Kissing the Body Politic: Engendering Heterosexuality/ Screening the Homosocial

Abstract

Manuel Puig’s El beso de la mujer arana [Kiss of the Spider Woman] (1976) is truly a magical text that not only reinvents the possi- bilities of gender, subjectivity, and passion, but reinvents narra- tive itself to seduce us into new modes of identification. The text’s history—from novel to play to Hollywood film to Broadway musical—is a dazzling example of genre crossing. Each textual moment gives us new stories to read, to contemplate, and to rehearse identification. In this final chapter, I will focus on Puig’s novel, a tour deforce in Latin American literature, that represents a summa of the author’s oeuvre, as well as a culmination of the literary movements and tendencies in which this work has been canonized. The novel’s structure follows many of Puig’s previous narrative experiments. For instance, the text’s structure resembles a film script or the text of a play. The story of Valentin and Molina—the former, a political prisoner who is accused of anti-government activities, also of being a Marxist; the latter, a very feminine, gay man accused of” corrupting youth,“ also a political prisoner—unfolds as an ongoing scripted dialogue, sometimes friendly, sometimes bitter. At times it is difficult to figure out who is talking, since the author does not give us the usual notations that reference action in the prison space; he occasionally uses footnotes to supply useful information and textual gaps to signal that nothing much might be hap pening. As with other works, Puig borrows and samples other narrative styles to tell his story—here he adapts the language of film into literary space.2