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Transnational discourses of peripheral sexualities in the Hispanic world
  • ISSN 2211-3770
  • E-ISSN: 2211-3789
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Abstract

The traditional reading of Julia de Burgos’s (1914–1953) poem “Río Grande de Loíza” positions the river as a male lover. An ecofeminist reading yields a very different reading and raises other questions about the gendered and sexual message circulating within the poem. In my reading, the river becomes a fluid, lyrical mirror reflecting the poet’s quest for transnational and transsexual freedom unbound by female corporeality. Burgos invokes the river as a non-human Other interlocutor in order to deconstruct both the geographic and political boundaries imposed by US colonial hegemony and the sexual ones foisted by patriarchal-oriented Puerto Rican nationalists who viewed sexuality as heteronormative. By the 1930s, landscapes had been appropriated as symbols of the fatherland and a distinct Puerto Rican identity. Burgos’s language establishes instead a fluvial proto-feminist discourse of empowerment by imagining multiple sites of corporeal pleasure that transcend national barriers and offers alternative poetic fluid sexualities.

© 2016 John Benjamins Publishing Company
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/content/journals/10.1075/jls.5.2.02esq
2016-09-16
2025-02-09

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/content/journals/10.1075/jls.5.2.02esq
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): Burgos; ecofeminism; non-human Other; Río Grande de Loíza; sexuality

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