Historical Constructions, Sexual Memories Open Access
Edwards, Matthew James (2009)
Abstract
Abstract: Historical Constructions, Sexual Memories, by Matthew Edwards
Historical
Constructions, Sexual Memories examines how Latin American
marginal
and minority subjects defy chronological and temporal order in
their artistic works in order
to create alternative ways of engaging the past, which creates new
ways of looking at
culture and society.
In the first chapter, "Hearing Silent Voices: Manuel Puig,
Prison Narratives, and El
beso de la mujer araña", Manuel Puig's decision to
express queer sex within nontraditional
narrative terms represents the apex of a marginal historical
narration that is imprisoned by a
political struggle in Argentina's history founded on
heterosexuality. In "Discovering Silent
Pasts: Copi's Archive of the Marginal Subject", Copi's cartoon,
dramatic and novelistic
production is regarded as an archive of marginal discourses. A look
into Copi's most
famous comic strip, La
femme assise, his play titled Loretta Strong (1974), and his
first
novel, El baile de las
locas (1976) locates marginality in an historical narrative
that focuses
on the difficulty of locating the queer body in a clear and concise
narrative of the past. For
Copi, the only historical narrative able to define the queer
subject situates meaning itself in
the erotic encounter between naked bodies. Finally, the third
chapter focuses on El
affair
Skeffington (1992), by María Moreno. In it, a textual
collage of misrepresented,
misunderstood and sometimes completely unknown historical documents
engages a
previously disregarded past that tells of a female erotic network
in conjunction with
disorderly social conduct.
In these texts, each author sees traditional historical
narration as limiting the way
marginal subjects define themselves within chronological time.
Taken together, they
present a memory founded on sex as a means of embracing chaos,
confusion and
contradiction in their historical endeavor. When sexual intimacy
becomes a way of
narrating the past, sexual memory leads to a present where nothing
is over-looked, not even
awkward pleasures or queer passions.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Introduction: Hindsight, Blindness and Looking into Latin America's
Marginal Pasts
……….1
I. From Marginality to Queer Stories to Sexual
Memories
……….8
II. Queer Histories, Sexual Memories: Speaking about Argentina's
Marginal Past
……...15
III. The State of My Question: (Sexual) Memories of Puig, Copi and
Moreno
……...30
Chapter 1: Hearing Silent Voices: Manuel Puig, Prison Narratives,
and El beso de la mujer
araña
………35
I. Puig's Prison Narrative, Part One: Paraphrasing Pasts, Narrating
Difference
………40
II. Puig's Prison Narrative, Part Two: Dominance, Documents and
Textual
Confinement
………64
III. Kissing the Spider Woman: Puig's Silent Discussion of
the Unimaginable
………80
Chapter 2: Discovering Silent Pasts: Copi's Archive of the Marginal
Subject
………90
I. Copi's La femme assise: A Weekly Archive of the
Margins
………98
II. Imag(in)ing Narratives: Copi and an Impossible Historical
Theatrics
……..109
III. Sexual Memory: Writing a Timeless Archive with Copi's
El baile de las locas
……..124
Chapter 3: Insinuating Pasts: Poetic Subjects and their Sexual
Memories in María
Moreno's El Affair Skeffington
……..155
I. Archival Confusions and Historical Fictions in Moreno's
Prologue
……..162
II. Reciting the Past: Quotes, Interpretation and Historical
Narration
……..176
III. A Sexual Poetics of the Subject: Reading Skeffington's
Affairs
……..207
Conclusion: Blurred Vision, Sexual Stories and the Historical
Subject
……..215
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