Las The Cuir Writings of the Self as a [Neo]Baroque Braid. Individual Subject, Collective Subjectivities and Impersonality of the Living

Abstract

The article intends to read the texts by Marlene Wayar, Furia Travesti, and Camila Sosa Villada, Las malas and Soy una tonta por quererte, from a perspective that deviates from the canonical reading pacts. The accent will therefore be placed on the way in which the texts respond to the question “Who am I?” and, at the same time, “Who are we?”, based on a conception of decentered, mutant, non-binary and becoming subjectivity that also unfolds as an unformed-form of the living. Thus, due to the characteristic estrangement effect of anamorphosis, one of the forms that biopoetic criticism can assume, what appears to be a dictionary can be conceived as an autobiography that braids the individual, the collective and the impersonal. Moreover, what is presented as a novel or collection of short stories focused on the figure of a ghostly self that appears and disappears in the text, can be considered a fantastic autofiction in which individual subjectivity is dispersed and multiplied in stories of fabulous beings that define an unformed-form of animal life. The work postulates that queer self-writings, in this case transvestite figurations, display their ambivalences and contradictions as an act of political dissidence in which a textual process of denaturation occurs that puts in crisis the meaning that editorial paratexts and metatexts (prologues, interviews with the author) try to impose.