In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Arturo Islas and the "Phantom Rectum"
  • Ricardo L. Ortíz (bio)

As an object of study, queer latinidad demands a practice that moves across geographic, linguistic, and imaginary borders, not simply because it is more provocative to do so, but because the very disciplines that divide Latin American from North American, music from literature, politics from performance, or queer studies from Latino studies have been based on paradigms constituted through our marginalization.

Juana Rodríguez, Queer Latinidad

Scholarship concerning the queer Chicano novelist and poet Arturo Islas has recently enjoyed a much-needed revitalization, primarily because of the publication of two long awaited scholarly volumes, one a critical biography (Dancing with Ghosts, 2004), the other an anthology of critical pieces on his published fiction (Critical Mappings of Arturo Islas's Fictions, 2005), and both prepared by Frederick Luis Aldama.1 Aldama paved the way for his continuing work on Islas with his edition Arturo Islas: The Uncollected Works (2003), which for the first time made available for wide public consumption not only a variety of Islas's [End Page 398] sketches in preparation for the finished fictional work on which his literary reputation most directly depends, but also a significant body of work in verse that testifies to his willingness to explore quite explicitly forms of especially male homosexual experience at which his finished novels only very subtly hint. In addition, Aldama's introduction to the 2003 volume begins the important, multipart project of situating all of Islas's written work within the context of his biography in ways that clarify the extent to which Islas's fiction in particular drew on his own life experiences, as well as making more complete the story of Islas's misadventures in the world of mainstream publishing before his work was finally picked up by Avon Press in the years just before his untimely death from AIDS in the early 1990s.2

Most importantly, however, at least from a queer critical standpoint, Aldama's work in the 2003 volume allows readers to see more fully how the unique qualities of Islas's corporeal life inform the shape and functioning of his corpus of texts, and in ways that no conventional biographical hermeneutic could ever adequate.3 No personal information about Islas that Aldama provides can be said to violate the protocols of privacy, however, because Aldama never ventures further than Islas himself was willing to go. Instead, Aldama's research mostly serves to confirm what Islas himself had already declared but declared primarily in the complex public form of a fictionalized pseudo-confession about how the state of his body had come to bear so forcefully on the state of his body of writing. Interestingly, Aldama's work principally allows readings of Islas to complicate themselves by introducing into the prevailing matrix of queer/Chicano readings through which Islas is primarily known the further but directly implicated matter of his body's status as both a healthy and unhealthy, functional and dysfunctional [End Page 399] organism, and in ways that importantly predate his diagnosis as HIV positive. The reassessment of Islas's work thus made possible need not distract attention from his status as a queer or Chicano writer, or even as a writer with AIDS, but should instead compel an integration of such readings as they map the most productive paths that critical and scholarly elaborations of Islas's work can take.

In his introduction to Arturo Islas: The Uncollected Works (as in much of Dancing with Ghosts), Aldama deploys the rhetoric of health and the body to manage a good deal of what he says about Islas's written work, a central motif of which, he tells us, revolves around multiple forms of recovery, primarily the recovery of the past through memory and of relative health through various forms of at least provisionally effective (if not ultimately redemptive) sexual/textual therapy.4 In Aldama's view of Islas's work, the rhetorics of sexuality, ethnicity, and corporeality thus operate in a mode of complex, triangulated reciprocity that resists all the familiar seductions of dyadic conceptual/critical forms, whether of a bi-national border, a bi-cultural mestizaje, or some analogous form...

pdf