Our panel brings together new perspectives on the link between fluctuating subjectivities and linguistic fracture at the level of form in 20^th and 21^st century Latin American textual production including novels, testimony, cinema and poetry. We aim to view both mutable subject-formation and formal linguistic fragmentation as labors of resistance and critique caught up in the practice of creating, fracturing, and productively mutating subjectivities in response to acts of state or interpersonal violence.

This panel is inspired by a desire to explore intersections between Marxian, feminist, and queer theories and engages with a timely conversation rooted in the changing relationship of 20^th and 21^st century Latin American literary subjects to themselves and their surroundings. This intention in part follows Jens Andermann’s 2018 book, Tierras en trance (Lands in Trance: art and nature after landscape), which grounds itself in the understanding that instability and frustrated dialogue realized through form play a crucial role in 20^th and 21^st century constructions of literary subjects. Andermann highlights Stenger’s work on the “schizophrenic subjectivity of late capitalism,” staging this as connected to violence as represented through formal composition, specifically through representations of landscape in plastic arts, novels, poetry, and film (23). In light of this, we aim to open this approach to queer and feminist approximations and focus on the ways in which literary texts act as frustrated, fractured, and composed spaces whose failures and opacities at the level of form reflect violence and/or resistance at the level of narrative content.

This panel is rooted in diverse interlocutors united in their relationship to formal fissures at the level of communication and heterogeneous or mutable subject formation, especially as realized from the margins or under threat of violence. Our panel is conceptually grounded in texts ranging from Peter Drucker’s Queer Marxism and Kevin Floyd’s Reification of Desire to Paul Preciado’s Manifiesto Contrasexual and José Esteban Muñoz’s Disidentifications, all of which set a precedent for dialogue between Marxian, feminist and queer theory. We also find our footing through theorists like Judith Butler, whose work informs several of the above studies, as well as the work of Nancy Fraser and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw. Together, these theorists bring both heterogenetiy and complementarity to the panel, allowing us to take up questions at the pro-social intersection of queer, feminist, and Marxian approximations. Our panel includes four presenters kept to a strict 12-minute limit in order to leave ample time for questions and discussion.

Alexandra Brown will begin by engaging Andermann’s work, placing it in conversation with Argentine author Samanta Schweblin’s 2014 novel, Distancia de rescate (Fever Dream). Taking up Andermann’s concept of the trance and its relationship to landscape, she interrogates the interconnectedness of unstable subjectivity and fragmented language under the capitalist mode of production as represented diegetically in the novel through its engagement with violent agribusiness and formally though its stilted literary style. In so doing, it is her aim to explore this novel as a rumination on the decay of both natural and interpersonal legibility under the capitalist mode of production in the present moment.

Kenna Neitch then guides the conversation into direct engagement with the relationship between textual fragmentation and the subjectivity of women, taking up Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of autohistoria (autohistory) in two testimonies written by women: Alicia Partnoy’s The Little School: Tales of Disappearance and Survival (1986) and Anzaldúa’s Light in the Dark / Luz en Lo Oscuro (2015). These texts reveal feminist innovations and interventions in the testimonial tradition that engage the subjectivity of memory from a position of marginality – both in terms of sociopolitical authority and generic liminality. Formally, both authors replicate the fractured, polyphonic, sensorily disorienting nature of their memories of experiences with sexual, spiritual, and sociopolitical trauma.

Shifting the theoretical lens from feminist to queer theory, Andrés Aluma-Cazorla will present on Giuseppe Caputo’s 2016 novel Un mundo huérfano (An Orphan World) and Rubén Mendoza’s 2017 film documentary, Señorita María, La Falda de la Montaña (Miss María, Skirting the Mountain). He engages shifts in the meaning of the word queer, from its meaning degradation (c.f. Judith Butler’s Cuerpos que importan), used as a paralyzing stigma, tracking its acquisition of a series of affirmative meanings (1993, 313). As noted by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Tendencies (1993), “the word 'queer' itself means across” (xii). The queer, then, could cross the narratives and discourses, the forms and styles of those that are composed to twist and divert them, transforming them, from the place of sexuality and non-normative gender. In his reading, Caputo and Mendoza question and destabilize the heterocentric norm, through the representation of an abject and marginalized subject who re-appropriates the term to empower and to oppose this degradation.

Finally, Lena Retamoso Urbano will engage the final medium that our panel will explore in a comparative analysis of Blanca Varela’s poem “Destiempo” (“Untimely”) and Garcilaso de la Vega’s “Soneto XIII” (“Sonnet XIII”). Dialoguing with José Esteban Muñoz’s conception of “Queerness as Horizon,” and taking as a theoretical orientation his study in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (Sexual Cultures), she will analyze the reinterpretation and/or rewriting by Varela of the story of “Apollo and Daphne,” focusing on the different stages of Daphne’s transfiguration and her capacity to speak from the limits of that world to which she was isolated. She suggests that in Varela’s approach, these agents of love are framed in the context of modernity therefore the myth is (post) humanized to the point wherein the lover and the beloved are no longer merely dichotomous figures, but multiple subjectivities whose identities constantly fluctuate.

Given MLA 2020’s focus on “Being Human,” this panel engages both timely and relevant questions grounded in understanding how human subjects (re)formulate themselves in response to their surroundings and render themselves and their experiences both visible and audible. We hope to initiate a generative discussion with other conference attendees centered upon a desire to explore the productive possibilities at the crossroads between feminist, queer, and Marxian approaches to language, form, and the subject.