This book is about transvestism and the performance of gender in Latin American literature and culture. Ben. Sifuentes-Jauregui explores the figure of the transvestite and his/her relation to the body through a series of canonical Latin American texts. By analyzing works by Alejo Carpentier, Jose Donoso, Severo Sarduy and Manuel Puig (author of Kiss of the Spiderwoma n), alongside critical works in gender studies and queer theory, Sifuentes-Jauregui shows how transvestism operates not only to destabilize, but often to affirm sexual, gender, national and political identities."

The Avowal of Difference explores the potentialities and limitations that queer theory offers in the context of Latino American texts and subjects. Ben. Sifuentes-Jauregui contrasts Latino American sexual genealogies with the Anglo-European "coming out" narrative--and interrogates the centrality of the "coming out" story as the regulating metaphor for gay, lesbian, or queer identities. In its place, the book looks at other strategies--from silence to circumlocution, from disavowal to indifference--to theorize queer subject formation in a Latino American cultural context. The analysis...

This collection of critical essays explores 12 keywords central in Latin American and Caribbean Studies: indigenismo, Americanism, colonialism, criollismo, race, transculturation, modernity, nation, gender, sexuality, testimonio, and popular culture. The central question motivating this work is how to think-epistemologically and pedagogically-about Latin American Studies as a field that has taken different historical and institutional trajectories across the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States.