José Donoso and the Monstrous Masculinities of Chile’s Agrarian Reform

Abstract

By including queer characters who complicate or interrupt the seemingly inexorable progression forward of patriarchal ideas about lineage in his novels El lugar sin límites (1966) and El obsceno pájaro de la noche (1970), José Donoso denounces and destabilizes the underlying heteronormativity of two modernization movements of late sixties Latin America: Chile’s “model” agrarian reform movement, designed to be led by male figures firmly invested in heterosexual reproductive praxis, and the “Boom,” Latin America’s triumphal entrée (albeit dominated by heterosexual men) into the pantheon of world literature. These novels, then, propose broader, more cosmopolitan tropes whose queer appropriations of folkloric, grotesque “monstrosity” question and possibly extend what it means to be an ideal subject of modernity, even as they stop short of advocating for the more radical critiques, further-reaching agrarian reforms, and increasingly experimental artistic aesthetics that would manifest themselves in Chile when the Unidad Popular took power in 1970.