HOMO-SEXILE: GAY AND TRANSGENDER COMMUNITIES - SEXUAL AND NATIONAL IDENTITIES IN LATIN AMERICAN FICTION AND FILM by Miguel Moss Marrero APPROVED BY SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: __________________________________________ Michael Wilson, Chair __________________________________________ Adrienne L. McLean __________________________________________ Robert Nelsen __________________________________________ Rainer Schulte __________________________________________ Teresa M. Towner Copyright 2018 Miguel Moss Marrero All Rights Reserved -For my father who inspired me to be compassionate, unbiased, and to aspire towards a life full of greatness. HOMO-SEXILE: GAY AND TRANSGENDER COMMUNITIES - SEXUAL AND NATIONAL IDENTITIES IN LATIN AMERICAN FICTION AND FILM by MIGUEL MOSS MARRERO BA, MA DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of The University of Texas at Dallas in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HUMANITIES THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS August 2018 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Latin American transgender women and gay men are part of my family. This dissertation is dedicated to them. It would have not been possible without their stories. I want to give my gratitude to my mother, who set an example by completing her doctoral degree with three exuberant boys and a full-time job in mental health. I also want to dedicate this to my father, who encouraged me to accomplish my goals and taught me that nothing is too great to achieve. I want to thank my siblings who have shown support throughout my doctoral degree. I also want to thank my husband, Michael Saginaw, for his patience while I spent many hours in solitude while writing my dissertation. Without all of their support, this chapter of my life would have been meaningless. During my undergraduate and graduate studies, many professors served as mentors, encouraging me to reach my goals. I want to thank my master’s committee at Universidad de Puerto Rico and Penn State for shaping my interests in Latin American and Caribbean literature and how it can be inherently political. I also want to thank my doctoral committee, Dr. Robert Nelsen, who inspired me to write creatively as well as academically; Dr. Adrienne McLean, who taught me indelible scholars in film theory; Dr. Wilson, who stepped in as my chair in the middle of my dissertation and challenged me to go deeper and be more deliberate in my writing; Dr. Schulte, for encouraging me to work in original language texts and for his academic excellence; and Dr. Theresa Towner for agreeing to serve on my committee after Dr. Nelsen left The University of Texas System to become president of the California State System in Sacramento. v Finally, I want to recognize the utmost collaboration and inspiration from many good friends and colleagues. My sincerest thanks go out to Sara Cardona, Susan Barkley, Scott Branks del Llano, Sha-Shonda Porter, and many others. April 2018 vi HOMO-SEXILE: GAY AND TRANSGENDER COMMUNITIES - SEXUAL AND NATIONAL IDENTITIES IN LATIN AMERICAN FICTION AND FILM Miguel Moss Marrero, PhD The University of Texas at Dallas, 2018 Supervising Professor: Michael Wilson This dissertation is an examination of the fictional portrayals of Cuban and Argentine gay and transgender communities that often experience resistance from authoritarian dictatorships and machismo attitudes towards sexual and national identity. It focuses on three novels: Manuel Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña (1976), Reinaldo Arenas’s Antes que anochezca (1991), and Mayra Santos Febres’s Sirena Selena, Vestida de pena (2000). It also focuses on two film adaptations: Hector Babeno’s adaptation of Puig’s novel Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985) and Julian Schnabel’s film adaptation of Arenas’s novel Before Night Falls (2000). Lastly, it includes five documentaries: Nestor Almendros and Orlando Jimenez Leal’s Mauvaise Conduite (1984), Andres di Tella’s Prohibido (1997), Jenny Livingston’s Paris Is Burning (1990), and Wolfgang Busch’s How Do I Look (2006). I have chosen these works because of their historical significance vis-a-vis machismo and its relationship to Argentina’s La Guerra Sucia [The Dirty War] from 1976 to 1983, and the Cuban Revolution in 1959. The accounts of the Cuban revolution, and Juan Perón and General Rafael Videla’s Argentine dictatorship are pivotal historical markers of the fictional novels, their feature film adaptations, vii and the documentary films. The gay and transgender protagonists in these works strive to become part of imagined communities that bring them together through sharing patriotic and political values, thus enabling these characters to strive towards national and sexual identities. The models of communities that represent a space that allows for possibilities of these dual identities are prison as community, drag as community, and the dynamics of Latin American exile communities in the United States. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS……………………………………………………………..………….v ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………………..vii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………….……….1 CHAPTER 2 PRISON AS COMMUNITY IN REINALDO ARENAS’S ANTES QUE ANOCHEZCA AND MANUEL PUIG’S EL BESO DE LA MUJER ARAÑA…………..……….20 CHAPTER 3 COMMUNITY IS A DRAG: HOWTRANSGENDER COMMUNITIES STRUGGLE TO IDENTIFY WITH THEIR ROLE IN ACHIEVING NATIONAL AND SEXUAL IDENTITIES……………………………………………………………………….…46 CHAPTER 4 LIFE IS A BALL: LATIN AMERICAN GAY AND TRANSGENDER EXILE COMMUNITIES IN THE UNITED STATES…………………………………………………..66 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………………107 WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………………..116 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH…………………………………………………………………...127 CURRICULUM VITAE……………………………………………………………...………...128 vii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION While doing research in Comparative Literature during my master’s degree at The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) between 1995 and 1997, I began mapping out a plan to research investigate the concept of a community that enables both national and sexual identity within oppressive circumstances. Through my research, I found that various Latin American and Spanish-speaking Caribbean countries challenged the ability of gay men and transgender women to maintain both sexual and national identities. Although many theoretical texts deal with homosexuality and exile, I noticed that none of these analyses moved beyond the fact that Latin American political leaders historically imposed heterosexist politics. For example, in the introduction to their collection Hispanisms and Homosexualities (1998), Sylvia Molloy and Robert McKee Irwin explain that relations between nationality and sexuality “are downright problematic” (xii). Furthermore, in order for gay men and transgender women to maintain their sexual identity, exile is often the best or only option. For my doctoral dissertation, I decided to interrogate representations of male homosexuality in Cuba and Argentina and, more particularly, to investigate the role of community as a common ground for protagonists who describe a loss of national identity in order to maintain sexual identity. Scholars have not completely overlooked this particular aspect of scholarship; my project builds on previous scholarship on homosexuality and exile in Latin America, such as Molloy and Irwin’s volume, Amy Kaminsky’s After Exile: Writing the Latin American Diaspora (1999), and David Foster and Roberto Reis’s anthology, Bodies and Biases: Sexualities in Hispanic Cultures and Literatures (1996). My aim is to go further by exploring 1 how Cuban and Argentine writers and filmmakers have established this common ground. I argue that the protagonists in the fiction and films strive for imagined communities that can bring together people who share patriotic and political values and who can enable gay men and transgender women to strive towards dual national and sexual identities. There is a unique role for Latin American literature in cultural and social critiques because it is dealing with conditions of constraint between authoritarian governments and dictatorships that impose machismo as normative gender roles that men and women were forced to observe. This is not only true of a left-wing dictatorship imposed by the Cuban Revolution, but also the right-wing dictatorship imposed by the Argentine government during La Guerra Sucia. These literary and journalistic critiques often considered both – the right and left wing governments as threatened by movements of youth taking place in the United States. Regardless of the political stance of Cuba and Argentina, in the sixties and seventies, liberal democracy concerning women’s liberation and gay and lesbian rights threatened their youth (Trento 48-41). In the title of my dissertation, I use the term “homo-sexile.” According to Manolo Guzmán, sexile refers to “the exile of those who have had to leave their nations of origin on account of their sexual orientation” (88). Homo-sexile is the term I use to reflect the narratives of characters who leave their countries, sometimes to reside in metropolitan cities, in search of another space to freely express their sexual identities. This term indicates my methodology of examining the novels and feature films in my dissertation from a queer perspective. For example, I am not positing a rudimentary perspective of distinguishing between normative and non- normative relations in each narrative. Instead, I closely examine the social construction of acts that are deemed sexually deviant and the representation of their impact on identity. While 2 claiming one’s sexual orientation as an attraction