The intimacy of the procedure: Writing, lesbian, south as practices of the self

Abstract

This is the first published English-language translation of the Argentinian lesbian activist writer val flores. This experimental essay thinks lesbian as a procedure of dissidence that exposes the guts of a way of doing: no longer sexual identity, but rather the body’s always unfinished writing, a writing as practice of the self, which babbles and mutters, a writing of not-doing as a vitalist affirmation. flores proposes that to write about making (oneself) a south lesbian writing, about the ways in which we (dis)organize life, language, body, writing, activism, love, sex, city, fucking, is to venture to write about the ways in which neocolonial power and its processes of subjection are constituted and break down in the cellular tissue of our own subjectivities. In this way lesbian writing may be a contingent and larval epistemic space in which to glimpse other forms of sensibility – political, affective, linguistic, sexual, and cultural.