| In 2014, Daniel Balderston and Jose Maristany authored the tenth chapter of the Cambridge Companion to the Latin American Novel: The Lesbian and Gay Novel in Latin America. In their chapter, they propose three stages to describe the evolution of a lesbian and gay Latin American literary tradition, citing Manuel Puig's El beso de la mujer arana (1976) as the founding text of the most current stage. They define this third stage by "the emergence of a lesbian and gay political subject concerned with the creation of a community and acting as an agent of social change, and the widening of definitions of queer subjects to include bisexuals, transgender people, transsexuals and even a queering of heterosexuality" (Balderston and Maristany 204). In this dissertation, I expand on their ideas by examining works written in the forty years since El beso was published and propose the characteristics of a nascent fourth stage of the queer literary tradition in Latin America. Taking the third stage as a point of departure, I analyze how the works of four Latin American novelists incorporate queer subjects into their novels, specifically examining: Salon de belleza (1994) by Mario Bellatin; Los sinsabores del verdadero policia (2011), Los detectives salvajes (1998), and 2666 (2004) by Roberto Bolano; Sirena Selena vestida de Pena (2000) by Mayra Santos-Febres; and Cien botellas en una pared (2002) by Ena Lucia Portela. Taking a methodological approach, I reveal an emerging fourth stage in the queer literary tradition, which I define by the depoliticization of the queer subject and the pervasive interweaving of the queer with the aesthetic and symbolic projects of each novel.;To approach the multiplicity of queer sexual practices and manifestations of queer sexuality depicted by these authors, I begin by developing a queer postmodernist methodology. I derive my methodological approach from Brian McHale's postmodernist narrative theory, set out in Postmodernist Fiction (1987), and the theories and studies of gender, sexuality, and queerness put forward by Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Jose Quiroga. In addition, I emphasize the examination of a queer literary tradition that better encompasses a nuanced spectrum of sexual identities and avoids the limitations and entrapments of a gendered three-part system (gay, lesbian, heterosexual). Moreover, in the works examined in this dissertation, I maintain that queerness is integral to their particularly well-received postmodernist writing.;I organize my study into four chapters each dedicated to one author. In Chapter One I offer a close reading of Bellatin's Salon de belleza with particular attention to the novel's relationship to questions of terminal illness, mortality, and palliative care. I demonstrate that Bellatin has developed a cohesive aesthetics of liquidity and that he purposefully constructs and coopts the narrator's fluid gender performance to echo the novel's aesthetic project. In Chapter Two I discuss the trope of epic catalogues and lists in three of Bolano's novels: Los sinsabores del verdadero policia, Los detectives salvajes, and 2666. I concentrate on one catalogue in particular that coopts queer sexualities as a taxonomical rhetoric to (re-)organize the poetic canon. In Chapter Three I analyze how Santos-Febres constructs an embodied political allegory by way of her queer travesti characters in Sirena Selena vestida de pena. I argue that her cooptation of queer identity, gender, and sexuality, for the allegorical project of the novel ultimately undermines the political agency of her characters and her social aspirations for her novel. Chapter Four focuses on Portela's Cien botellas en una pared , which foregrounds queer female characters and demonstrates the discrepancy between how male- and female-bodied queer sexualities are applied and deployed. This discrepancy reveals that while authors freely and diversely coopt and apply queer sexualities as aesthetic or rhetorical elements of the text when figured through a male-bodied lens, the same does not and cannot occur when figured through a female-bodied lens.;In my Conclusion, I examine the factors that may have led to the emergence of this fourth stage of the queer literary tradition in Latin America, tracing a shared genesis of Bellatin, Bolano, and Santos-Febres's novels in the HIVJAIDS pandemic. Additionally, I propose that Portela's novel (not derived from the HIVJAIDS crisis) stands as a counterpoint to the texts of her contemporaries, consciously resisting participation in the fourth stage of the queer literary tradition. Instead, Portela's novel emphasizes the urgency of a more robust canon of third-stage literature foregrounding queer female-bodied subjects and their political agency. |
