Cruel Dispositions: Queer Literature, the Contemporary Puerto Rican Literary Field and Luis Negrón’s Mundo Cruel (2010)

Abstract

This chapter offers an account of the rise and institutionalization of queer literature in the contemporary Puerto Rican literary field during the last quarter of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first. To do so, it charts and studies three key moments in the field’s history of positions and positionings—the twin birth of the contemporary Puerto Rican state and literary field in the 1950s and its elaboration of a heteronormative and homophobic cultural grammar; the rearticulation of the literary field in the 1970s by the members of the literary magazine Zona. Carga y Descarga and Manuel Ramos Otero, who were responsible for the expansion of the field’s horizons of the possible; and, finally, the constitution of a local queer literary space during the 2000s and the cultural life of Luis Negron’s short story collection Mundo cruel (2010), arguably the most successful book in the island in recent memory.