'Latin American Lesbian Literature'? Interrogating the Marginalisation of Texts

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This doctoral project will focus on the construction of queer womanhood within the cultural sphere by examining the conceptualisation of so-called 'lesbian literature', taking examples from a Spanish American literary context. The existence of the term 'lesbian literature' speaks to how the output of queer women writers is doubly 'marked' against a supposedly 'neutral' literary mainstream: rarely has a 'straight male' literary category been proposed by publishers, critics or literary historians. This project will examine how this marking of literature as 'other' occurs, along with the ramifications of this otherness for works and authors marked as belonging to this category. I will take an intersectional approach, considering the overlap of categorisations of 'female' and 'queer', while also accounting forfactors such as race, class, and geographical origin. I will examine case studies of three authors whose works may be classed as 'lesbian literature': Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro (Puerto Rico, 1970-), Ena Lucia Portela (Cuba, 1972-) and Rita Indiana Hernández (Dominican Republic, 1977-), all female Hispanic Caribbean writers from the same generation, publishing prose fiction in the twenty-first century.