Cuir Dissidence

Tracing Restorative Criticism and Breaking Bonds with the Mexican Canon

Francesca Dennstedt

• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9780826508027, 9780826508034
• eBook ISBN: 9780826508041
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. The Canon Deception
• 1. Fucking with Death and (Not) Yet Cuir: Choking Eroticism through the Work of Inés Arredondo in Complicity with Kati Horna, Leonora Carrington, and Xitlalitl Rodríguez Mendoza
• 2. The Restorative Possibilities of an Archive of Gender Playfulness: Women’s Mustaches and the Third Gender
• 3. Snap, Snap, Snap!: Toward an Aff ective Cuir Method of Literary Critique
• 4. Communal Writings and the Canon Hoax: The Glu-Glu Fear and Other Elegant Emotions
• Coda. Acuerpar la lucha
• Notes
• References
• Index