Abstract

KULAWIK, Krzysztof. The Multiple Facets of the Transvestite: The Dispersion of the Subject in the Transcultural Spaces of Severo Sarduy's Neo-Baroque Narrative. Lit. teor. hist. crit. [online]. 2015, vol.17, n.1, pp.207-244. ISSN 0123-5931.  https://doi.org/10.15446/lthc.v17n1.48694.

A re-reading of Severo Sarduy's novel Cobra reveals postmodern phenomena that apply to current Latin American literature. The novel's Neo-Baroque nature is expressed in the combination of motifs of sexual ambiguity (transvestism, androgyny) with experimentation and exuberance. The displacement of stable referents of sex, nation, and culture in the characters and narrative spaces questions the univocal sense of identity. By incorporating transvestism, Sarduy's neo-Baroque novel deconstructs the fixed categories of identity (sex, nation, Latin America, West, and East). The ambisexual subjects inhabit a fluid, transsexual, and transcultural imaginary space, thus transgressing the American heterosexual model and attenuating the distinctions between both masculinity and femininity and the Western and the Oriental. In the context of cultural studies, this analysis makes it possible to formulate a theory of transitive identity based on the mobility of referents, which can be applied to the analysis of other recent Spanish American authors.

Keywords : transvestism; identity; transcultural spaces; Neo-Baroque; postmodernity.

        · abstract in Spanish | Portuguese     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )