Spanish 475 Fall-Narrating the Queer (original) (raw)

Description This senior seminar is concerned with the narratives associated with neo-baroque, post-boom, and post-modern Latin American literature, which main topic is the sexual proliferation of identities and the problematization of heteronormative and binary sexuation processes. This heteronormative frame has not only been hegemonic within Latin American cultural production it is currently reinforced by predominant neoliberal and ultra-conservative rhetoric. Through the reading of crucial literary authors (such as Severo Sarduy, Pedro Lemebel, Rita Indiana, Osvaldo Lamborghini, among many others), and some essayists (such as Nelly Richards, Carlos Monsiváis, Néstor Perlongher, and others), we will problematize the canonical heterosexual and Catholic representation of Latin American culture from the point of view of these queer interventions. What is the relationship between queer identities and literary imagination? In what sense Latin American writers have elaborated an important critique of heteronormative and anthropocentric representations of male and masculinity? What are the consequences of this queer imagination for conventional politics and the standard representation of human rights? Are among the main question we will interrogate through the semester. The basic assumption, however, is that the queer is not only a passive consequence of the repressive mechanisms informing our cultural practices, but it is also an active process of des-identification and subject-formation able to elaborate a strong critique of contemporary power, beyond identity politics. In other words, we will understand queer imagination as a counter-interpellation addressed to the anthropologic and anthropocentric kernel of western metaphysics and, as such, as a political or infra-political possibility oriented towards a non-humanistic thinking that seems relevant today, in what has been called a post-human world. This course fulfills the literary requirements for minors.