Memoir as a Testimony to Oppression and Defiance: A Study of Reinaldo Arenas’s Before Night Falls (original) (raw)
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2017
In this dissertation, I will seek to review how historical homophobic repression has been depicted both within and outside of Cuba by cultural productions. This dissertation will explore three films as a means of exploring the relationship between institutional homophobia and memory politics in Cuba. I will analyse the representation of homophobic repression in Néstor Almendros and Orlando Jiménez-Leal’s documentary Conducta Impropia (1984), Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío’s Fresa y chocolate released by the ICAIC (1993), and the American film interpretation of Cuban exile Reinaldo Arenas’s autobiography Before Night Falls (Julian Schnabel 2000). I will explore differing popular and academic critiques of homophobia in Cuba to gain a deeper understanding of the socio-political context of homophobic repression during the period 1965-1980. The dissertation will conclude by balancing progressive policies granting Cubans with LGBTQ Rights with an understanding of the continued significance of the representation of homophobia in cultural productions during the period 1980-2000. These films have contributed to collective memories, and hence contemporary socio-political understanding of, institutional homophobic repression during the period 1965-1980.
THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA, 2019
The literary work of Fernando Molano Vargas was the result of creativity and talent conceived under discriminatory circumstances surrounding poverty, homosexuality, and HIV/AIDS. This thesis asks what drives a person like Molano, who is triply marginalized, to dedicate himself to writing? I argue that Molano, an openly homosexual author, makes of literature his personal instrument of salvation: a matter of life and death. The present work is the first sustained analysis, at least in English, devoted to Molano’s trilogy, guided by theoretical approaches in queer theory such as those of Lee Edelman’s Homographesis (2016) and No Future (2004), and Kathryn Stockton’s The Queer Child (2009). This thesis is divided into three chapters. The first is on the novel Un beso de Dick (1992) and deals with themes of homosexual desire, love, life, and death. I evaluate Molano’s exploration of homosexuality in relation to the naive adolescent’s first love, sexuality, and the homoerotic desire within the masculine environments of sports, where gay men are usually forced to hide their sexuality to avoid homophobia. The second chapter is on the posthumously published novel Vista desde una acera (2012), where I consider themes of poverty, relationships, discrimination, and HIV/AIDS. Here, I interpret Molano’s personal experiences with poverty, gender roles, and traditional family values. I contend that Molano sees in literature an opportunity to process and reflect upon his childhood traumas. The third chapter is on Todas mis cosas en tus bolsillos (1997), Molano’s book of poetry. Here, I explore Molano’s development of love, sexual pleasure, BDSM, homoeroticism, and homosexual relationships and point out how Molano’s poetic voice changes, highlighting a defining characteristic of his poetry—defiance — where intimate life details are shared. The narrator is a voyeuristic, sexually active rebel and literary connoisseur, who aims to capture the attention of a curious reader.
Traveling queer subjects: Homosexuality in the Cuban diaspora
Revista De Estudios Hispanicos, 2009
Este artículo estudia al sujeto homosexual en la diaspora cubana, sin utilizar teorías de hibridez—como lo han hecho otros académicos—pero utilizando los argumentos de José Esteban Muñoz de la “des-identificación”—una estrategia que re-constituye y luego re-implementa normas opresivas culturales. Hace una lectura minuciosa de dos cuentos con treinta años de diferencia, “Piazza Margana” de Calvert Casey (1969) y “La más prohibida de todas” de Sonia RiveraValdés (1997). En “Piazza Margana” Casey se des-identifica con la imagen del hombre gay penetrador cuando consigue conectarse eróticamente con su amante no a través de la penetración sexual, sino al disolverse en su sangre. En “La más prohibida de todas” Rivera-Valdés se des-identifica con la imagen de la lesbiana de-sexualizada usando lenguaje vulgar que se utiliza en el sexo heterosexual e implantándolo en escenas lésbicas. Ambos cuentos cuestionan las normas culturales y lingüísticas que regulan la homosexualidad, cambiando regist...
Queer Rebels: Rewriting Literary Traditions in Contemporary Spanish Novels
Queer Rebels: Rewriting Literary Traditions in Contemporary Spanish Novels, 2022
‘Queer Rebels’ is a study of gay narrative writings published in Spain at the turn of the 20th century. The book scrutinises the ways in which the literary production of contemporary Spanish gay authors – José Luis de Juan, Luis G. Martín, Juan Gil-Albert, Juan Goytisolo, Eduardo Mendicutti, Luis Antonio de Villena and Álvaro Pombo – engages with homophobic and homophile discourses, as well as with the vernacular and international literary legacy. The first part revolves around the metaphor of a rebellious scribe who queers literary tradition by clandestinely weaving changes into copies of the books he makes. This subversive writing act, named ‘Mazuf’s gesture’ after the protagonist of José Luis de Juan’s ‘This Breathing World’ (1999), is examined in four highly intertextual works by other writers. The second part of the book explores Luis Antonio de Villena and Álvaro Pombo, who in their different ways seek to coin their own definitions of homosexual experience in opposition both to the homophobic discourses of the past and to the homonormative regimes of the commercialised and trivialised gay culture of today. In their novels, ‘Mazuf’s gesture’ involves playing a sophisticated queer game with readers and their expectations.
Revista Brasileira Do Caribe, 2011
De acordo com a omnipresença dos tropos homoeróticos os quais sostêm o imaginário nacional, a exclusão das vozes queer do discurso oficial cubano resulta paradoxal, a continuada invisibilidade de uma Cuba lésbica na literatura e na história da Ilha reforça a tenacidade das interpretações androcêntricas d nação. Este artículo examina alguns dos assuntos políticos relacionados com a escritura de uma Cuba lésbica. Establece algumas das preocupações essenciais do emergente discurso lésbico forxado interna e diaspóricamente; assim também, coloca os conflitos através de uma leitura da narrativa confessional de Sonia Rivera-Valdés, produzida nos Estados Unidos. Assim, exploram-se, desde as perspectivas de identidades lesbianas múltiplas, tanto o passado colonial de Cuba, como o governo de Castro e a reconstrução cultural dos últimos anos da década de 1990. Principalmente, as confessões ficticias propõem uma viagem desde o monólogo heterosexista até o diálogo lésbico, entendido como um mecanismo de construção de narrativa nacional. Palabras-chave: Cuba lésbica, Estados Unidos, Sonia Rivera-Revista Brasileira do Caribe, São Luis Br, Vol. XII, nº23. Jul-Dez 2011, p. 95-116.
This essay aims to make a contribution to the study of how LGBT people entered the postdictatorship memory regime (Crenzel 2008), a topic still neglected in the study of the transition to democracy in the Southern Cone. By mixing up different discursive practices stemming both from LGBT transnational political practices (e.g. public self-outing) and from the post-conflict and transitional culture (e.g. oral interviews with witnesses and the public display of past atrocities), how do LGBT people construct the memory of State Terrorism, join the human rights movement and reposition consequently their subjectivities? I will analyse a specific textual object: a section of the Archivo de Historia Oral (oral history archive) in Córdoba, devoted to the memory of the sexual repression. What I argue in the analysis is that the memory archive is a complex enunciative device that, through the oral history interview as a genre and discursive practice, allows the interviewee to reconfigure their own subjectivity. Passing from the police interrogation and the request for truth in confession during the dictatorship to the narration of their lives and the demand for testimony, the interview as an “interrogation of the subject” resignifies the very act of “coming out of the closet” and of disclosing the truth about the self (“I am gay”/ “I was born as a male”) and on State Terrorism (“I was imprisoned”/ “I was abused and mistreated”).