Marxism and sexual revolution: from Manuel Puig's The Buenos Aires Affair to Kiss of the spider woman

Abstract

The publishing of The Buenos Aires Affair (1973) meant a turning point in Manuel Puig’s literary career. Even though the reflection about gender and the authoritarianism of machism had already been explored in La traición de Rita Hayworth (1968) and Boquitas pintadas (1969), his third novel adjusted the terms to a larger debate that was taking place at the beginning of the 1970s, which is sexism and the need to incorporate sexuality into the longed revolution. In its pages, Puig narrates the days before the Cordobazo through the story of two protagonists: an artist and an art critic, repressed both sexually and politically. After the contact with the Frente de Liberación Homosexual (FLH), Puig incorporated the theoretical framework which allowed him to propose an exit to the sexual pressures that weighed over his characters and crystallized in El beso de la mujer araña (1976), his fourth novel, where he set out an utopian resolution to the conflict between Marxism and sexual revolution within the left wing sectors, which continued to consider homosexuality a bourgeois and decadent perversion and could not see its revolutionary potential.