Of Rats and Men: The Homosexual's Becoming-Animal in Antonio Roig's Autobiographical Writing

Abstract

The name of Antonio Roig is by now inextricably linked in Spain to the controversy which, during the years of the Transition, followed the publication of his three autobiographical works, in which the author came out as a gay priest: Todos los parques no son un paraíso (memoriasde un sacerdote) (1977); Variaciones sobre un tema de Orestes (diario, 1975–1977) (1978), and Vidente en rebeldía: un proceso en la Iglesia (1979). An ostracized Carmelite living in London in the early 1970s, Roig writes at the margins of a number of reified or 'molar' subjective positions: those of nationality, of masculinity and sexuality. This paper aims to show that behind the essentialist ('confessional') mode which permeates the author's autobiographical trilogy, there is in it a truly transgressive potential towards the deterritorialization of identity which queercritics so far have not paid enough attention to and which is in the current 'post-political' climate (Slavoj Zizek) particularly relevant. The article proposes an anti-humanist, anti-essentialistand anti-homophobic reading of Roig. Drawing on a comparison between Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's idea of 'becoming-animal' (as expounded in, among other sources, Kafka and A Thousand Plateaus) and Roig's recurrent use of animal metaphors to refer to his experience asa gay man, it aims to demonstrate that Roig's uses of subjectivity cannot be understood unless we take into consideration the overall undermining of ontology and of the traditional categories of identity which Deleuze and Guattari's 'schizo-analysis' puts forward.