Mujeres raras: Patriarchal Nightmares, Dissident Imagination

Abstract

In contraposition to notions such as “transgression” or “marginality”, the idea of “dissidence” points towards the dismantling of binary figures and concepts that shape canonical readings of Argentinean literature. Literary writings on gender and sexual dissidence—especially after the second half of the 20th century and the first decades of 21st century—not only decenter heteronormative models (masculine/feminine; hetero/homosexual; transgender/cisgender) but also drag with them a number of constitutive configurations of Argentinean cultural imagination, such as nationalism/cosmopolitanism, Peronism/antiperonism, lettered/non—lettered, etc. This essay analyzes a series of literary texts (from Manuel Puig´s El beso de la mujer araña to Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s Las aventuras de la China Iron) in which sexual and gender opacity interrupts and displaces normative binarisms—at the same time bodily and cultural—showing the way in which the languages of dissidence set the ground for other cultural, as well as political, imaginaries.