Abstract

Abstract:

Uruguayan-born author Cristina Peri Rossi is best known for her prose, which often features omniscient narrators and male protagonists. Her poetry, in contrast, privileges an erotic, woman-centered, transgressive subjectivity. Although the author herself eschews labeling her work as “lesbian,” this study argues for the inclusion of her lyrical works in a body of lesbian-identified literature because of their subjective, intimate nature, their conscious homoerotism, and their defiance toward traditional notions of sexuality and identity. The issue of textual homosexuality serves as a point of departure to address the complex and original construction of woman-centered subjectivity in Peri Rossi’s erotic poetry. Issues of vision, identity and authority in excerpts from Lingüística general, Babel Bárbara and Otra vez eros are discussed in the context of Jacques Lacan’s theories of the “mirror stage” and the imaginary, as well as Luce Irigaray’s re-reading of Lacan in Speculum of the Other Woman. In each of these poems, mirror imagery plays a key role in the subversion of masculine symbols of power and the construction of a woman-centered identity. Reinterpreting such textual pillars of patriarchy as the Bible, Lacanian theory, and the “dulce stil nuovo” poetic tradition, Peri Rossi’s figurative mirrors systematically undermine the social myths, institutions and practices which attempt to define lesbian identity and lesbian experience. At the same time, they serve to counter such negative views of lesbianism with innovative and distinctly positive images of women’s relationships.

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