Aesthetics of the Surface: Post-1960S Latin American Queer Rewritings of the Baroque

Aesthetics of the Surface: Post-1960s Latin American Queer Rewritings of the Baroque By Jacqueline Bialostozky A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Hispanic Languages and Literatures in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Francine Masiello, Chair Professor Emilie L. Bergmann Professor Estelle Tarica Professor Mel Y. Chen Fall 2017 1 Abstract Aesthetics of the Surface: Post-1960s Latin American Queer Rewritings of the Baroque by Jacqueline Bialostozky Doctor of Philosophy in Hispanic Languages and Literatures University of California, Berkeley Professor Francine Masiello, Chair In this dissertation, I examine the ways in which four contemporary Latin American authors have rewritten seventeenth-century Baroque aesthetics, histories, and texts by focusing on the queer body. Rather than following the usual trajectory from the Hispanic Baroque to the Cuban Neobaroque, I trace an alternative path in which I analyze the works of a seemingly disparate group of poets and artists: Néstor Perlongher, Alejandra Pizarnik, Luis Felipe Fabre, and Jesusa Rodríguez. Their texts and performances appropriate not only the structures and themes of the Baroque, but also the minutiae of their source texts. Each writer establishes a practice that draws from Baroque aesthetics and Neobaroque intertextuality—namely its parody, artifice, and proliferation of citations—while more extensively and critically reworking a specific text or group of texts. Rooted in a queer sexuality that is mapped onto the page and materialized as textual play, their rewritings, I argue, structure an aesthetics of the sensuous, material surface. Their rewritings thus constitute a critique of heteropatriarchal cultural legacies and present us with alternative modes of understanding our relationship to literature and history. By weaving together close readings of the source texts and their rewritten versions, I explore how these rewritings carve out a space for non-normative histories, interpretations, and literary practices. Chapter One focuses on the work of Néstor Perlongher, particularly on his first two books of poetry, Austria-Hungría (1980) and Alambres (1988). In this chapter, I argue that the queer body serves as the structuring mechanism of Perlongher’s neobarroso poetics. Through the queer body, Perlongher disrupts and perverts the semblance of realism and normativity. This disruption drives the queering of History through the violent corrosion of language and reimagining of historical figures that results in a queer carnival of pleasure and wordplay in place of linearity and communicative language. This chapter also serves to outline and structure what is meant by queer rewriting throughout this dissertation and serves as a starting point for the construction of an aesthetics of the surface. Chapter Two studies Alejandra Pizarnik’s 1965/1971 short prose text, La condesa sangrienta. This chapter explores the connections between Pizarnik’s La condesa sangrienta and the Baroque; the chapter’s aim is to find new affinities in Alejandra Pizarnik’s work and to read La condesa as a precursor to the neobarroso. Chapter Three turns to the work of Mexican poet Luis Felipe Fabre’s La sodomía en la Nueva España (2010), a poetic text that rewrites the 2 seventeenth-century history of a group of men who were tried and burnt at the stake for their sodomitic acts in New Spain. My analysis centers on how Fabre’s rewriting of these particular texts counter the poetic model that had been at the center of Mexican poetry since José Gorostiza and Octavio Paz. Chapter Four takes up the 1995 performance Sor Juana en Almoloya (Pastorela virtual), written and directed by Jesusa Rodríguez. In Sor Juana en Almoloya, Rodríguez imagines the seventeenth-century nun imprisoned in Almoloya in the twenty-first century. The performance structures a critique of the Catholic church and the Mexican state, as well as a critique of the way we have come to understand and historicize the past. Beyond simply appropriating baroque structures and aesthetics, these four authors return to specific historical moments and figures to reread them from the perspective of the body and queer pleasure. Their textual engagement with the surface, both as an act of rendering the hidden visible and as language play that reveals but never resolves paradoxes, thus opens up countless possibilities for non-normative literary and historical genealogies and practices. i To my family. ii Table of Contents List of Figures.............................................................................................................................. iii Acknowledgments....................................................................................................................... iv Introduction................................................................................................................................. v Chapter 1: Queer Rewriting: Néstor Perlongher’s neobarroso................................................... 1 Chapter 2: Alejandra Pizarnik’s La condesa sangrienta............................................................. 23 Chapter 3: Luis Felipe Fabre’s La sodomía en la Nueva España............................................... 47 Chapter 4: Jesusa Rodríguez’s Sor Juana en Almoloya (Pastorela virtual)............................... 70 Conclusions................................................................................................................................. 98 Bibliography................................................................................................................................ 101 iii List of Figures Figure 1 Salvador Dalí, The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory.................................. 29 Figure 2 Juan de Valdés Leal, In Ictu Oculi................................................................................. 29 Figure 3 The Iron Maiden of Nuremberg..................................................................................... 30 Figure 4 Caravaggio, The Conversion of Saint Paul.................................................................... 32 Figure 5 Luis Felipe Fabre, “Loa”................................................................................................ 52 Figure 6 Caravaggio, Boy Peeling Fruit....................................................................................... 64 Figure 7 Miguel Cabrera, Portrait of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz................................................. 71 Figure 8 Still shot of Sor Juana en Almoloya (Pastorela Virtual), Rodríguez in the role of Sor Juana............................................................................................................................................. 71 Figure 9 Still shot of Sor Juana en Almoloya (Pastorela Virtual), superimposed newspaper article with Carlos Salinas de Gortari in a nun’s habit................................................................. 71 Figure 10 Still shot of Sor Juana en Almoloya (Pastorela Virtual), Manuel Poncelis................. 80 Figure 11 Bernard van Orley, The Virgin of Louvain................................................................... 80 Figure 12 Still shot of Sor Juana en Almoloya (Pastorela Virtual), Tito Vasconcelos................ 91 iv Acknowledgements I want to first thank my dissertation chair, Dr. Francine Masiello, for her dedication and support over the past years and for always believing in my project. This dissertation would not have been possible without her meticulous comments and thoughtful insights. Our conversations, from my very first year in the Ph.D. program, were instrumental to my writing process. I am also immensely grateful to my second readers Dr. Emilie L. Bergmann and Dr. Estelle Tarica. To Dr. Bergmann, I am grateful for her helpful comments and sharing of resources on the Baroque, which were invaluable to my project. I am thankful to Dr. Tarica for always having an open door and for her willingness to help me work through the most challenging moments in my writing. I am also grateful for Dr. Mel Y. Chen’s insights on queer theory, which helped guide this project. While the process of writing a dissertation can feel isolating, the support of those around me made this project possible. I want to thank the faculty and staff in the Spanish, German, and Comparative Literature departments at UC Berkeley. I am grateful to Dr. Natalia Brizuela for her discerning questions that led me to more multifaceted avenues of thought. I am thankful to Dr. Ignacio Navarrete, who was kind and supportive throughout this process. I also want to thank Professors Dru Dougherty, Ivonne del Valle, and Robert Kaufman, whose seminars helped shape my scholarly writing. Without the support of Miriam Hernández-Rodríguez while teaching, writing would have been impossible. I am forever grateful to Verónica Lopez, Myriam Cotton, Cathie Jones, Nadia Samadi, and Andrea Rapport, whose kindness and positivity got me through the most difficult stages of the writing process. I also want to thank my colleagues Daniel Rodríguez and Charo González, who were kind enough to read my work and give me valuable feedback. I am also grateful for the support of and conversations with Krista Brune, Julia Chang, Manuel Cuellar, Julia Havard, Marianne Kaletzky, Ivett Lopez Malagamba, Sebastião Macedo, Juliana Martínez, Marilola Perez, Diana Ruiz, Johnathan Vaknin, Julie Ann Ward,

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