New Approaches to Latin American Neo-Baroque in Transvestite Poetics: A Spoilsport and Angry Writing

Abstract

The transvestite, throughout Latin American literature, has been adopted as a relevant aesthetic-critical figure to reflect on human immanence and modes of inhabiting territories.                Claudia Rodriguez's fanzines will be analised in order to outline contemporary ways of thinking transvestites as a re-ontologising and re-affective figure on neoliberal discursive plots of early twenty-first century society. We will focus on articulating a critical apparatus that re-thinks Latin American writing as a critical act, where happiness -as an oppresive technology-, hygienist logics and ways of conforming bodies are questioned. Throughout this analysis we will focus on Sara Ahmed's theories on happiness and the affective turn, Audre Lorde's reflections on anger -as a defiant response to racism- and Severo Sarduy's and Nestor Perlongher's readings of the Baroque-Neobaroque-Neobarroso and its historical drifts. In synthesis, these theories will allow us a transdisciplinary reading of Claudia Rodriguez's transvestite writing as an example of the possibility of refounding discourses and bodies within the hygienist, happy and capitalist society of our present.