Queer Affect and Transnational Movement in Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro’s Caparazones

Abstract

Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro’s novel Caparazones (2010) questions the formation and enactment of subjectivity with relation to categories of identity. By focusing on nationality, sexuality, and race, Arroyo Pizarro represents bodies that, while still rendered legible by certain markers of identity, challenge the reduction of the body to a simplified correlative pairing with categories of identity. I argue that positioning the protagonists of Caparazones as transnational subjects, Arroyo Pizarro creates queer possibilities of family and kinship that challenge heteronormative formulations of identity, belonging, time, and space. Transnational movement reformulates subjecthood as a stable and identifiable position and complicates the relationship between nationality, expression of gender and sexuality, and affective bonds.