A Material World

Abstract

In the early twentieth century, the reorganization of the Latin American lettered city allowed the entry of subjects and sensibilities long excluded from the public literary sphere. This chapter reviews the strategies that queer writers deployed to inscribe themselves within new genealogies based on affect, corporality, foreignness, and travel, in a challenge to tradition and nation. It examines queer writers' approaches to spaces that had previously been closed to those of minoritized races, sexualities, and gender identities, and how these writers used public space to stage a new, sexualized literary field. Beginning with figures central to the construction of the Latin American queer writer—like Porfirio Barba-Jacob in Colombia, Salvador Novo in Mexico, and Augusto D'Halmar and Gabriela Mistral in Chile—the chapter traces important continuities with relevant contemporary writers, such as Reinaldo Arenas and Severo Sarduy in Cuba, Manuel Puig, Alejandra Pizarnik, and Sylvia Molloy in Argentina, Fernando Vallejo in Colombia, and Chileans Mauricio Wacquez and Pedro Lemebel. Controversy, the politics of the archive, the status of the writer, and the relationship between public and private life are all crucial to the invention of their personas. Through such invention, a new species of writer was created in Latin America.