A comparatist exercise of queer literature: rReflections on Manuel Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña

Abstract

The articulation of a queer epistemology allows us to think about textuality as a place of dramatization of a politic fiction that questions the heteronormative patterns of sex and gender, and proposes a strategy of resistance based both on bodies and pleasures and on politics of representation and reinvention of masculinities and femininities. Taking feminist assumptions, narratology and queer theory/epistemology as theoretical basis, it is made a critical reading of Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976). Through the principles of narratology, it is also studied in which way (or ways) the narrative is configured as a space of negotiation, from a queer perspective, of nationality, sexuality and gender in the enunciation of these novels. In this sense, literature rewrites both the sexual body, seen as the place of individual subjectivity, and the social/national body, understood as a fiction that balances body and sexual sociabilities.