The Language of the In-Between: Travestis, Post-hegemony, and Writing in Contemporary Chile and Peru

by Erika Almenara

Overview

Often, the process of modern state formation is founded on the marginalization of certain groups, and Latin America is no exception. In The Language of the In-Between, Erika Almenara contends that literary production replicates this same process. Looking at marginalized communities in Chile and Peru, particularly writers who are travesti, trans, cuir/queer, and Indigenous, the author shows how these writers stake a claim for the liminal space that is neither one thing nor the other. This allows a freedom to expose oppression and to critique a national identity based on erasure. By employing a language of nonnormative gender and sexuality to dispute the state projects of modernity and modernization, the voice of the poor and racialized travesti evolves from powerlessness to become an agent of social transformation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822947271
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	10/04/2022
Series:	Illuminations Series
Pages:	258
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Erika Almenara is assistant professor of Spanish in the Department of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Arkansas. Her research interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American cultural production, especially in the cases of marginalized subjects and communities.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: There Was Something Different in the Way That Body Danced and Sang 3

1 Cuiring the Birth of the Modern(a) Nation-State in Chile and Peru 29

2 The Travesti as a Language of the "In-Between" 77

3 Pedro Lemebel: The Loca Travesti as a Site of Resistance 114

4 The "In-Between" in the Works of Giuseppe Campuzano and Claudia Salazar 160

Epilogue: An Invitation to Opening 195

Notes 203

Bibliography 219

Index 233

Editorial Reviews

Erika Almenara delivers a timely and complex analysis that delves into the tensions of official discourses of modern state formation and their exclusions through queer, transvestite, and transgender expressions of artists, intellectuals, writers, and performers in Peru and Chile. The Language of the In-Between makes an important contribution to intersectional approaches to the discourse of modernity and the artistic and literary creation of dissident practices and languages of resistance and their cultural and social transformation.” —Ana Forcinito, University of Minnesota

“A valuable book that explores canonical Latin American authors such as Arguedas, Donoso, and Lemebel to challenge the modern racist, classist, and anti-LGBTQ+ national paradigms in Chile and Peru. Departing from the idea of the language in between, Almenara’s reading reopens the debate about cultural practices of emancipation using performative and literary works to interrogate a speculative aesthetics that reconceptualizes the current debates on ‘the political’ in Southern Cone and Andean Cuir/Queer politics. . . . [The Language of the In-Between] provides key insights for those working in the intersection of Latin American literature, queer studies, and gender and sexuality studies.”  —Fernando A. Blanco, Bucknell University

From the Publisher