Notes on a Queer (Mexican) Literature: The Case of Ana Clavel

The present essay examines the place of Ana Clavel in critical studies on contemporary Mexican fiction. Instead of situating her production vis-à-vis female contemporaries in what has been labeled the Boom Femenino, I argue that Clavel’s novels embody the ethos of a queer literature. A queer literature unpacks, decenters, and disobeys norms of gender, sex, and sexuality, and favors the posing of questions versus the providing of neatly packaged answers. Moving away from the subject, it mobilizes these same actions towards the communal and the national. Queer literature moves against the conventions of narrative; it breaks through the limits of the textual to render insufficient the power of the word. By reading the author’s meditation on sex, gender, and sexuality (especially as they relate to the urban space in Cuerpo náufrago), the essay furthers that Clavel’s fiction may best be understood within a genealogy of queer Mexican texts