Queering Postcolonial Narratives: Representations of Sexuality, Resistance, and Confinement in Enrique Serna’s Ángeles del abismo (2004).

• In Event: Queering Hispanic Autobiographies. The Text as Self, the Self as Resistance

Abstract

Sexuality, resistance, and transgression are recurrent themes that form an important part of the corpus of Spanish American colonial texts available today. As is well known, Josefina Ludmer calls these articulations “tretas del débil,” as they are used from a marginal position in order to survive within a regime that is hierarchical, Inquisitorial, and oppressive. Taking this situation as a point of departure, in Enrique Serna’s novel, Ángeles del abismo (2004) a colonial Mexican society is depicted as an oppressive reality that, at least metaphorically, speaks to contemporary Mexico. Therefore, in this paper I study the role of sexuality, gendered spaces confinement and the mechanisms that the protagonists of these postcolonial pieces use to transgress, subvert or accept such situation, in order to highlight how the postcolonial mind imagines these spaces and re-invents them for the contemporary eye within an innovative “historiographic metafiction” —a self-reflexive and yet historical fiction, as theorized by Linda Hutcheon.

Author

• Jose Guillermo De Los Reyes, University of Houston