within a tradition of female writers and journalists who question
the thematic, discursive, and formal social limitations of traditional gender
roles.5 Rejection of these roles is made explicit in many of Moreno’s liter-
ary choices. For instance, Lucía María de Leone argues that Moreno’s use
of the name alfonsina draws a definitive connection between the author
and poet Alfonsina Storni, illustrating how Moreno pushes beyond sheer
literary tradition to embrace Storni’s condition as “madre soltera, mujer,
escritora, poeta, periodista, defensora de los derechos de la mujer y del
niño, suicida,” (single mother, writer, poet, journalist, defender of wom-
an’s rights and of children, and, as suicide victim).6 Moreno’s associations
transcend notions of legacy, joining her to her compatriots (like Storni)
98 M.J. EDWARDS
via the explicit literary expression of injustice and inequality: “una práctica
común del periodismo general y especialmente del escrito por mujeres,”
(a common practice within journalism and especially that written by
women).7 In fact, de Leone marks the cultural, professional legacy of
the name alfonsina as a symbolic point of departure from which Moreno
defines her aesthetic and political projects vis à vis the codified lifestyles of
gender- and sexuality-based marginality. Her use of pseudonyms (includ-
ing Rosa Montana, Elba Gallo, Mariana, and alfonsina), de Leone argues,
demonstrates an explicit push to decentralize authorship and articulate a
female collectivity outside the limitations of patriarchy.
While proper surnames are symbolic reminders of heteronormativ-
ity—of the power of the father and of the imposition of familial legacy as
the primary means of social identification and representation—Moreno’s
use of pen names cracks open this visible subjectivity to explore not only
author(ity) but also marginal subjectivities. The names she chooses for
herself are deep, entangled, and complex; her self-identification and re-
identification through these names pushes against dominant notions of
linearity, longevity, and heritage, outward and away from the horizontal
movement associated with progress across the written page and through
time. Understanding who Moreno is involves an upward movement, a
coming-up-off-the-page, in order to engage in the networks established
through the recognition, deciphering, and unraveling of the hinted-at
relationships her many names inspire.
While criticism has approached Moreno through her numerous pseud-
onyms and through her important role in alfonsina, her earlier columns
published in the magazine El Porteño, beginning in January 1982, explic-
itly associate her signature and name, María Moreno, with social mobility,
public space, and a critical textual-thematic presence. If Moreno’s role in
alfonsina is to be understood as a mechanism for engaging revolutionary
femininity vis à vis the decentralizing, disorienting effects of the name-
game, her earlier contributions to El Porteño explicitly link the name and
person, María Moreno, to the mapping of contemporary marginal subjec-
tivity beyond traditionally female spaces and discussions.
Prior to the inauguration of alfonsina in December 1983, Moreno’s
name can be found authoring contributions to El Porteño, particularly in
columns such as Sexo (Sex) and Ciencia amateur (Amateur Science).8 In
the magazine’s first edition in January 1982, Moreno published a piece that
contextualized her place within the public sphere and clearly distinguished
her poetics of social engagement from the margins. While the columns
MARÍA MORENO’S MODEL BEHAVIOR 99
strategically place her squarely in the doorway of closet cultures where she
is able to communicate with those communities on the inside and out. To
the extent that Moreno’s thematic, discursive, and geographic movement
within the text marks points of contact with queer space, touchpoints for
the comprehension of feelings and attitudes, it does so in order to connect
author and reader within a longer trajectory of social engagement. Unlike
Muñoz, whose movement is proudly rooted in real closet experiences—in
his text the homoerotic cruise guides him to “utopia” and to a hopeful futu-
rity through a vast network of closet connections—, Moreno’s stance on the
threshold questions notions of authenticity, authority, and authorship as it
blurs the origins of her own critical debate.
Nabokov’s cameo in Moreno’s narrative realm argues for the merging
of different symbolic systems—the literary with the real, the queer with
the heteronormative—and demonstrates the author’s strategic place in
between. More specifically, Moreno’s mention of Nabokov points toward
a legacy of narrative confusion and authorial masquerade. In evoking a
literary lineage populated by figures like John Shade and Charles Kimbote
[fictional poet and editor, respectively, of Nabokov’s own text Pale Fire
(1962)], Moreno is suggesting that she, too, be included within this liter-
ary tradition. In fact, the very mention of Nabokov by Moreno gestures
toward her first novel, El Affair Skeffington (1992), where the Russian-
American author appears early on in the narrative as a thematic guide to
a story of queer desire, geographic displacement, and textual mapping.
Moreno’s reference to Nabokov becomes emblematic of her push to
reorganize marginal epistemological frameworks as she focuses attention
upward and through her multiple textual references. As her textual ref-
erences accumulate one on top of the other—El Affair Skeffington atop
Vladimir Nabokov, who in turn is placed on top of homoerotic code and
textbooks discussing the natural sciences—the closet becomes the meeting
place where cultural observations occur. Moreno’s textual, discursive, and
physical movement—from a place of gender-based marginality to a critical
awareness of dominant social order—maps contemporary subject formation
as it engages queer systems of knowledge, making of the closet doorframe
a strategic stronghold for the accumulation of cultural meaning and critical
interpretation. By piling on the closet threshold this infinitely stacked mate-
rial, Moreno paints a cultural allegory for society’s dependence upon mar-
ginal sexualities and desires. The closet, in Moreno’s work, thus becomes a
point of contact to all social interaction, interpretation, and understanding,
making of it a central axis to all her narrative maneuvers.
MARÍA MORENO’S MODEL BEHAVIOR 105
QUEER CONNECTIVITY
Moreno is constantly on the move. Her mobility takes her outside tra-
ditional ideological frameworks and facilitates her cultural observations
from the margins. However, in her first formal piece of narrative fiction,
El Affair Skeeffington (1992), she is still, her movement archival. The
accumulation of textual references, citations, and secondary sources she
presents prove to be essential to the discovery of her protagonist, Dolly
Skeffington, within 1920s Paris. Yet, while Moreno herself remains still, she
propels others through her narrative collage, tracing marginality through
misinformation, misinterpretation, and misplacement. As Moreno speaks
about Skeffington, her textual references imply complicity, their spelling
errors and stylistic deviations gesturing toward future engagement. Yet
these imprecisions ultimately lead nowhere; instead, their presence serves
to identify chaos and confusion as necessary points in the formation of the
contemporary marginal subject.
Moreno’s narrative begins with the discovery of a previously unpub-
lished manuscript. For Moreno, approaching the unknown involves com-
parison, breaching the gap of difference through the creation/discovery
of similar pairs. “Avergüenza empezar-- ¡una vez más!—con el hallazgo
de un manuscrito, no de John Shade, Emily L. o Gabrielle Sarrera sino
de una total desconocida: Dolly Skeffington. Una vez más también se
trata de inventar una precursora en cuya obra—por demás problemático
de definir—podamos leer, como dicha la convención, lo que queremos
leer” (It is a shame to have to begin—one more time!—with the discovery
of a manuscript, not by John Shade, Emily L., or Gabrielle Sarrera, but by
a totally unknown author: Dolly Skeffington. Once again, it also means
creating a precursor to her work—in itself difficult to define—we can read,
as the saying goes, what we want to read.).15 These opening words sug-
gest that Moreno’s central role in the novel (as in all her work) is to be the
discoverer of marginality. “Una vez más”—once again—she has come into
contact with something previously hidden, out of sight and unknown.
And once again, it is suggested, her story is destined to engage alternative
spaces, places, and times, to represent a symbolic crossing between two
different social points. What is “a shame,” in this context, is not the exis-
tence of Skeffington’s work itself (and, thus, marginality), but Moreno’s
own repeated and seemingly inescapable encounter with marginality’s
silent/silenced voices. However, her reflection that it is “a shame” to
begin again with an unknown work also suggests an empathetic response
106 M.J. EDWARDS
and a collective push to engage cases like that of Skeffington’s. Her call
to a collective we (“we can read what we want to read”) serves as both a
discursive mechanism to erase the particularity of the narrative “I” and an
evocation of an equally engaged reader who, like Moreno, is dedicated to
the discovery of difference and recognizes the necessary codes required to
understand Dolly Skeffington.
Together, author and reader share the unease at discovering Skeffington.
However, as Moreno’s narrative begins—“once again”—the (for her, typi-
cal) journey of discovering, uncovering marginality sets her reading col-
lective in motion. After Moreno symbolically removes Skeffington from
hiding, she positions her in contrast to a short list of known authors: John
Shade, Emily L, and Gabrielle Sarrera. The negative pairing maintains
Skeffington’s integrity as other by establishing her place in opposition to the
legacy these better-known authors collectively form. However, Moreno’s
choice of references to exemplify authorship distracts from Skeffington
altogether. While John Shade and Emily L are recognizable authors within
the specifically literary realm of authorship presented in the novels Pale
Fire (1962) by Vladimir Nabokov and Emily L (1987) by Marguerite
Duras, respectively, Gabrielle Sarrera is a difficult referent to pin down.
She is neither author nor protagonist. Instead her name, Sarrera, appears
only in the Basque dictionary: defined as an entrance, a point of access or
entry, a heading in journalistic terms. Her name thus carries an epistemo-
logical foundation of regionalism and of marginality in a greater Spanish-
national context. And it is this name, more than the unknown personage
of Sarrera herself, that suggests a relationship with Dolly Skeffington: a
relationship based on separation from the national and a curious textual
history. Her place within Moreno’s list of authors is bewildering, confused
by her absence from any obvious literary tradition and the contrast formed
with the suggested significance of the other notable mentions. Here, the
absence of any qualifying explanation not only confirms Moreno’s inten-
tions to interrupt storytelling but also marks misunderstanding as a neces-
sary product of reading and engaging in Skeffington’s tale.
As Moreno places Dolly Skeffington alongside John Shade, Emily
L, and Gabriella Sarrera, she links her to a literary and lexical trajectory
where authorship is equated with subject formation in a particular fictional
context. In creating this link, Moreno suggests that Skeffington, like the
others, must also be understood in strictly literary terms: that she exists
inasmuch as she is understood as part of a literary world. The negative
comparison, used initially by Moreno to qualify Skeffington as unknown
MARÍA MORENO’S MODEL BEHAVIOR 107
and other, now separates Moreno from her own literary creation and marks
her text as a Bildungsroman that maps her own path to authorship and to
authority on marginal tales. The reference made to John Shade, Emily L,
and Gabrielle Sarrera, then, becomes an allegorical starting point from
which Moreno embarks on a circular journey through marginality, where
her purposeful and explicit loss of authority allows for authorship to be
reimagined through the citations, paraphrases, and textual collage neces-
sary to engage with dominant traditions.
Moreno begins her textual journey toward authorship, Dolly
Skeffington, and Paris of the 1920s in a cinema in Mar del Plata in 1989.
From its beginning, Moreno explicitly juxtaposes her journey to/from
textual authority against the passivity of visual spectatorship, allowing the
close relationship between author and protagonist to be dissolved by tem-
poral and spatial distance. As Moreno finds herself in Mar del Plata, at
the Second Annual La Mujer y el Cine International Film Festival, the
following aside chronicles her belief in the significance of understanding
authorship.
you tended to hear what seemed to be the shouts of a dancing mob excited
by an impulsive disk jockey. She told me that she was inviting me to Madrid
but I considered it a mere expression of kindness until I received an enve-
lope with a plane ticket inside and I contemplated the possibility of replac-
ing my Criadores brand with their Four Roses whiskey and the china-men
of Buenos Aires’ Plaza Miserere with Madrid’s Plaza Malasaña. So I went.)
que ella se agachaba a recoger con la dificultad de una persona de edad muy
avanzada y, no bien se había erguido y sacudido un poco la caspa de las
solapas, dejaba caer otros: el bolso, un manojo de novelitas usadas, el manto
de spaí que dijo haber comprado en el mercado de pulgas.
“Aunque ya la había visto beber en las terrasses una botella de Richard y
tenía los ojos vidriosos, pasó sin verme y se metió en el café Des Amateurs.”14
Así describe John Glassco a Dolly Skeffington. Luego se pregunta y
responde retóricamente: “¿Qué era? ¿Una artista? Por cierto que no. ¿Una
puta? Quizás intermitentemente. ¿Una lesbiana? Sí y no. De lo que estoy
seguro es que era una anandrine.”20
(“On Mouffetard Street she walked as if through a series of obstacles.
Her large North American legs and her thin feet, held up by her high heels
by Guilermina, tottered like those of a clumsy woman kept within a cocktail
dress (she had holes in her stockings). Her curly red hair, taken up at the
top of her head with a small nacre comb, collapsed onto the shoulder pads
of a black coat with deformed pockets, whose holes spat objects that would
seem to belong to homeless children—a hazelnut flute, a broken watch, a
miniature running shoe, pencils—that she bent over to gather as if chal-
lenged by old age and, after having just straightened up and shaken briefly
the dandruff from the jacket’s lapel, only to have others fall, the purse, a
bunch of little used novels, a spy’s cloak that she swore to have bought at
a flea market.
“Although I had seen her drink a bottle of Richard on the terrasses,
she had glazed eyes, she walked right by me and went into a café, Des
Amateur.”14 This is how John Glassco describes Dolly Skeffington. Later
on, he asks, and responds rhetorically, “What was she? An artist? Certainly
not. A prostitute? Maybe sometimes. A lesbian? Yes and no. What I am sure
of is that she was an anandrine.”)
Moreno explores what cannot be said, she devotes attention to sameness and
difference, she takes her readers on an odyssey through prohibited territory
and language, she tests asynchronicities against conventional literary order,
MARÍA MORENO’S MODEL BEHAVIOR 115
she toys with traditional concepts of authorship and the genres that have
excluded women. At the same time, she reminds us that the memory of all
sexual pleasure is in itself an act of translation, a repositioning of discourses
that creates an illusion of access to what is far out of reach or lost. (…) From
the known maps of charted pleasure, we then move out of fixed terrain;
lesbian sexuality in this instance is a condition of expatriation. It produces a
need to speak beyond father and homeland, to announce the insufficiency of
any single language, to celebrate the noncorrespondence of images emerg-
ing from flawed translation.26
VALUES FROM THE BACKSIDE
Since the publication of El Affair Skeffington in 1992, Moreno has, in a
sense, become famous. Her collections of essays, pieces of narrative fiction,
and regular columns in the Buenos Aires newspaper Página12 have helped
to imbue her name with celebrity. In 2002, Moreno was the recipient of
the Guggenheim fellowship for her work on sexuality and political mili-
tancy during the 1970s, and from 2005 to 2008, she served as creator and
host of the television series Portaretratos on Argentina’s public broadcast-
ing network; these experiences and others have consolidated her acclaim as
a respected author and cultural critic and have marked her as a representa-
tive of and spokesperson for marginal histories, perspectives, and subjec-
tivities on the national and international stage. The authority afforded to
Moreno’s work is attested in her recent prominent positions as founder
of Latin America’s first transgendered magazine, El Teje (2007–2011)
and director of the series Nuestra América (2011–2013), published with
Buenos Aires based Eterna Cadencia, which creatively anthologizes the
last two centuries of Latin American art and literature.
Today, Moreno’s name can be found in archive catalogs as the author
of newspaper originals from the 1980s, as well as on shelves of bookstores
nationwide as the author to new editions of her work. Her early work,
published originally in local magazines and newspapers including Babel,
Fin de Siglo, El Porteño, and alfonsina, has been recirculated vigorously,
located piecemeal within her contemporary columns and neatly collected
in recent anthologies, including A tontas y a locas (2001), El fin del sexo y
otras mentiras (2002), Vida de vivos: Conversaciones incidentales y retratos
sin retocar (2006), Teoria de la noche (2011), and Subrayados: Leer hast
que la muerte nos separe (2013). All of these publications have magni-
fied her presence in the public sector, making “María Moreno” a name
difficult to overlook. The overlapping, simultaneous quality of her pub-
lications, online and offline, archived and reedited, creates an effect that
almost parodies mechanical reproduction: the multiplication of her name
serves to propagate and augment, rather than separate or dismantle, her
place as author-authority. As Walter Benjamin once put it, Moreno is both
120 M.J. EDWARDS
original and copy; the proliferation of her name merges past with present
and thereby magnifies the aesthetic qualities of authorship and authority.
If, for Benjamin, mechanical reproduction leads to the politicization of
art and manipulation of the masses, the proliferation of Moreno’s name
within the public sphere likewise functions as a beacon signaling sociocul-
tural change.
Moreno is explicitly anchored within Argentina’s capital. While her
texts are easily identifiable and circulate freely, having been published in
important local editorials including Bajo la luna, Planeta, Sudamericana,
Mar Dulce, and Mansalva, it is her constant participation in book releases,
collaborations with local and online magazines, including Pagina12,
Anfibia, and Bomb Magazine, and active presence on social media that
make her easy to find, and even befriend. Much as the use of citation
and textual referencing in El Affiar Skeffington directs research on social
marginality toward confusion and the misunderstood, the proliferation of
Moreno’s name continues to link her own author(ity) with critical social
engagement.
Moreno’s name traces a path that not only traverses past–present
dichotomies but also intersects the work of a community of other authors
through reviews, prologues, and back-flap blurbs. Consider, for example,
her introduction to Modarelli and Rapisardi’s Fiestas, baños y exilios: los
gays porteños en la última dictadura (2001), which describes the homo-
erotic circuits during Argentina’s military dictatorship (1976–1983).
Moreno’s name on this work not only connects the authors’ work to
the work of Copi (through her introduction to the recent collection of
his work Obras I [2013]) but also to the legacy of journalist and author
Rodolfo Fogwill, to whom she paid homage in Fogwill: una memoria coral
(2014) after his passing in 2004. Her name leads to the back cover of
both Continuadísimo (2008) and Batido de Trolo (2013), applauding the
work of trans-blogger, performer, poet, painter, artist, and author Naty
Menstrual—to whom we turn in the next chapter—and it guides her fol-
lowers to the feminist zeal behind each female character’s move toward
solitude in Gabriela Bejerman’s second novel Heroina (2014). Her name
initiates contact and inspires textual relationships with sexual, aesthetic,
and political innovation.
María Moreno capitalizes on her name’s authority to direct, guide,
motivate, and trace contemporary social movement. Her place on the back
flap of Alejandro Modarelli’s most recent collection of chronicles, Rosa
prepucio (2011), leads readers not only to his tales “sobre el envejecer gay
MARÍA MORENO’S MODEL BEHAVIOR 121
NOTES
1. See (Judith) Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2011); Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the
Politics of Queer History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007);
Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); and José Esteban Muñoz,
Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York:
New York University Press, 2009).
2. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer
Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009).
3. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 100.
4. Flavio Rapisardi and Alejandro Modareli, Fiestas, baños y exilios: los gays
argentinos en la última dictadura (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2011),
23.
5. See Lea Fletcher, “Hitos en el periodismo de mujeres argentinas: 1830-
2007” in Las palabras tienen sexo: Introducción a un periodismo con per-
spectiva de género, comp. Sandra Chaher and Sonia Santoro (Buenos Aires:
Artemisa Comunicación Ediciones, 2007), 78–94, and Tania Diz,
“Tensiones, genealogías y feminismos en los 80. Un acercamiento a alfon-
sina, primer periódico para mujeres,” Mora 17.2 (2011) accessed
September 7, 2015.
6. Lucía María de Leone, “Una poética del nombre: los “comienzos” de
María Moreno hacia mediados de los años 80 en el contexto cultural
argentino,” Cadernos Pagu 36 (2011): 238.
7. De Leone, “Una poética,” 240.
MARÍA MORENO’S MODEL BEHAVIOR 123
8. See María Moreno, “Sexo,” El Porteño, 1.3 (1982): 37; and, María
Moreno “Ciencia amateur,” El Porteño, 1.7 (1982): 24–5.
9. María Moreno, “Gracias Madre Agresividad,” El Porteño. 1.1 (1982):
32–33.
10. Moreno, “Gracias Madre,” 32.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. María Moreno, El Affair Skeffington (Buenos Aires: Bajo la luna, 1992),
9.
16. Moreno, El Affair, 43.
17. Moreno, El Affair, 44.
18. Moreno, El Affair, 9.
19. Ibid.
20. Moreno, El Affair, 14.
21. Moreno, El Affair, 62.
22. For more on the term anandrine, see Susan Lanser, “Au sein de vos
pareilles”: Sapphic Separatism in Late Eighteenth-Century France.”
Homosexuality in French History and Culture. Ed. Jeffrey Merrick and
Michael Sibalis (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2001), 105–16.
23. Francine Masiello, The Art of Transition: Latin American Culture and
Neoliberalism. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. This argument and Moreno’s
example is condensed to article length in her essay “Bodies in transit:
travel, translation, and gender,” Voice-Overs: Translation and Latin
American Literature. Ed Daniel Balderston and Marcy Schwartz (New
York: State University of New York Press, 2002), 213–23.
24. Masiello, The Art of Transition, 170–1.
25. Masiello, 170.
26. Masiello, 170–1.
27. Masiello, 172.
28. Doris Sommer. Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin
America (Berkley: University of California Press, 1991).
29. Sommer, Foundational Fictions, 6.
30. Ibid.
CHAPTER 5
matched only by the diverse interests of their vendors and of those who
browse the merchandise.
Along Defensa, the kiosks contain more of the same—more books,
bath salts, and balloons; leather, light fixtures, and choripan—and their
products both attract and distract the passersby in their appeal to national
iconography, regional traditions, and local habits. Much in the same way,
the vendors entice the international consumers with their “portuñol”
blends, their shouted English clichés attesting to the unique qualities of
their mass-produced crafts. The mate gourd filled with hot water and tea
leaves circulates through the streets for all to share, producing a folkloric
ambiance that converts the indulgent shopping spree into a necessary cul-
tural experience worthy of travel guides and weekly errands alike.
The products found are vastly varied, designed to appeal to all tastes and
appetites; they lure in local, national, and international customers with the
magic of the historic, open-air stroll and the market atmosphere. It may
be the combination of the old and the new that brings a community of all
sorts to walk San Telmo’s streets on Sunday, but it may just as easily be
the unique pairing of the delicious with the beautiful, the artisanal with
the priceless: whatever its secret, there is a laughter and lightness to San
Telmo’s cobblestone walkways that transforms the unorganized, crowded
mess into a sacred ritual of the social agenda.
Within this marvelous cacophony, difference, contrast, and contra-
diction collide, producing a spectacle worthy of pursuit, suppressing for
a moment the allure of the international brands that line the historic
downtown shopping mall, Galeria Pacifico, and pushing the formal shop-
ping district along Calle Florida, both just blocks away, further down on
Buenos Aires’s “to-do” list. Far from the soulless corridors where brand
names, perfumed hostesses, and gleaming floors attract eager consumers
and hopeful spectators, the recently swept streets of San Telmo reimagine
the capitalist experience from within the flea-market logic and make the
mercantile interaction a social experience that extends well beyond the
exchange of money for material goods.
The early morning setup of stalls coincides with Sunday morning
errand-running and converts the streets of San Telmo into a place of
social, political, and economic intermingling, where independent artisan-
collector-entrepreneurs bring not only their products but also their sto-
ries to exchange with neighboring vendors and touring consumers. In
San Telmo, value is assigned and exchanged in passing: where window
shopping evokes economic inadequacy, this shopping experience invokes
THE QUEER CONSUMPTION OF NATY MENSTRUAL 127
discussion over more than price. The exchange of sights, sounds, and smells
charges San Telmo, as a whole, with a cultural (surplus) value unique to
contemporary social exchange, crying out to serve as an allegorical excur-
sion through postmodern subject formation.
In Scenes from Postmodern life, Beatriz Sarlo describes the contradic-
tory impact of the neoliberal global economy within contemporary Latin
America.1 According to Sarlo, the Latin American experiences postmo-
dernity as a systematic juxtaposition between the global and the local: a
collision of integration and segregation, a desire to consume frustrated—
in the vast majority of the cases—by an inability to do so. Like Néstor
García Canclini before her, Sarlo recognizes epistemological coexistence
as a defining factor of contemporary social realities. While the consump-
tion of material goods provides the only viable method of community
formation and identification in a capitalist-oriented society, religion and
family, Sarlo argues, fail to sufficiently represent individual (consumer)
needs and patterns.
In a place of such antiquated methods of social and spiritual identifica-
tion, the shopping mall stands out, exemplifying, according to Sarlo, the
nomadic, border-free imaginaries of contemporary populations, as well
as the unforgiving stratification that accompanies the monetarily flow. As
Sarlo puts it, the shopping mall’s “points of reference are universal: Its
logos, acronyms, texts, and manners do not require their interpreters to be
settled in any culture previous to or distinct from that of the market. Thus
the mall produces an extraterritorial culture from which nobody can feel
excluded.”2 Consumerism, in its concrete shopping-mall guise, entices
with a welcoming dynamic, promising social mobility and belonging via
circulation through its hallways, planting yearning for the products it sells.
In the shopping mall, the “petty consumers manage perfectly (…), invent-
ing various unforeseen uses for it that the machine tolerates to the extent
that these uses do not divert the energies that the mall administers,” while
the poorest find within clean, safe spaces “where they can walk around
at any time of day.”3 It is a place that accepts all visitors into its special
design, each recognizing their place within the contemporary capitalist
market logic.
The shopping mall is significant in its capacity to “hold up a mirror that
reflects a crisis of public space in which it is difficult to construct meanings;
and the reflected image is an inverted one, in which an ordered torrent
of signifiers flows day and night.”4 Sarlo’s description of Latin America’s
postmodern reality—and her reading of the shopping mall experience in
128 M.J. EDWARDS
Just as, for Jack Halberstam, “living queerly” is synonymous with social
difference and life on the outside, for Beatriz Sarlo, dominant postmod-
ern, market-oriented lifestyles are formed on the inside, from within shop-
ping malls. Queer times and places, then, are not just located outside the
nine-to-five, as Halberstam argues but also outside global markets and the
shopping districts that sell their international brands.
As Halberstam suggests, contemporary social trajectories reflect the
interests, desires, needs, and possibilities of the individual. In San Telmo,
the sharing of artisania (artisan goods) and antiques means a sharing of
space: goods are reused and recirculated, as well as inspired, created, and
often consumed on the streets where they are sold. While many vendors
are artisans (and many artisans their own marketing advisors), social iden-
tities are multiple and interchangeable; as they intermingle, these identities
themselves become a valued part of the (exotic) excursion and ceremony
130 M.J. EDWARDS
Fig. 5.1 Fernando Varas Toledo (Naty Menstrual), personal photograph, 2013
THE QUEER CONSUMPTION OF NATY MENSTRUAL 131
san with the fake, the easily reproducible, and reasserts the validity of social
difference and the immanence of cultural stratification. Yet in doing so,
she simultaneously reinforces the otherness of the LGBTTIQ community,
highlighting its opposition to the dominant, to the normative, and—in this
case—to the apparent omnipresence of the global capitalist framework.
Menstrual is (drag)Queen to her queer kingdom, ruler of over five
thousand Facebook friends, followers, and likers who she encourages to
embrace the strange and crazy, to confront normativity and welcome dis-
approving glares. She is not looking for power, despite what her popularity
on social media may suggest. Rather, the community Menstrual builds is
minority-oriented, the products she sells proudly original in their hand-
made quality. Amidst market pressures to embrace international, cross-
cultural exchange, increase productivity, and maximize sales, Menstrual
remains local and inefficient. Her status updates, complete with makeshift
catalogues of new tee-shirt designs, are followed by interested onlook-
ers; her attentive responses to their inquiries not only ensure fair pricing
and the possibility of custom work—by order and on-demand—but, more
importantly, forcefully limit the transactions to the local. Here, on-site pick
up in San Telmo or door-to-door delivery options for customers outside
the Greater Buenos Aires area reveals a dedication to tee-shirt production
that extends beyond aesthetic experimentation and toward survival tactics:
ironically, the global face of social media becomes a mechanism reinforc-
ing local interests. In a situation where complex, innovative marketing
portfolios are unrealistic, Menstrual appeals to the global in order to fur-
ther engage with the local. In doing so, she draws direct queer consumers,
liberal ideologues, and art connoisseurs alike to her San Telmo kiosk.
For Menstrual, the local is grounded in a real where fingers continue
to point and laughter identifies difference. As those who visit Menstrual’s
stall openly and explicitly declare—even shout—their support of same-sex
marriage, gender equality, and nontraditional families, the offended look
on from a distance, their fingers pointing and their laughter echoing. Yet
the politics of both groups fail to appeal to Naty Menstrual. Instead, she
embraces difference itself, greeting both ideological comradery and social
condemnation from within her place of business. She knows both dis-
courses well and speaks to them in turn. As a communicative flaneur, her
fluency in the cultural trademarks that define these oppositional ideologies
permits her economic solvency: it is this very inter-ideological exchange
that underpins Menstrual’s engagement in the neoliberal marketplace.
For Menstrual, the intimate greetings between friends, the interested
136 M.J. EDWARDS
exchanges with kiosk consumers, and the violent deliveries of verbal slan-
der all typify the innately flexible nature of real social encounter: a type of
encounter too broad to be delineated and captured by political protago-
nism and social marginality (Fig. 5.4).
Menstrual’s economic exchanges represent something beyond the stan-
dard interaction of artisania and sustenance goods. The buying and selling
of Menstrual’s cartoon protagonists demonstrates not only the affective
appeal of marginal, queer identities and their social legacy, but also the
valuing of queer aesthetics beyond exoticism and beyond the homonor-
mative. These transactions demonstrate the marketability of marginality
within contemporary Argentina and beyond. In a market that has long
been understood as global, Menstrual’s San Telmo sales reveal a place for
queer consumption within the local, as part of the nation’s internal domes-
tic relations. Here, the trans-subject is on display, produced on-demand
for a consumer eager to belong in a community founded on difference.
formed and funded body that is needed to obtain that power. By play-
ing on these themes, Menstrual inscribes her story within a much larger
panorama of the class-based inequalities characteristic of contemporary
neoliberal frameworks.
For Sissy, beauty is a marketable good that can bring both fame and for-
tune. Yet this capitalist vision falls short of its promised outcome as Sissy
fails to attain the physical appearance that would bring her desires to life.
In fact, her inability to possess the necessary modes of production, here
understood in terms of feminine beauty, prevent Sissy from capitalizing
on a marketplace where the commodification of desire is commonplace.
Instead, her self-mutilated body is relegated to the margins of the sex
trade; although her transgendered body is a sought-after object of desire,
for Sissy it is clearly marked as an obstacle to overcome. The consequences
of incompletely, inaccurately (trans)gendering her body are tragic, coun-
tered only by her entrepreneurial vision and remarkable dedication to
dominant workforce ethics.
medio!” (Sissy looked and couldn’t believe it. It must have been twenty-
six and a half centimeters).17 The narrator immediately qualifies this
statement by adding that the “[p]uta vieja, tenía una regla en los ojos
de haber visto tantas vergas” ([o]ld slut had a ruler for eyes after having
seen so many cocks).18 With this line, Sissy becomes a penis-specialist,
a connoisseur of sorts—and her expertise suggests that she, too, has
something other than money to gain from this transactional encounter.
Whether it be knowledge and the furthering of a life’s work, dedicated
to the study of the phallus or fame, Sissy’s participation here is clearly
not passive.
What is noteworthy, however, is that her fame and expertise go seem-
ingly unnoticed. As she sits in the car, she says and does nothing to reveal
her know-how. Her partner’s verbal and physical advances accentuate
Sissy’s silent acceptance of this exchange. It is only the narrator’s own ret-
roactive interjections that allow us, as readers, to understand this encounter
differently. It is Menstrual’s own testimonial that translates Sissy’s silence
into intelligible terms—her purposeful decoding that translates passive
reception and marginality into pleasure and exceptionality. In this way,
Menstrual politicizes her role as narrator, author of social alterity; over the
course of the story, her presence within Sissy’s experience becomes strate-
gic and purposeful, directly connected to the empowerment of the silent,
the poor, and the trans-community.
In Menstrual’s story, the trans-subject’s silence is understood as a
mechanism to fulfill the same desires for social and sexual gratification that
her transactional counterpart pursues. However, as Sissy and her Prince
Charming enter the apartment, a new set of expectations is introduced.
The corpse’s stench serves as a beacon, signaling the rejection not only
of heteronormative privilege but also of global capitalist frameworks. It
calls to those close by to come, form around Sissy: the last one standing.
While her suitor’s Audi A3 and sparkling clean “Prince Charming” appeal
acknowledge a high level of social mobility, class-crossing, and sexual flex-
ibility, they also clearly symbolize the repression, violence, and inequality
fostered by unwanted ideologies imposed by a global capitalist economy.
The putrid smell that emanates from Sissy’s apartment represents a call to
others, and ultimately a call to all communities who experience dominant
epistemologies from the margins. Here, death and putrescence produce a
social gathering that places Sissy, as the queer trans-subject, at the fore-
front of contemporary responses to (hetero)normativity.
Lee Edelman, author of No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive,
describes queer lifestyles as a counter to normative reproductive futurism,
which situates biological procreation and familial legacies as the only means
of propagating a social framework founded on progress. For Edelman,
the child embodies “the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged poli-
tics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention,”22 while
queerness is understood as “the negativity opposed to every form of social
viability.”23 Edelman insists that queer communities embrace their char-
acterization as non-reproductive, non-future, non-normative, arguing that
the association of queerness with death may be seen as a “resistance to a
Symbolic reality that only ever invests us as subjects insofar as we invest
144 M.J. EDWARDS
SOCIAL (TRANS)FORMATIONS
Naty Menstrual’s trans-protagonists all share a similar fate. Whether it be
as prostitute, spinster, or housewife, their marginal status is recognized,
understood, and made commonplace; ultimately, this status is pinpointed
as the reason for the continual class-crossings that characterize contempo-
rary social interaction. The trans-subject’s seemingly permanent place at
the margins normalizes these communicative frameworks and social rela-
tionships, making a ritualized, performative repertoire of the crude sexual
language, the physical and emotional abuse, and the impossible dreams
that populate Menstrual’s stories. The repeated representation and situ-
ation of the transsexual, transgendered, and transvestite within marginal
structures is a literal reading, over and over, of trans-subjectivity through
this social lens.
The title of Menstrual’s first collection of short stories, Continuadisimo,
positions the trans-subject within a temporal, spatial, and narrative mode
of transference, within which the protagonists themselves become points
of social, economic, geographic, and sexual convergence. Protagonists like
“la Angie,” who, in “La empastillada,” (The Pill-Taker), confronts her sad,
frustrating, tiring reality—“embichada” (infested, rather than infected)
with AIDS—by going to the Cineplex to watch porn and “hacerse coger”
(to get herself fucked), become clear representatives of a social alterity in
which pharmaceutical cocktails are a luxury to be collected, not a treat-
ment plan toward survival. La Angie presents sex as an antidote, albeit
momentary, to a sickness rooted in socioeconomic inequality rather than
sexually transmitted infection. But, as queer desire leads to abuse—its cli-
max a “patada voladora en el mentón” (flying kick to the chin)—her suf-
fering becomes a norm understood by all and tolerated in silence.25 The
neighbors are “acostumbrado[s] a esos quilombos” (accustomed to those
ruckuses); their decision to not ask about what they don’t want to know
reflects a socially qualified apathy, born of a tradition of marginal social
146 M.J. EDWARDS
engagement.26 For “La Angie,” and others like her, words are clearly not
enough.
Llegó, fue hasta el baño, se miró fijamente en el espejo y lloró. Lloró hasta
que le dolió el pecho más que los moretones de los párpados y del resto del
cuerpo. Fue a buscar el tarro de harina. Le costó tragarse absolutamente
todas las pastillas porque se le atragantaban con el llanto que no paraba
un instante. Terminó de tragarlas. Volvió frente al espejo y siguió llorando
más que antes. De repente ya no pudo ver más su reflejo en el cristal, la
hinchazón era tan grande que los párpados se habían apoderado de sus ojos,
envolviéndolos con un calor y un latido insoportables. Quedó ciega, o al
menos ella así lo creía. Y aún frente al espejo, dijo:
—Viste, bicho hijo de puta…viste bicho hijo de puta que no me gan-
aste…ahora te jodo y me mato yo primero…
Y tanteó el espejo hasta descolgarlo y romperlo contra el suelo. Cayó. Se
revolvió entre los vidrios cortantes riendo.27
(She arrived at home, went to the bathroom, looked at herself intensely
in the mirror and cried. She cried until her chest hurt more than the bruises
on her eyelids and on the rest of her body. She went to look for the flour
can. She found it difficult to swallow absolutely all of the pills in it because
they got caught up in the tears that didn’t stop flowing, not for a second.
She finished swallowing them. She turned to face the mirror and continued
to cry, more than before. Finally she couldn’t see her reflection anymore
in the glass, the swelling having grown so exaggerated that her eyelids had
taken over her eyes, engulfing them in a warmth and heartbeat that were
unbearable. She went blind, or at least that’s what she thought. And, still in
front of the mirror, she said:
—You see, bug, son of a bitch…you see, bug, son of bitch, you couldn’t
win. Now it’s my turn to fuck you over and I’ll kill myself first…
And she felt around the mirror until she managed to unhook it and
break it on the floor. She fell. She rolled around in the sharp, broken glass,
laughing.)
use, and the acquisition of the disease, here Menstrual updates Sontag’s
assessment of the contemporary AIDS pandemic by identifying socioeco-
nomic inequality as the true carrier of infection. It is clear that La Angie
is acting against a disease that feeds predominantly on the poor. Distant is
the queer shame that historically limited LGBTTIQ communities to clos-
eted lifestyles, codified communications, and performative repertoires of
passing. In its place is a class-based silence, motivated by the impossibility
of change and the inevitability of suffering. La Angie’s trans-subjectivity
must be understood, along with that of Menstrual’s other protagonists, as
strategically and purposefully center stage.
Menstrual’s self-proclaimed “porno-trash” introduces a poetics of social
engagement in which the erotic encounter functions, in carnavalesque
fashion, as a conduit for rethinking the center–periphery dichotomies that
characterize socioeconomic discussions. In Menstrual’s work, the indi-
vidual’s drive to satisfy erotic desire simultaneously justifies a rupture with
traditional epistemological structures and encourages faithful adherence
to those same frameworks. With pleasure as the ultimate goal, the search
for physical and emotional gratification sets the subject in motion, yielding
a social cruising empowered by uneasy, often eroticized encounters with
difference. Despite the author’s repeated marginalization of the trans-
subject, no changes are proposed, no modifications desired. Rather, the
trans-protagonists insist on the naturalization of difference; in the context
of these stories, it is difference itself that ensures the recognition of social,
sexual, and gender identities, as well as economic solvency and erotic sat-
isfaction. The carbon-copy scenarios that Menstrual’s protagonists inhabit
intentionally refute equality as a goal and reify difference as the sole social
categorization.
Much like “26 y ½” (26 and a ½) and “La empastillada” (The Pill
Taker), “Huesito de pollo” (Chicken Bones) captures a significant hatred,
directed toward life in general, and a desire on the part of the protagonist
to “rajarme en un vuelo rápido de esa casa de mierda. De ese barrio de
mierda. De toda esa gente del orto,” (fuck right off in a quick flight from
this shit-filled house. From this shitty neighborhood. From this whole
ass-sucking crowd).28 However, when reality sets in, change becomes an
impossibility: “Había soñado muchas veces que volaba, y era hermoso…
pero volaba con alas de pájaro, no con alas de pollo. Odiaba el pollo y me
lo tenía que comer calladita la boca, porque era lo que había y lo que mi
vieja compraba con tanto sacrificio, y que no me quejara…” (I had dreamt
many times that I could fly, and it was beautiful…but I flew with birds’
148 M.J. EDWARDS
wings, not with chicken wings. I hated chicken and I had to eat it with my
mouth closed, because it was the only thing there was, and it was such a
sacrifice for my old lady to buy it, and I’d better not complain…).29 For
the narrator, the desire for socioeconomic ascent is overwhelming, driven
by the insurmountable weight of class-defining/-restricting/-specific tra-
ditions and attitudes. Here, socioeconomic mobility is a dream imagined,
restricted to the wealthy class, like Sissy’s Audi driver in the earlier tale.
The queer subjects lucky enough to fly definitely do not live in these
neighborhoods; they are not the focus of these tales. Menstrual’s trans-
protagonists do not fly with pride, in parades: they walk—for their wings,
when spread, offer targets for both hatred and desire. In “Huesito de pollo,”
there is no pride, nor is there shame; indeed, the openly queer subject is
never explicitly mentioned. The protagonist and narrator of this tale is
only assumed to be queer, inasmuch as trans-identity is projected through
the thematic continuity that links each story in this anthology. Any one of
Menstrual’s previous trans-protagonists might just as easily fit into this urban,
low-income, multigenerational family, where queer is clearly marked as com-
monplace and, like chicken, a plate easily served for any occasion. Again, the
queer subject is silent, deep in thought, as the chicken becomes a symbolic
reminder of contemporary social stagnation, of what is out of reach and dif-
ficult to swallow. Menstrual’s trans-subject becomes a spokesperson for this
grounded queerness, its wings clipped: an overcooked, dry, and colorless
reality; a representative of contemporary social marginality on a grand scale.
En un momento, cuando estaba por servirle vino, vi que me ponía cara rara
y miraba para adelante como un pavo con el pecho hinchado. Como un pavo
empavonado. La miré extrañada y me hizo una seña rara. La seguí mirando.
Seguía aleteando y por un momento pensé que se estaba convirtiendo en
pollo de veras. Aleteaba y se agarraba la garganta. Aleteaba y aleteaba. Me
hizo reír. (…)
Cayó al suelo. Se empezó a retorcer como un gusano. Pero nunca voló
como un pollo. De repente se quedó quieta. Morada. Con la boca entreabi-
erta y con los ojos redondos como huevos fritos sin pestañear. Huevos fritos.
Qué rico. Pero sin pan no tienen sentido. No vale la pena.
(In a moment, when I was about to serve her wine, I noticed that she
was making a strange gesture, peering forward like a turkey with a swollen
chest. Like a silly-looking turkey. I looked at her, not understanding what
was going on, and she gave me a weird hint. I kept on looking at her. She
continued to flap about and for a moment I thought that she was turning
into a chicken, for real. She flapped and grabbed at her throat. Flapped and
flapped. She made me laugh.
THE QUEER CONSUMPTION OF NATY MENSTRUAL 149
She fell to the ground. She began to wiggle about like a worm. But
she never flew, just like a chicken. Suddenly she was still. Purple. With her
mouth slightly open and her eyes round like fried eggs, unblinking. Fried
eggs. Delicious. But without bread it just didn’t make any sense. It wasn’t
worth the while.)30
confirm her presence and make of Menstrual, for the first time, both the
voice and the image through which all the stories inside are told (Fig. 5.5).
The obvious playfulness associated with her stage name, Naty
Menstrual, combines the traditionally hidden, “padded” and “tamponed”
trans-femininity with the theatricality inherent in the repertoires of Spanish
performer Nati Mistral, and makes of transvestite glamor a provocative
point around which stories are gathered and authority formed. Batido de
trolo breaks from Menstrual’s first collection, however, in allowing the
author’s image to overpower her signature as a marker of ownership.
Here, Menstrual is not just a symbolic gatherer of tales, but a distribu-
tor and seller of marginality. The photomontage presented on the cover
introduces Menstrual visually in a sequence of four separate, but similar,
portraits; the author is captured in different poses, wearing different wigs,
blouses, jewelry, and facial expressions. The Benjaminian reproduction of
the trans-subject is rendered explicit by the aestheticized filmstrip fram-
ing. Here Menstrual, like her trans-protagonists in Continuadisimo, is
repeated in cookie-cutter fashion. However, if for Benjamin the mechani-
cal, photographic reproduction of contemporary art results in the political
Fig. 5.5 Naty Menstrual, Batido de trolo (Buenos Aires: Milena Cacerola, 2012).
Cover page
THE QUEER CONSUMPTION OF NATY MENSTRUAL 151
Fig. 5.7 Naty Menstrual, Batido de trolo (Buenos Aires: Milena Cacerola,
2012). 27. Photo by Nicolás Fernández
THE QUEER CONSUMPTION OF NATY MENSTRUAL 153
Fig. 5.8 Naty Menstrual, Batido de trolo (Buenos Aires: Milena Cacerola, 2012).
146. Photo by Marieta Vazquez. www.marietavazquez.com.ar
create interest and justify the movement, both psychological and physi-
cal, required to establish contact.
Moving now as one, author and reader are inseparable: their bod-
ies, platinum-blond wigs and pleasure-seeking intentions set apart
by a single black tee. Engulfed in the performance of intimacy, the
author–reader relationship represented here is clearly marked by third-
party spectatorship; the implications of consuming queer subject mat-
ter, even secretly, cannot be denied. The onlooker’s presence attracts
the glare of Menstrual and her partner, creating from their embrace a
theatrical presentation that addresses the performative conceit inher-
ent in both sexual and textual encounters. To read, to consume queer
eroticism is understood as inescapably voyeuristic: an act necessarily
mediated by the scrutiny of social conventions. It is this scrutiny that
marks the formation, however skewed, of contemporary community
(Fig. 5.9).
Belying this conventional conceit, on the other hand, the onlooker’s
gaze is characterized as pleasure-seeking, as the voyeur deliberately strives
Fig. 5.9 Naty Menstrual, Batido de trolo (Buenos Aires: Milena Cacerola, 2012).
198. Photo by Marieta Vazquez. www.marietavazquez.com.ar
THE QUEER CONSUMPTION OF NATY MENSTRUAL 155
NOTES
1. Beatriz Sarlo. Scenes from Postmodern Life, trans. Jon Beasley-Murray
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
2. Sarlo, Scenes, 15.
3. Ibid.
4. Sarlo, Scenes, 17.
5. Jorge Salessi, Médicos maleantes y maricas: Higiene, criminología y homo-
sexualidades la construcción de la nación Argentina. (Buenos Aires: 1871-
1914) (Buenos Aires: Beatriz Viterbo, 1995).
6. Salessi, Médicos, 14. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
7. Ibid.
8. Judith (Jack) Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgendered
Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005),
10.
9. Halberstam, In a Queer Time, 153–4.
10. “La Menstrual Remeras (Facebook Page) ” posted August 4, 2012,
accessed on December 2, 2015, https://www.facebook.com/
LaMenstrualRemeras/
11. “La Menstrual Remeras (Facebook Page)” posted on June 25, 2015,
accessed on December 5, 2015, https://www.facebook.com/
LaMenstrualRemeras/
12. Naty Menstrual, Continuadísimo (Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia, 2008).
13. Menstrual, Continuadísimo, 15.
14. Menstrual, Continuadísimo, 16.
15. Menstrual, Continuadísimo, 17.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2004), 3.
23. Edelman, No Future, 9.
24. Edelman, No Future, 18.
THE QUEER CONSUMPTION OF NATY MENSTRUAL 157
LOOKING SOUTH
In closing this discussion of queer culture, closet epistemologies, and con-
temporary Argentinean society, I feel a need to disclose that I am neither
queer nor Argentine. Rather, I am a cis-heterosexual Canadian. My silence
on this point until this moment represents, in part, a desire to pass as
other, to pass as part of the other, in a moment when North America and
heterosexuality represent normative discourses whose historical legacy of
cultural enforcement encourages my movement toward the margins and
my (self-)identification as different. This “coming out” of sorts is born
of my wish to make explicit my ability to speak about Queer Argentina
despite the sexual, geographic, and cultural distances that separate me
from my subject matter. Knowledge is often measured through experience
and belonging; my silence signals my desire to move toward understand-
ing through empathy. At the same time, however, it is crucial that the
reader understand my engagement with the cultural material within these
pages as a constant renegotiation of these terms, where the status of my
own (national-sexual) secret is discovered, time and again, in the cultural
legacy tied to the name on this book and to the language I use to speak
about queer culture in contemporary Argentina. Like the social, familial
lineage tied to my name, Edwards, my use of English reveals a distance I
am unable to shorten, a secret I am unable to hide. Together, these tokens
mark my difference publicly—and, in a way my own sexuality does not,
insist that the obvious be discussed and my story be told. Speaking about
Queer Argentina represents, for me, a constant re-telling, re-stating, re-
cognition of my sexual, national, and linguistic associations, in an effort
to explain how it is that I too may understand what it means to negotiate
closet(ed) lifestyles and cultural difference in today’s global(ized) world.
Eve Sedgewich admits the usefulness of the closet as an allegory for
social alterity in her Epistemologies of the Closet.1 The closet has been for-
mally elaborated as an elastic frame for queerdom, its walls continually
reconstructed and resituated according to the people, groups, and com-
munities that gay subjects engage with: from whom their secret(s) must
be kept, or to whom they must be carefully revealed. The back-and-forth
movement across the closet’s threshold becomes part of a necessary per-
formative repertoire of being other, where entrance is directly related to
the identification of (sexual) difference as a necessary secret. As an exten-
sion of this concept, the phrase coming out implies both a literal exit from
enclosure and confinement and the resultant social confrontation with
dominant discourses, revealed through institutionalized public opinion
that the newly “out” person must engage with. Closet life marks a lifestyle
defined by knowing, and concealing, difference.
My own engagement with queer culture, as seen through the readings
performed in these pages, suggests that such—closeted—lifestyles may be
considered desirable. Unlike Sedgewick, however, I suggest that in today’s
world, the closet has become a sought-after destination and an explicit
response to feeling uncomfortable at home, as part of normalcy beyond
sexuality. Despite the distances that separate contemporary subjects
physically, economically, and ideologically, the negotiation of silence and
knowledge that characterizes queer epistemologies has made the closet an
increasingly frequented symbolic place, its threshold a high-traffic zone
where community forms and social alterity connects. Here, the silences
required to coexist within the limits of normativity mark social, economic,
political, and sexual dissidence as a shared experience—an axis around
which community takes shape.
My desire to look away from North America and toward queer cul-
tural production in Argentina represents an explicit attempt to accom-
modate myself within this space. What makes me look abroad is not just
my unwillingness to fit in and become part of a society located in the van-
guard of capitalist, consumer-based trends—a society increasingly defined
by racial divide and ideological imposition—but also the sheer impossi-
bility of my doing so. Fitting into (post)modern, neoliberal, globalized,
CONCLUSION: CÉSAR AIRA AND QUEER MOVEMENTS IN CRISIS 161
is sought after, pursued, and used as a gathering point around which social
otherness unites. Each story begins by defining the retrospective glance of its
female narrator and protagonist.
“Yo era una niña de siete años, princesa de un país de cuento de hadas.”
(I was a seven-year-old child, princess of one of the countries of Fairytale
Land.)
“Yo era una chica moderna, que salía mucho.” (I was a modern girl who
went out a lot.)
“Yo era una mujer casada, y sufría por serlo.” (I was a married woman
and I suffered for it.)
Se desató una tormenta. Cuando salimos del bosque el cielo se había puesto
negro, y el viento descargaba bolas de nieve que explotaban sin ruido sal-
picándonos de polvo blanco. Los relámpagos unían las cimas de las mon-
tañas, y el eco de los truenos se prolongaba en los valles lejanos. Atrás,
quedaba el crac siniestro de los carámbanos que colgaban de los árboles
quebrándose. Adelante, el fragor de los torrentes crecidos. Los chivos cor-
rían más rápido que el viento, levantando una polvareda de nieve; saltos
prodigiosos intercalados con la carrera les permitían mantener la línea recta
a través de todos los obstáculos.9
(A storm was unleashed. When we left the forest the sky had turned black,
and the wind discharged balls of snow that exploded without sound, sprin-
kling us with white dust. The lightening joined the peaks of the mountains,
and the echo of the thunder was extended in the distant valleys. Behind us
remained the sinister crack of the icicles that hung from the trees as they
broke. In front, the roar of the flooding streams. The goats ran faster than
the wind, kicking up a dusting of snow; the glorious leaps that punctuated
their speedy trajectory allowed them to maintain a straight line through all
the obstacles)
(The race continued, the storm worsened, the mountains and the omi-
nous gorges followed each other in the whirlwind of the escape. It was as if
we were getting too far away and leaving the reach of all hope. If there was
something in my imagination that could take me from the reaches of my
father, it was distance; and distance was accumulating at a distressing rate.
Suddenly, to top off the glass of my fears, the wind stopped, the clouds
broke and a bruised rainbow shone over a dead city.)
Their arrival at the margins, and at the city of rainbows, reinforces the sug-
gestion that this collective be understood queerly. Their counterculture
status is confirmed by the home they arrive at: not the bright kingdom of
family life, but the city of death under a battered rainbow. The distance
traveled insists that such spaces are a sought-after refuge. Located beyond
the imagination of dominant fantasies, beyond the princess’s own reality,
queer spaces are understood as the global, the far-off in a world otherwise
conceived of as strictly local. Traveling large distances creates separation
from the once-known, from the comfort of tradition—and, as such, marks
the queer in geographic terms, plotting their location in distant lands.
Queer culture, as painted in Aira’s story, initiates and motivates a delib-
erate break with normativity and the experiences of otherness. It is pre-
sented as a well-established, preexisting force that actively counterbalances
and counteracts dominant, heteronormative frameworks. The kidnapping
of the princess and her geographical-epistemological relocation assigns and
confirms agency to queer culture, independent of dominant traditions;
the silent—they do not speak throughout the episode—masked, distant
qualities of the goat-men introduces the closet as their point of ideological
departure. Although queer culture itself is presented here as the allegori-
cal opposite to monarchical rule in Fairytale Land—and the keen enemy
of family life—movement into secrecy and hiding, and engagement with
closet frameworks, is understood as a means of responding to moments
of social, economic, and political crisis. When the princess returns from
her adventure to the dead city, she finds that family life has literally lost its
magic. As part of the ransom agreement for her release, the king revealed
his Fountain of Wishes as the source of all his wealth, both social and eco-
nomic. Stripped of popular support, the king grows tired of tradition, of
the pomp of royal ceremony, and notices that his daughter, the narrator,
had also become bored, desensitized to the stimulation that the excesses
of royal/real life, “la vida real,” once thrilled her with.
172 M.J. EDWARDS
In Aira’s story, the narrator’s return home does not represent a happy
ending, but another situation to resolve, another crisis to appease. The
city of rainbows, and the queer culture represented by the homosocial
community of men on goats, become, amidst moments of crisis at home,
a sought-after destination and an alternative to the despair and discomfort
of domestic existence. Together, the father and daughter leave Royal life
in search of queer frameworks and a different lifestyle, and while they
never do arrive at the city of rainbows, their encounter with the masked,
muscle-bound goat riders comes at the end of a fantastic travel narrative
that places queerness in a far-off land, located on the edge of representa-
tion itself.
La ladera por la que bajábamos sin fin era en realidad un complejo de laderas.
El ejército de Hombres Chivos bajaba en formación cerrada hacia nosotros
rodeándonos, pero a la vez nosotros también bajábamos hacía ellos, rodeán-
dolos. El terreno se bamboleaba en todas direcciones. Las paredes de los
montes se habían ensombrecido, y se encendieron unas hileras de lucecitas
rojas en el camino. Me di cuenta de que estábamos en un cine. La nieve,
omnipresente, hacía de pantalla. La proyección era la de nuestros temores
y fantasías.11
(The hillside from which we descended without an end in sight was in
reality a series of hillsides. The army of Goat Men came down in closed
formation toward us and surrounded us, but at the same time we descended
toward them, surrounding them. The terrain swayed in all directions. The
walls of the mountains had become dark, and rows of red lights were lit
along the way. I realized that we were in a movie theater. The snow, omni-
present, became the screen. The projection was of our fears and fantasies.)
In a scene that reproduces Plato’s cave allegory, the Goat Men and the nar-
rator’s Royal family are understood as the source from which cultural nar-
ratives develop. Rather than the projection of forms as shadows on a wall,
the cryptic allusion to cinematography reconceptualizes reality itself as a
story, a sequence of individual forms that gather meaning when under-
stood as a collective performance. The allegorical film in the narrator’s
fantasy projects and refracts both the queer and heterosexual understand-
ings of the social. The private screening of social representation merges
the paths of the queerly defined Goat Men with a family life in crisis, and
their union here represents a path leading to the resolution of contempo-
rary social conflict and personal discontent.
CONCLUSION: CÉSAR AIRA AND QUEER MOVEMENTS IN CRISIS 173
No recordaba nada pero las conversaciones con Lila las recordaba perfecta-
mente, hasta la última palabra.
¿Yo borracha? ¿Yo ebria? ¿Yo amnésica? No, imposible. Conociéndome,
era imposible. Y sin conocerme también.12
(I didn’t remember anything except the conversations with Lila, but
those I remembered perfectly, right up to the last word.
Was I drunk? Me, intoxicated? Forgetful? No, impossible. Knowing me,
that was impossible. And even without knowing me.)
The lapses in the narrator’s memory revealed in this excerpt become the
scaffolding for the story’s sequence of events, presented as “[f]ragmen-
tos, frases sueltas, episodios incoherentes” (fragments, loose sentences,
incoherent episodes).13 Waking up to the morning light signals not only
one’s induction back into the “normal” world of business hours and good
behavior but also the imposition of a system of knowing and understand-
ing aimed at clarity and organization that contradicts and impedes trans-
gressive nightly events.
Intersecting the narrator’s daytime attempts at clarity, Aira intro-
duces friendship as an epistemological platform for engaging the
night and the subcultural lifestyles it represents. This friendship comes
into the story through the conversations that the narrator recalls—
and although these moments are not considered as apart from the
night’s events or as having evaded its fragmentary incoherent unravel-
ing, these exchanges are considered complete and are presented as a
model against which other nightly communications may be compared.
In this context, the narrator’s relationship with her friend, Lila, stands
out as unique, breaching a gap between two opposed positions within
modernity. In fact, the friendship between these two characters may be
directly regarded as a microcosm of contemporary sociocultural differ-
ences in Latin America.
Lila era mi mejor amiga. Nos conocíamos desde los dieciocho años, y nues-
tra amistad había sido inquebrantable a través de todos los altos y bajos
de la vida. No podíamos ser más distintas. Nunca dos seres humanos han
tenido personalidades más opuestas. Y no sólo eso: nuestras familias parecían
provenir de planetas distintos, y nuestras historias eran tan divergentes que
sólo un milagro podía haber hecho que nos cruzáramos. Pero ese milagro se
había producido, y a partir de él nada nos pudo separar. Aunque distinta de
mí, ella era tan moderna como yo, lo que me hizo pensar que había más de
una modernidad, por lo menos dos, la suya y la mía.14
CONCLUSION: CÉSAR AIRA AND QUEER MOVEMENTS IN CRISIS 175
(Lila was my best friend. We had known each other since we were 18
years old, and our friendship had been unbreakable throughout all of life’s
ups and downs. We could not have been more different. And not just that:
our families seemed to come from different planets and our pasts were so
divergent that only a miracle could have made our paths cross. But this
miracle was produced, and from that moment on nothing could separate us.
Although different, she was just as modern as I was, and it made me think
that there was more than one modernity, at least two, hers and mine.)
…yo las admiraba y las quería como a dos hijas, y sigo queriéndolas a pesar
de todo. Dos chicas bonitas, criadas con amorosos desvelos por sus padres,
dos amigas inseparables que no tenían secretos una con la otra, y no tenían
secretos con el mundo porque no habían tenido tiempo, en la frescura de
su juventud, de hacer nada que debiera ocultarse; una flor que se abre en un
jardín de la aurora tampoco tiene secretos. Y, sin embargo, me desilusion-
aron, ¡y cómo! Esta noche me decepcionaron. De abajo de sus caras gracio-
sas asomó el rostro horrible de la crueldad, sus cuerpitos esbeltos revelaron
los tentáculos deformes del monstruo que las habitaba…
¡Está hablando de nosotras! Todo coincidía.16
(…I admired and loved them like two daughters, and despite everything
I still love them. Two pretty girls, raised by the loving sacrifices of their par-
ents, two inseparable friends that didn’t hold secrets from one another, and
they didn’t hide anything from the world because they didn’t have time, in
the freshness of their youth, to do anything that should be hidden; a flower
that opens up in a garden at daybreak has no secrets. And, nevertheless, they
disappointed me, and in what a manner! That night they lied to me. From
underneath their friendly faces, there appeared a horrible cruelty, their well-
defined bodies revealed the deformed tentacles of the monster that lived
within them both…
He was speaking about us! Everything made sense.)
Here, the police official assumes a fatherly tone as he narrates the story of
the social family’s demise. Although the two young ladies that form part of
this family are placeholders for the Beauty and Happiness that are consid-
ered by the police official to be innate qualities of the social, the narrator
178 M.J. EDWARDS
hidden him, tied his penis to her finger, and let him go. The Commissioner
was right below us, a little bit in front. El Gauchito lowered himself down
until halfway and came back up; the elasticity of his little virile member was
fantastic. She threw him back down harder, and he almost made it to the
Commissioner’s head. One more time. He was truly a living yo-yo. He
agitated his arms and legs like a gray gelatin spider, and came up again in
one jump. With a little bit of practice Lila managed to get him to stop right
in front of Cipolletti’s face, who (engaged as he was in his speech) didn’t
realize what was happening. He must have thought in his distraction that it
was an insect that flew in front of his eye. He made a small gesture to scare
it and continued speaking. El Gauchito jumped up with a sharp “blaaah!”
that coincided with one of the Commissioner’s majestic pauses. Everyone
followed his trajectory, laughter became constant, and the small night club
vibrated with choral “blaah!”’s resonating from within the multitudes.)
The young protagonists disregard the police official’s plea for cooperation
and empathy, instead celebrating the weaknesses of the symbolic confu-
sion that bonds their lifestyle to dominant traditions. The flexibility of
the commissioner’s allegory permits the two women to act freely, and to
act out against the anxiety associated with authority as a whole. Rather
than flee, and increase their symbolic separation from the dominant fig-
ures who imagine harmonious futures through family logics, the female
couple chooses to dangle El Gauchito from his elastic phallus, mockingly,
in the face of authority. The premature fetus, without the medical assis-
tance needed to come to term, embodies the stunted growth character-
istic of underdevelopment. As it oscillates up and down, El Gauchitos’s
penis routine gains impetus and volume. Its meaningless chant not only
annotates each of the commissioner’s thoughts with a dismissive “blah”
but also illustrates the richness of speaking between, around, and through
dominant discourse. Here the collective body of nightly dancers unites
behind the symbolically charged “blah, blah, blah”s of underdevelopment,
offering up the suggestion that the contradictory, overlapping nature of
modernity in Latin America revolves around the creative dismissal of local
authority.
In No Apocalypse, No integration: Modernism and Postmodernism in
Latin America (2001), Martín Hopenhayn describes contemporary life
through the void left after the hopes of social utopia, democratic reform,
and economic development are unfulfilled. Today, he explains, the oppor-
tunity to rectify long-lasting, persistent inequalities through social, politi-
cal, and economic change has come to an end. In its place, doubt has
180 M.J. EDWARDS
Life’s joy lies in occupying the interstitial areas, the areas in-between. Facing
a reality which is simultaneously fragmented and enormously resistant to
structural changes, one can substitute the reconciliatory, liberatory joy
promised by revolution with enthusiasm for little utopias or gaps within a
disenchanted world. This enthusiasm can spur one to lead an initiative of
communal participation; to identify oneself with the ephemeral and circum-
stantial symbols used by those who reject the status quo, the Establishment;
to come and go between new social movements that are born and die; to
sporadically transgress a social norm; to ridicule power in complicity with
some peers; or to capitalize, taking advantage of the gaps that macroeco-
nomic disequilibrium creates. All this can be a source of rejoicing, however
briefly.19
QUEER NECESSITIES
The embrace of queer culture from within heterosexuality is today
regarded with cliché-filled optimism. PRIDE now inspires marches of soli-
darity where LGBTTIQA marks A for ally in the fight against inequality
and for institutionalized inclusion of sexual and gender-based differences.
However, for many queer thinkers, assimilation is dangerous, a clear indi-
cator of a market-oriented, heteronormative push for cultural homogene-
ity. Authors David Eng, José Esteban Muñoz, and J. Jack Halberstam
collectively observe that critical thought surrounding queer sexualities has
developed into a platform for understanding social, political, economic,
and racial, as well as sexual and gender-based antagonisms. For these
authors, queer studies offer a critical understanding of “public debates
about the meaning of democracy and freedom, citizenship and immi-
gration, family and community, and the alien and the human in all their
national and their global manifestations.”21 In a special edition of the jour-
nal Social Text, Eng, Muñoz, and Halberstam call attention to the conse-
quences of homonormativity and queer liberalism (and the concomitant
passive adherence to US empire building and nationalism) by encouraging
the field of queer studies to look away from itself and toward humility as
a necessary next step in a queer social agenda. Since then, the notions of
time, feeling, movement, and social interaction within Queer Studies have
been expanded further by these authors and others, including Elizabeth
Freeman, Heather Love, Lauren Berlant, and David M. Halperin, in an
attempt to question the aesthetic, affective, and geographic limitations
imposed by our market economy and heteronormative traditions.
184 M.J. EDWARDS
Within the Latin American context, the plaza represents the intentional
placement of leisure time, political protest, and social alterity alongside
formal manifestations of dominant culture. Today, the Argentinean plaza
symbolizes the coexistence of government institutionalization, religious
orthodoxy, and financial normativity with the chaos and unpredictability
of the independent merchants, homeless wanderers, and exhausted party-
goers who often share its benches. It is a place swept and sprayed, whose
sought-after cleanliness mimics a marketplace ethos that seeks tourists and
consumers, profits and progress. This chaotic reality of Aira’s suburban
plaza contrasts with the contemporary urban planning trends that aim to
hide or remove communities seen as undesirable, mischievous, or harmful.
US-based writer and cultural critic Samuel L. Delaney wrote in his
Time Square Red, Time Square Blue (2001) about the cleaning-up of
New York’s famous Times Square in order to increase the urban center’s
economic worth. By contrast, Aira presents a plaza that is untouched by
capitalist motives. While Delaney chronicles the systematic removal of the
sex industry from the New York City center in order to coax families and
respectable businesses into downtown, Aira depicts the incursion of oth-
ers into the marketplace: Gladys is enticed into the forgotten plaza by the
promise of the hidden, the unknown.
it was that I came upon it. It was in between two trees, at the center of the
arches formed by their fallen branches in which roots had sprung up and
formed new trees: a type of low gallery, very sheltered by a thick shrubbery
of hemp. And even there, in its hideout, the statue was half-buried in waves
of hardened mud, like iron, by the presence of phosphorescent limestone.
Inclined, possibly inverted, blackened by the bonfires made by generations
of bums in this rubber-plant gathering spot, it was still recognizable: an
allegory of Benevolence, a relic from a more optimistic era.…Or maybe not
so optimistic. (…) Because it was an old Benevolence, hunched over, seated
as if it were never again to stand, with a severe gesture, sour, resigned, in so
much as you could read an expression in the worn-down face, without nose
and lips. I wasn’t the only one to have found it, quite the contrary. Recent
graffiti proved that it was visited with certain frequency: they had painted
the eyeballs with hot-red nail polish. The effect was chilling)
Gladys’s journey through the plaza and her discovery of the statue rep-
resents a cultural movement away from social cleansing, urban gentrifi-
cation, and the heteronormative institution of marriage. Her desire to
engage with (and literally step inside of) society’s shadows, to enter its
overgrown spaces, permits her to recognize social networks whose defini-
tion lies outside the normative framework. Private makeup sessions mark
the fallen statue Gladys discovers as an icon of self-identification, of wor-
ship, tucked within a space that remains unchoreographed, independent,
and self-motivated—as are those who share its holy company.
For Gladys, life goes on after marriage. In fact, as her story comes to a
close, she is healthier and happier than ever. Travel has permitted the dis-
covery of parallel—queer—realities that have made of the world (or at least,
the urban landscape that surrounds her) a flexible space where she can fully
engage with her socioeconomic marginality. Away from the destructive
rigidity of normative institutions, Gladys is able to self-construct, choosing
to fashion herself into a clown. And as she makes herself over, renovation
becomes inseparable from recycling. Ultimately, the maligned domestic
sphere itself becomes an integral part of her public (re)presentation: “me
ponía el sombrero de zapato, un zapato de guante y otro de nariz, me
calzaba las orejas en los pies, los pantalones de camisa, la levitón de chi-
ripá, la peluca de corbata, o cualquier otra variación que naciera del apuro
frenético por volverme payaso” (I used the hat as shoes, one shoe as a glove
and the other as my nose, my ears fit perfectly on my feet, my pants as a
shirt, my overcoat as chiripa, the wig as a tie, or whatever other variation
came about in my frenzied rush to become a clown.).27 The relocation
CONCLUSION: CÉSAR AIRA AND QUEER MOVEMENTS IN CRISIS 191
example, “I was a married woman…” and from there, step by step, advance
until arriving in the present. It didn’t matter how long it would take, nor
the quantity of paper that I would need to print the pamphlet. Essentially, I
saw it as an infinite task.)
mative traditions: it not only permits, but insists upon, renegotiation and
reorientation within contemporary frameworks. Finding queer culture,
as María Moreno has argued, is a useful exercise. It enables new social
networks to emerge and new power structures to be endorsed. Like Naty
Menstrual, Aira’s Gladys and Aldo choose to move toward, to locate and
engage with queer culture as a response to the pressures of living in a
global, market-oriented society. Here, as Manuel Puig suggests in his
Kiss of the Spider Woman, communities form and collectives unite behind
queer representatives, finding in otherness a common ground in a global
age where social interaction involves collaboration, coexistence, and
compassion.
NOTES
1. Eve Sedgewick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkley: University of California
Press, 1990).
2. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011),
28.
3. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 44.
4. Néstor García Canclini, Imagined Globalization, trans. George Yúdice
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 15.
5. Sandra Contreras, “Superproducción y devaluación en la literatura argen-
tina reciente,” in El valor de la cultura: Arte, literatura y mercado en
América Latina, ed. Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante et al. (Buenos Aires:
Beatriz Viterbo, 2007), 74–5.
6. César Aira, Yo era una mujer casada (Blatt and Rios: Buenos Aires, 2011).
Kindle Edition.
7. César Aira, Yo era una niña de siete años, 2nd Ed. (Buenos Aires: Interzona,
2011), 16.
8. Aira, Niña de siete años, 18.
9. Aira, Niña de siete años, 40.
10. Aira, Niña de siete años, 40–1.
11. Aira, Niña de siete años, 90.
12. César Aira, Yo era una chica moderna, 2nd Ed. (Buenos Aires: Interzona,
2011), 8.
13. Aira, Chica moderna, 17.
14. Aira, Chica moderna, 21.
15. Aira, Chica moderna, 41.
16. Aira, Chica moderna, 54.
17. Aira, Chica moderna, 57.
194 M.J. EDWARDS
association with death, 9, 11, 143, limits on, 13, 41, 160
144, 170 as a process in flux, 16, 95, 128
as a cultural category, 11 through language, 15, 16, 114,
as disability, 62 118, 145, 152, 159, 162
as nonconformity, 62, 144 subjectivity, 5, 7–10, 14–16, 18, 20,
as a sexual period, 11 21, 23, 29, 30, 40, 54, 56, 57,
as sickness, 128, 145, 146, 188 57n2, 62, 65, 67, 89, 93, 95,
queer normalization, 94 96, 98, 118, 122, 145, 147,
queer sexuality, 5, 53 155, 168, 170
R T
reproduction of the self, 55, 119, 120, textual invisibility, 7
128, 134, 150, 151 Tía Vicenta (magazine), 22, 31–5
Rossi, Agustín, 9–12, 16, 20, 42, 50, tradition, 2, 4–7, 9, 13, 15–18, 20,
105, 143, 145, 181, 187, 192 22–4, 30, 31, 34–7, 40, 42, 43,
rumor, 63, 64, 71 45, 52, 54, 61–4, 75, 78–80, 83,
89n6, 93–9, 102–9, 111, 114–17,
121, 126, 129, 133, 135, 139,
S 140, 144, 145, 147–50, 155,
Saint Genevieve in her bathtub 162–7, 169, 171, 175–9, 181,
(theatrical sketch), 42 183, 186, 188, 191–3
same-sex marriage, 1–26, 131, 135, transactional hierarchies, 137
192. See also civil union; transgenderism, 5, 23, 94, 119,
marriage legislation in 129–31, 133, 137, 139, 142,
Latin America 145, 149
Sarlo, Beatriz, 28, 57n1, 127, 129, transvestism, 23, 133, 145, 150
130, 156n1, 156n2, 156n4 travel
sexual education, 3–5 as an metaphor for the desire to
sexual equality, 4, 9, 51, 75, 142 think differently, 173
sexuality as a social construct, 4 as a queer act, 182
shopping-mall experience, 127 Turkification, 148
social alterity, 6, 19, 43, 55, 61, 73,
80, 89, 96, 109, 118, 133, 137,
141, 145, 160, 167, 182, 189 U
social protagonism, 37 underdevelopment, in Latin American
study abroad, 162, 163 culture, 42, 114, 116, 119, 127,
subject formation 173, 175, 177, 181, 182, 189