Overview

In Cuir Dissidence, Francesca Dennstedt uses affect and queer feminist theory to rethink the boundaries and hierarchies of the Mexican literary canon. Steeped in ideas of male genius and intrinsic aesthetic quality, the canon has long marginalized women writers by overlooking their contributions or placing their work into literary categories that perpetuate stereotypes about femininity. In response to this history of erasure and neglect, Dennstedt shows how women writers who identify as non-heterosexual or whose work is focused on critique of heteropatriarchal power structures have challenged the very idea of the canon through affect and non-conformity. Over the course of four chapters, she examines how writers like Inés Arredondo, Rosa Maria Roffiel, and Cristina Rivera Garza employ alternative sexual intimacies, gender dissidence, collective authorship, and experimental blending of genres to actively reject the canon. In addition to these creative readings of Mexican women writers, Dennstedt centers her own affective response to these texts to further challenge the traditional boundaries of literary criticism. The book thus prompts readers to see the intellectual project of these writers as a premeditated act of rebellion, one that can help deconstruct the power structures deeply ingrained in Mexican literature written in Spanish and create a space for these voices to flourish across time.

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9780826508034

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Reviews

""Bringing together cultural and literary studies, affective and embodied critique, and lesbian, feminist, and transfeminist approaches, Cuir Dissidence moves in and out of the Mexican canon, revealing its shortcomings and proposing new ways of imagining literature and culture that are attuned to the intimate archives and cuir vibrations of bodies and desires."" --Joseph M. Pierce, author of Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890-1910

Author Information

Francesca Dennstedt is an assistant professor of Hispanic studies at the University of Kentucky.

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