Subjection and norms in Latin American lyric love poetry. A Butlerian reading

Abstract

In numerous analyses of sex, gender and identities construction, norms, their repetition and effects, matter a great deal to Judith Butler. The question put throughout these analyses is the question about spaces the power leaves accessible to subject in the process of norms reiteration, spaces that open possibilities of opposition. My purpose is to go deeper into reflection on what happens in contemporary lyric discourses about love of Spanish-American women poets (from Delmira Agustini to Cristina Peri Rossi). These lyric discourses can confine to the poetic tradition, or explicitly interrogate about some gender norms; or reject such a debate using a radically antinormative theatricalization that does not make room to “heterosexual hegemony”. This investigation brings up the conditions of possibility for a deconstruction of the literary traditions and for a lyric discourse that does not reiterate, through linguistic and conceptual stereotypes, the dissymmetrical relations between “women” and “men”.