The Avowal of Difference: Queer Latino American Narratives by Ben Sifuentes-Jáuregui (review)

Ben Sifuentes-Jáuregui’s The Avowal of Difference: Queer Latino American Narratives is a thoughtful and timely intervention on the finitudes and strategies of Latino American sexualities in narratives that span the period of modernismo to the present day. The project is largely borne from a critical question regarding the centrality of theories of performativity, or as Sifuentes-Jáuregui clearly states: “is there any room left to talk about bodies themselves or has the notion of the body withered away?” (184). Readers familiar with the author’s oeuvre will recognize the shift onto the body—as opposed to the alleged universality of performance—as a connective thread to Transvestism, Masculinity, and Latin American Literature (Palgrave 2002). This, however, is not the sole point of concern in Avowal; instead, Sifuentes-Jáuregui sutures the hermeneutics of the body to the narrative trope of “coming out,” arguing in a parallel fashion that the latter too must be reconsidered and not taken as axiomatic in non-Anglo studies of gender and sexuality. Herein lies the crux of Avowal, and one that will situate it at the forefront of any interrogation of global queer studies, as Sifuentes-Jáuregui outlines and successfully arguments for autochthonous alternatives to universalizing tropes that have otherwise been taken for granted.

Avowal thus dedicates itself to tracing out alternative epistemologies of non-normative sexualities and gender expressions, largely through a socioculturally-specific exercise that while keeping Anglo (identitarian) ideas in place, posits “as a postcolonial affront” the possibility for “new alternatives for sexual narratives and identifications” (2, 3). It is easy here to draw connections between Sifuentes-Jáuregui’s project and José Quiroga’s seminal Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America (2000), which the former indeed acknowledges early on in the study. Both texts, while similar and different at the same time, pose complementary angles to any future research on the subject at hand.

Divided into four parts, with a total of ten content chapters, Avowal provides a structured survey of queer Latino American texts that will prove useful to both novices and seasoned scholars. In fact, one of the first interventions that the author poses is an interrogation of the term “queer” in regards to these texts, suggesting that the terminology and critical optic come from a specific cultural context and may thus not always hold water or develop a cogent conversation with non-US spaces and milieus. Part 1, titled “Unwriting the Self,” moves seamlessly through Amado Nervo’s El bachiller and Barbachano Ponce’s El diario de José Toledo, to Luis Zapata’s canonical El vampiro de la colonia Roma, in an examination of “how the self narrates itself in very solipsistic and hermetic ways” (16). Of particular interest in this section is Sifuentes-Jáuregui’s exploration of how modernista poetics and aesthetics come to shape the subject. The second Part of Avowal will prove to be useful to scholars seeking a critical framework for writing about the erotics of specific sociohistoric formations, namely through the prism of what the author calls “epistemerotics,” or the “shuttling move from erotics into politics and back” (104). Chapters four and five put theory into practice; the latter is essential reading given the death of Pedro Lemebel, and provides a fulcrum into the author’s under-considered body of work. Part 3 positions the principal arguments in Avowal in relation to group dynamics, that is, in tracing out how queer positions may influence formations of community that are both real and symbolic. Sifuentes-Jáuregui poses careful and suggestive readings of well-known texts by Vargas Llosa, Lezama Lima, and Sarduy, providing the reader with new points of entry into seemingly exhausted texts. The final section of Avowal focuses on Latina/o narratives, and argues that these fictions “borrow from two different traditions and cultural languages . . . to fashion a transnational queer identity” (17).

At the core of Sifuentes-Jáuregui’s argument is...