“Commitment trouble. Gender performances and poetic dissident in the Cuban Revolution”

Abstract

The first official poets of the Cuban Revolution founded in 1966, under the patronage of the Cuban Communist Party, a review named The Bearded Caiman. This beard, often maintained in remembrance of combat, had indeed become a revolutionary insignia merging virile identity and political identity. These young, smooth-faced poets thus brandished a discursive beard like they would have displayed a red star. But to what extent did displays of virility equal political displays? How was this “new man”, who political leaders wished for, supposed to articulate gender and commitment? And what meaning should be given to excessive gender performances, bordering on parody, in these poets’ texts? To answer these questions, we must first examine politico-gendered prescriptions weighing on them in particular, as official poets, but also on the whole literary field. We will then consider gender performance in their texts and in their social mise-en-scènes as doubt, deliberately cast over their political commitment. What if the hollow shell was not the gendered subject, but the revolutionary subject?

Keywords

• Gender performance
• Cuban Revolution
• poetical dissidence
• gender parody
• official poets.