Devotional Baroque: Queer Writing and the Poetics of Obscurity in Latin America
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| Pubblicato in: | ProQuest Dissertations and Theses (2025) |
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ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
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| Accesso online: | Citation/Abstract Full Text - PDF |
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| Abstract: | This dissertation, Devotional Baroque: Queer Writing and the Poetics of Obscurity in Latin America, examines how twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American writers have strategically mobilized baroque aesthetics to resist the consolidation of homosexuality as a stable political and epistemological category. While recent scholarship has often treated the baroque as stylistic exuberance well-suited to encode homoerotic desire, this study reframes it as devotional: an aesthetic-political modality that draws on the discursive, affective, and symbolic operations of the Christian tradition to articulate counter-discourses against modern regimes of sexual intelligibility. By foregrounding obscurity, figuration, and excess, the devotional baroque displaces identity-based frameworks, offering instead a poetics of unintelligibility and relationality that unsettles the binaries of norm/antinorm, visibility/invisibility, and utopia/negativity. The dissertation develops this argument across three case studies. Chapter One analyzes José Lezama Lima’s Paradiso and his devotional poetry of the 1940s, showing how his poetics of obscurity, indebted to negative theology and mystical traditions, reframes debates on homosexuality in mid-century Cuba. Rather than affirming or concealing sexual identity, Lezama deploys apophatic strategies that produce interpretive wonder (asombro) and challenge modern demands for legibility. Chapter Two turns to Fernando Vallejo’s Our Lady of the Assassins (1994), situating its furious devotional discourse in Medellín’s landscape of narco-violence. The novel, I argue, dramatizes the collapse of ethical distinctions—legality/criminality, justice/injustice, God/Devilthrough the figure of the child-sicario, who emerges not as a queer subject but as a queer assemblage of violence, devotion, and precarity. Chapter Three reads Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s We are Green and Trembling (2023) as a baroque rewriting of the colonial archive through the transfiguration of Antonio de Erauso. The novel fuses Christian mysticism with Guaraní cosmology to generate an eco-affective, more-than-human relational ethos, resisting both the extractivist logic of colonial modernity and the identitarian frameworks of queer studies.Together, these chapters show how the devotional baroque exceeds the framework of queer anti-normativity dominant in Anglo-American theory, articulating instead a hypertelic poetics (after Lezama) oriented toward excess and openness beyond teleological closure. The study contributes to Latin American literary studies by situating queer baroque writing as a critical archive of epistemic resistance, and to queer theory by proposing non-secular, Global South genealogies that challenge the hegemony of visibility, recognition, and identity politics. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that the devotional baroque provides a model for rethinking queerness not as the affirmation or negation of norms, but as a poetics of unintelligibility, wonder, and relational excess that unsettles the very conditions of political and sexual legibility. |
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| ISBN: | 9798265426499 |
| Fonte: | ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global |