Sexuality, multilingual love and the Latin American diaspora

Nationalist thought and sentiment insist that each national subject should strive to speak a native language well just as he or she "speaks" or performs within the ranges of one gender and one sexuality. Ongoing debates on bilingualism, immigration and the rights of LGBT individuals in the Americas serve as evidence of the persistence of this monological configuration of the nation and its subjects. By drawing from diasporic Latino American authors (Alarcón, Sarduy, Lozada, Santiago, Peri Rossi, Alvarez, Ferré, Santos-Febres) who advocate and put into practice an aesthetics of multilingualism in their discussions of human sexuality, this dissertation demonstrates how aesthetic and political strategies often understood as marginal pose key challenges to restrictive configurations of the nation and the subject. Indeed, this dissertation argues that Latin American literary discussions of non-normative human sexualities often take multilingual form because both political strategies--queerness and multilingualism--challenge simplistic and totalizing visions of the Nation and the person. These writers do not just advocate pluralism and tolerance--hallmarks of homogeneizing gay and lesbian liberation movements--but rather a difference that strikes at the very roots of the categories of gender, sexuality and national belonging. Drawing from recent publications on bilingual aesthetics and the sociolinguistics of gender and sexuality, in this dissertation I read "bilingually" texts that have not been read before as such, while seeking to highlight the relationship between writers often understood as novel or marginal (i.e., queer Latino authors) to the multiple literary traditions from which their work arises. The dissertation demonstrates that multilingualism can be, and has been, deployed as a queer aesthetic strategy that is intrinsically political. In an unexpected move, it also suggests that multilingualism might serve, queerly, for a critique and positive revaluation of how heterosexuality struggles to become normative in works by Mayra Santos Febres, Julia Alvarez, Rosario Ferré and Cristina Peri Rossi.