El deseo, enorme cicatriz luminosa: Ensayos sobre homosexualidades latinoamericanas (review)

In "Corazones abiertos," the concluding section of El deseo, Daniel Balderston praises a 2001 collection of gay-themed Chilean literary writings edited by Juan Pablo Sutherland. In his Introduction to that collection, Balderston tells us, Sutherland makes a striking gesture of openness toward his own book's potential readers, stating "los textos están aquí, esperando ser leídos en aquel espacio intenso que existe entre el mundo creado por los autores y la recepción de sus lectores" (p. 169); Balderston, in commenting on this passage, goes on to invoke a "lector posible" for these texts, one "quien relee y mantiene la vitalidad de la tradición" in turn because that "tradición depende siempre de lecturas que son, a un mismo tiempo, secretas y compartidas" (p. 170). Balderston here does more, however, than imagine an ideal reader for the texts collected by Sutherland; he also, and just as eloquently, describes his own extraordinary performance as critic and reader in the essays he himself collects in El deseo.

Balderston's book, republished last year in Argentina after an initial 1999 publication in Venezuela, represents the culmination of a more than decade-long engagement on the writer's part with a still-evolving homoerotic and homosexual thematic genealogy emerging within Latin American literary writing. The pieces collected here go at least as far back as "La 'dialéctica fecal'," the writer's 1991 essay on homosexual panic as an informing operation of Borges' oeuvre, and traces defining moments in Balderston's critical work through such pieces as "Sexualidad y Revolución," his 1997 reading of the footnotes on sexuality and politics in Puig's Beso de la mujer araña, and "Fuegos fatuos" (2002), his devastating critique of a suspiciously marketable queer thematic in recent verse volumes by two Cuban poets, Jaime Bayly and Nelson Simón. Everywhere in this collection Balderston's own reader is treated to both the challenge and the pleasure of an ongoing engagement with a critic and scholar working at the height of his powers, and at a pitch of intensity clearly fueled by his passionate commitment to the larger project of making queer-themed literary and cultural material from Latin America more fully and coherently available for both future critical and even recreational consumption.

Balderston's readings as collected in El deseo are uniform only in the level of care and attentiveness he brings to his always fascinating and always instructive elaborations of a decidedly heterogeneous set of texts and authors, representing an impressively wide variety of national and historical locations, as well as of sexual and cultural orientations. He also does not, to his credit, ignore the inescapable fact that, given the profoundly patriarchal proclivities of most Latin American cultures, queer-themed textual production by women and by trans-gendered people remains less feasible and certainly therefore under-studied, and that this condition sadly also limits what he can cover in his own work. That said, no one should doubt but that the re-publication of El deseo will itself do much to inspire and to assist future readers and scholars of queer-themed Latin American literary and cultural work; these "lectores posibles" will find in Balderston's collection a set of exemplary performances to emulate and build upon for years, and generations, to come. These essays represent what might be called productively "intimate" readings in the best possible sense; they certainly work as instances of public, disciplinary discourse, but they also confess to a closeness of familiarity, of contact, with significant secrets still to keep.