Gender, Body and Writing in Ena Lucía Portela’s “Una extraña entre las piedras”

Abstract

This article seeks to fill a gap in Cuban gender studies. The aim here is to explore, through Ena Lucía Portela’s short story “Una extraña entre las piedras”, how intertextuality is used in recent Cuban lesbian narrative to challenge the monologic and homogeneous positions created in terms of post-revolutionary Cuban subjectivities. By inserting the feminine subjects within a transnational debate, this article claims that Portela will create a fluid identity within a context labelled by Portela herself as “pulp”, a heterogeneity framed by discourses that engage with postmodernism, and feminine writing. This article will prove that although the text itself attempts to defy the parameters of French feminists, it ends up representing them through a metanarrative process, which paradoxically places Portela at the forefront of new gender frameworks in Cuban studies, by giving visibility to the generally absent lesbian body.

Keywords

• gender identity
• cuban literature
• feminine writing
• intertextuality
• lesbian fiction
• postmodernism
• metafiction