Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Gender Studies and Sexuality
Year: 2024
DOI:
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Beyond Queer Normativity: Queering Fiction, or Fictionalising Queerness, in Camila Sosa Villada, a Travesti Writer
Massimiliano Manni
ABSTRACT:
If after the memoir boom of the turn of the century more of those affected by the “politics of exclusion” of autobiography (Smith & Watson 2010) have been able to tap memoiristic forms for testimonial purposes or self-affirmation, certain stories continue to be ‘unintelligible’ (Butler 2003) if told in a documentary mode. To circumvent the disempowerment resulting from readers’ likely failure to comprehend her socially unscripted story, the Argentinian writer Camila Sosa Villada ‘gives an account of herself’ in the mode of fiction. In her first novel Las malas (2019), she intersperses her true biography and background as a trans sex worker with references to the magical, mythologised events of her trans community. In Tesis sobre una domesticación (2019), published soon afterwards, she entrusts her fake biography to a third-person narrator freely accessing other characters’ thoughts and telling the unimaginable story of her staggering financial success as a theatre actress, her fraught marriage with a gay man and their adoption of a child with HIV. Through the ambiguous referential status of autofiction and its disruption of conventional truth discourse, Sosa Villada can articulate experiences which escape common patterns of queer relationships. This paper will show that it is by making these transgressions tentative in the alternative world of two author-centred texts written as fiction, and at the same time by making those transgressions zones of character and community exploration, that Sosa Villada can capture her unique identity and broaden the scope of the ‘sayable’ in (self-)life writing.
keywords: autofiction, magic realism, nonnormative family, sex work, trans identity