Crónicas travestis: El periodismo transgresor de Alfonsina Storni, Clarice Lispector y María Moreno by Mariela Méndez (review)

Crónicas travestis traces a novel genealogy between the journalism of Alfonsina Storni (Argentina, 1892-1938), Clarice Lispector (Brazil, 1920-77), and María Moreno (Argentina, 1947-), focusing on the subversive engagement of all three writers with the conventions of the women's column and drawing connections between this body of work and Moreno's post-dictatorship journals alfonsina and El Teje. Méndez argues that, by introducing the genre-bending fluidity of the crónica, writing under multiple (sometimes gender-crossing) pseudonyms, and subtly parodying the prescriptions of the rigidly normative genre of the columna femenina, Storni, Lispector, and Moreno each destabilize gender binaries while laying bare the constructedness of gendered identity. In this way, Méndez reads these key figures in twentieth-century Latin American proto-feminist and feminist journalism as anticipating theories of gender performativity (Judith Butler), cross-dressing (Marjorie Garber), and queer temporality (J. Jack Halberstam).

Méndez is not the first to associate these trailblazing women writers with a subversively feminist political project; she acknowledges a debt, for example, to the work of Gwen Kirkpatrick and Francine Masiello. The originality of Méndez's study lies in its engagement with contemporary queer theory as well as in its comparative nature. The connection between the two Argentine writers is well-established (Moreno invokes Storni in calling the feminist journal she launches in 1983 alfonsina), but as Méndez points out, Storni's journalism receives far less critical attention than does her poetry. Clarice Lispector's journalism has been similarly overshadowed by her renowned fiction. Moreover, reading the Brazilian author alongside her Spanish American counterparts remains a rare comparative move.

It is one that proves fruitful for Méndez, whose study not only moves between Argentine and Brazil but also unites several distinct historical moments in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Méndez's analysis encompasses Storni's columns "Feminidades" and "Bocetos Femeninos" (in La Nota and La Nación, respectively, 1919-21), Lispector's columns "Correio Feminino-Feira de Utilidades" and "Só para Mulheres" (in Correio da Manhã and Diário da Noite, respectively, 1959-61), and Moreno's columns "La Mujer" and "Señores" (in Tiempo Argentino, 1982-86), as well as Moreno's writing in the journals alfonsina (1983-84) and El Teje (2006-10).

Diligently attending to the historical and cultural specificities that make the context in which each author worked distinct, Méndez identifies compelling commonalities between them. She points, for example, to how all three writers entered the public space of journalism at times when the prevailing ideology (often linked to the state) sought to usher women back into domestic roles and regulate their bodies. This reactionary ideology rears its head not only in moments associated with conservative politics, such as during the last dictatorship in Argentina, but also in moments of rapid modernization and progressivism, such as the 1920s in Argentina, the late 1950s in Brazil, and Argentina's return to democracy in the 1980s.

Crónicas travestis unfolds over four chapters, the first two building the case for comparison among the women's columns authored by the three writers in question and the last two analyzing Moreno's post-dictatorship journals as the most overt expression of a radical gender politics that has its roots in these earlier columns. The first chapter focuses on the difficulties and discomforts each author faced as a woman occupying public space and the common response of creating a multiplicity of public personas (some of them male) behind which to hide and between which to move. Méndez argues that, for these writers, the mask becomes a political praxis that troubles the possibility of fixing identity and questions notions of authority and authorship (97). Chapter two analyzes how Storni and Lispector queer the genre of the women's column through rhetorical cross-dressing, by which Méndez means not only writing in a...