Estudios de Teoría Literaria (Nov 2022)
Translation as a device of sexual dis/orientation: Bellessi, Rosenberg and Thénon
Abstract
In the 1980s, together with the end of the military dictatorship, the consolidation of feminist and LGBT movements, and the proliferation of poetry collections published by women poets, lesbian bodies burst into Argentine poetry with unusual frequency. Lesbian imaginaries, while naming desire among women, question the category of "woman": they interrupt the binary organization of the sex-gendered body. Considering that this decade was tinged by literary debates about the existence of a “feminine writing” or a “literature written by women”, as well as by a certain reticence towards lesbianism on the part of feminism, the emergence of the lesbian in poetry constitutes a remarkable literary phenomenon. In this article I explore how lesbian affectivity affects the corpus of Argentine poetry, based on the hypothesis that the lesbian imaginaries were established between languages: in, through and sometimes against translation. In order to place the reading, I will work on some aspects of the literary production of Diana Bellessi, Mirta Rosenberg and Susana Thénon in which I find creative connections between poetry, body, translation and sexual dissidence.
