Framing the Margin: Nationality and Sexuality Across Borders (review)

Anyone approaching an emerging, yet significant, field of study greatly appreciates the presence of preexisting monographs that provide adept research into the topic. This fact is true not only because of the thorough bibliographies found in the study but because of the ability of these texts to frame or guide future academic pursuit regarding a common topic. For those with interests in modern Spanish or Latin American literary studies, Margaret G. Frohlich's Framing the Margin: Nationality and Sexuality Across Borders provides this sort of 'laying of the land' by employing diverse theoretical approaches to many fictional works within the broad, contested categories of lesbian and queer writing coming from the Hispanic world. While highlighting the cultural and political interplay between sexual and national identities in Hispanic lesbian fiction, Frohlich's study remains consistent in its explication of the literary texts, which consists of an in-depth consideration of the theoretical scholarship for this area of inquiry.

In her study of lesbian fiction, Frohlich organizes the pertinent arguments within this field beginning with the concrete examples of novels and film that display the ways in which lesbian sexuality crosses national borders and cultural boundaries; towards the end of the book, she uses a more theoretical lens in examining this issue by investigating the more ontologically centered questions regarding female subjectivity. Within each chapter Frohlich examines many fictional works in order to convey the argument. By focusing on only a few of these, the objective of this review is to distill the major issues interrogated in this critical text.

In Chapter 1, Frohlich examines the categories of nationalism and transnationalism by considering the ways in which female subjects navigate the formation of their identities as lesbians of cultural and national particularities. Frances Negrón-Muntaner's film Bricando el charco (1994) becomes a major example of the way in which lesbian identities form within the interstice of national cultures by observing two Puerto Rican women who share similar ethnic backgrounds, yet who employ different manners of dealing with assimilation in the context of the dominating United States culture. Chapter 2 deals with the issue of bisexuliaty as a theme formed within Lesbi fiction, which is a category of lesbian fiction connoting female bisexuality. A pertinent feature of this section of Frohlich's study is the use of the Rosamaría Roffiel's novel Amora (1989), which challenges the incorporation of common, North American derived terminology for gays and lesbians, such as the term "gay," into Mexican vernacular. Observing the novel's commentary on this use of language, Frolich helps the reader see the way in which the work contests the commonalities of gay/lesbian/queer culture across national borders, calling this move by the author "a resistance to the assumed superiority of the United States and its ethos of identity politics that posits a universal model for all to follow" (72). Following this discussion Frolich continues to reveal the problematic of lesbian subjectivity by engaging questions of language and writing through a lineage of theoretical texts, including Frued, Kristeva, Irigaray, and Deleuze. These texts aid the readers in seeing ways of conceptualizing gender and sexual identity in the space in which a Hispanic lesbian writes, as well as in beginning to question what political end this writing might reach. In the final chapter, "Taking Place in Time: Somewhere over the Rainbow," the bildungsroman takes precedence as a significant literary form in Hispanic fiction that shows the role of space and time as features of subjective experience and identity formation. At the conclusion of this chapter Frohlich notes that these fictions "do not provide a way out" of power relations; however, they help "make clear that there are more ruptures and connections, more ways to travel and be confined, within power relations than claims for essential origins suggest" (147). By resisting standard structures of sexual and national identities, these fictions contest prescribed ways of being, giving a more "nuanced view of the relation between nationality and sexuality" (149). Frohlich provides the theoretical and...