Chapter Two

Snap, Snap, Snap! The Unthinkable Lesbian Method of Cuir Critique

The leftovers. The failures. The forgotten books. The residues of a moment in time that

has vanished into (almost) oblivion. These residues are the literature that, at the end of the

nineteen eighties, started documenting the experiences of women who choose to live outside the

confines of heterosexuality. This literary production, however, is frequently forgotten or erased

both in Mexican literary studies and in cultural histories of the LGBTTTI movement in Mexico.

Hence, to build an archive from these gendered residues demands thinking affectively of failure

as cuir possibility. It means to imagine negativity as an oriented emotion that allows us to feel a

future out of the frustrated efforts of our past and present. As we will see, this negative emotion

is not self destructive—it is not tied to the death drive as Lee Edelman suggests—nor is it simply

linked to erotic practices.1 Instead, it affects the way we feel temporality in order to render those

ideas as unstable. Therefore, in this chapter, I explore the emergence of lesbian literature to

demonstrate how failure and negative feelings provoke snaps that disrupt how we feel

temporality. Understood in relation to gender, these snaps do not annihilate the future in service

of a present or embrace a queer utopian hermeneutics. Instead, cuir temporalities are linked to

gendered crisis points that have the potential to aim for a cuir future without using the

unproductive rhetoric of hope or a masculinized death drive.

What does it means to read certain books as residues of a moment in time? How can

these residues affect the way we perceive cuir culture? Can residues as snaps affect the way we

feel time? These are some of the questions that I explore through the work of Rosa María Roffiel

and Criseida Santos Guevara. Read together, the work of these writers reveals negative modes of

critique to elaborate what I call a lesbian method of cuir critique. Following Ellen E. Berry’s

ideas of negative aesthetics—where “negative textual strategies are deployed in such a way that

normative structures of perception and representation are rendered unstable, in the process

revealing their limits or crisis points” (5)—a lesbian method of cuir critique suggests that cuir

moments happen when snapping is embraced as an ethical or political alternative even though

the battle has already been lost. Therefore, it is a form of unthinkable cuir politics. By paying

attention to different snap events scattered through time, the lesbian method of cuir critique

situates failure affectively as an intertwined moment that reproduces complex social inequalities

simultaneously in relationship to categories of power (gender, race, class, and sexuality) and

domains of power⁠ (coloniality and capitalism).2 By making this simultaneous relationship

evident, the work of Roffiel and Santos Guevara urges us to understand cuir temporality as

something that is not attached to a linear conception of time. If cuirnes is associated with

negativity, refusals, residues, it is not because cuir rejects the future or hope. Rather, this

negativity enables other ways of feeling time that constitute one of the first steps into imagining

more ethical alternatives—less normative and patriarchal—for living and writing a cuir life.

Besides looking into how the lesbian method of cuir critique affects temporality, I

explore how the work of Roffiel and Santos Guevara—understood as the leftovers of the cultural

history of the LGBTTTI movement in Mexico—urges us to discuss the problem of canon

construction and its relationship to cuirnes. Are canonicity and cuirnes incompatible? What does

it mean to build a cuir canon? Does it matter? Can a cuir canon be understood as a temporary

arrangement? Through taking into account the history of the emergence of gay literature plus the

work of scholars that have aimed to build an archive of foundational texts that reflect on the rise

of LGBTTTI culture, I demonstrate that the real problem is that there is already a canon in

circulation: Luis Zapata, José Joaquín Blanco, Carlos Monsiváis, Salvador Novo, Enrique Serna.

In the best case scenario, this group of writers performs as ‘cuir’—that is, as a group of writers

that challenge compulsory heterosexuality and homophobia. In the worse case scenario, it is a

group of gay males with patriarchal views promoting normative ways of perceiving sexuality and

gender.3⁠ Thus, this chapter starts with an analysis of the emergence of gay literature—mainly

“Ojos que da pánico soñar” by José Joaquín Blanco and El vampiro de la colonia Roma by Luis

Zapata—and the intellectual production of a gay cultural history—the two editions of México se

escribe con J by Michael K. Schuessler and Miguel Capistrán plus Schuessler’s essay “The

Hidden Histories of Gender: LGBTQ Writers and Subjectivities in México”—to question how

cuir this type of male gay recognition is. By no means am I arguing that their literary production

or the critical interventions of Schuessler and Capistrán are not a monumental part of challenging

discourses of heterosexuality, nor I am implying some sort of essentialism where gay male

production cannot be inherently cuir. And definitely, I am not trying to minimize the importance

of these interventions. Instead, what I want to point out is that if we look into what is left out of

the history of the LGBTTTI movement and from an intersectional perspective, the limits of this

way of constructing a canon becomes evident. By asking how cuir this type of male gay

recognition is, first I point out the limits of using identity politics to build a canon. Second, I aim

to suggest that there is an epistemological problem surrounding the way gender and sexuality has

been understood in Mexican literary studies to finally propose cuir as a methodology and as a

political affiliation that has the potential to make us see things differently—outside the normative

realms of heteropatriarchy.

This chapter starts with an analysis of the emergence of gay male literature and with their

cultural history because Roffiel and Santos Guevara explicitly criticize the masculine strategies

employed by some of these writers and scholars. In the case of Roffiel, Amora could be read as a

feminist intervention into what El vampiro de la colonia Roma proposes while the protagonist of

La reinita pop no ha muerto by Santos Guevara, dreams of writing a book called “Monterrey se

escribe con M de machorra.” It is crucial, however, to clarify that I am not rendering these texts

as ‘rewritings’ of gay male canonical works, nor I am implying that lesbian literature needs to be

read always in relation to gay male literature. Instead, I want to argue that one of the central

negative strategies used by these writers is snapping as a feminist-cuir writing practice that

unmakes the dominant structures of heteropatriarchy and innovates the ways in which literature,

feminism and queer theory have been linked in Mexican studies.

Snap: a sudden break, a sharp noise, a bond. Sara Ahmed has brilliantly reflected on

snapping as a feminist practice from her own snapping experience within the context of working

within institutions, such as universities.⁠4 Echoing her ideas about unhappy feelings and objects, I

argue that Amora and La reinita pop no ha muerto orient us toward a snap moment—that is,

recognizing with frustration and anger that others might wish to relegate to oblivion the voices

and practices of lesbians, and recognizing that the promises of the sexual revolution of the

seventies failed to address the patriarchal institutions inherited by the LGBTTTI movement.5⁠

Yet, as Ahmed reminds us, snap is not the starting point nor a singular event but what we have to

keep doing to keep being. It is important to keep in mind that reading these texts as snaps opens

up a gap in time not to necessarily experience the whole impact of the present (or the past) but to

build an affective community to sustain a future that is out of joint—here and yet not here, as

Muñoz explains in Crusing Utopia. Ultimately, by using snapping as a feminist-cuir writing

practice I propose different ways of orienting us to canon building: one that pushes us to make a

mess, to breed resentment, to shock, to annihilate, to build unthinkable canons just to crush them

again and again—to perceive the canon affectively. And it starts with residues, cuir failures, and

‘feminists killjoys.⁠6’

Unthinking the Canon: The Affective Synthesis of a Male Century

‘Canon’ refers to practically everything accepted as a ‘masterpiece’ of literature, hence

worthy of the attention of scholars, of having a place in history, and with the power to build a

national literature and an intellectual community. Inherently, canon is a normative concept: it

functions as a point of departure and determines the boundaries of the object of study itself. It is

a way of justifying the glorification of the ‘great literary tradition’ from a position that pretends

to be rationally intended. Even though there have been challenges to the way we think about

canonicity—for example, by paying attention to the process and conditions of canon formation

or by admitting previously unaccepted works and writers—the canon has been built and reflected

on the subjects it purports to represent: limited almost to males who are largely preoccupied with

establishing a national literature and building an intellectual sphere.

If we pay attention to the literary history of the twentieth century in Mexico—the time of

institutionalized revolution and the beginnings of Mexican literary modernity—this masculine

pattern becomes evident. One only needs to look at the way literature was being framed in the

1920s and 1930s, in terms of virile or effeminate literature, to realize how gendered the

processes of building the canon are⁠.7 Unfortunately, this is a pattern that has been systematically

repeated in time until our present. As a case in point, if we look into the table of contents of the

two most successful anthologies of Mexican literature, Antología de la narrativa mexicana del

siglo XX (1989) by Christopher Domínguez Michael and Poesía en movimiento. México 1915-

1966 (1966) by Octavio Paz, Alí Chumacero, José Emilio Pacheco and Homero Aridjis, we find

the following:

Title Men Women

No. Percentage No. Percentage
Poesía en movimiento. 38 90.47% 4 9.52%

México 1915-1966 (1966)

Antología de la narrativa 135 85.44% 23 14.55%
mexicana del siglo XX. Vol.
I and II (1989)
Diccionario crítico de la 129 89.58% 15 10.41%
literatura mexicana (1955-
2005) (2007) by Christopher
Domínguez Michael
Antología general de la 81 87.09% 12 12.90%
poesía mexicana. De la
época prehispánica a
nuestros días (2012) by
Juan Domingo Argüelles*
*Only the sections that belong to the 20th century were chosen.

As the table shows, the disparity between men and women continues to be present in the

processes of selection of the 21st century.⁠8 Precisely because of these numbers, Nuala Finnegan

argues that paying attention to women writers just because they are women who write is still a

worthwhile intellectual pursuit; that gender as a category of analysis is still a necessary act of

cultural politics ("Women Writers in the Land of "Virile" Literature” 348). On the other hand,

María de la Cruz Castro Ricalde and Cristina Rivera Garza have pointed out on several occasions

that it is surprising that the tasks of visibilization and representation are still not over. As they

explain, the idea of paying attention to women writers because they are women was an

intellectual pursuit that was considered temporary in the eighties (Pacheco 5:59). How is it that

almost four decades later the link between literature and gender studies remains the same? What

I want to show in this section is that numbers and representative disparities orient us to an

epistemological problem—that is, to the ways literary criticism and scholarly work have

discussed canon formation either following the traditional approach (national identity and

modernity) or by resisting these approaches by looking into the ideological and political

implications of literary criticism—in this case, gender and sexuality studies.

Hopefully by doing an affective synthesis of a male century, it will become evident that it

is necessary—as a form of cultural politics, as a methodology of cuir literary critique—to

unthink the canon and make a mess. The affective turn that I propose here is a response to the

temporal impasse of gender studies in Mexican literary criticism that also reveals the (male)

limitations with which the canon has been formed. As I pointed out before, I am indebted to Sara

Ahmed’s theorization on objects of feelings—that is, on how feelings as cultural and social

practices shape bodies into objects impressed with affect that then circulate and generate

emotional effects and actions. I am interested in perceiving the canon affectively for two reasons.

First, since affect is a methodological and conceptual free fall—an in-between-ness—it allows

me to build a cuir canon without imprisoning it in the horrors of normativity. Isn’t it time for

canon—with or without the capital C—to work this way? Echoing Gregory J. Seigworth and

Melissa Gregg’s words, isn’t it time for a master set of literary works to operate with a certain

modest vitality rather than impressing itself into a rapidly changing world like a “snap-on grid of

shape-setting interpretability” (4). Secondly, it allows me to ‘kill’ the male canon simply because

I feel like doing so—I propose to snap the penis as a literary form of cuir critique!

If we look into one of the most celebrated books about canonicity, Naciones

intelectuales. Las fundaciones de la modernidad literaria mexicana (1917-1959) by Ignacio M.

Sánchez-Prado, we can see why it is that men have been positioned as responsible for imagining

intellectual nations, founding the literary field and its cultural institutions⁠.9 Literary criticism

departs from the traditional idea that there is an ideological and intellectual praxis that seeks to

homogenize literature in order to legitimize or create a political power (Sánchez Prado, Naciones

Intelectuales… 3). In the case of Mexico and as Sánchez-Prado explains, historically literary

criticism has been intimately linked to “lo mexicano”—and then, to the limits of identitarian

discourses (Roger Bartra, Carlos Monsiváis)—and finally to the problem of national modernity

(Claudio Lomnitz) (2). Literary criticism has been discussed in terms of the nation and the

literary construction of the nation has been done by canonized male writers (Mariano Azuela,

Martín Luis Guzmán, Ramón López Velarde, Alfonso Reyes, Octavio Paz⁠).10 To quote Emily

Hind: “critics today share not a master set of literary works so much as an approved grouping of

theoretical texts that generally favor masculinist styles” (Femmenisms and the Mexican

Woman… 4). The question, then, is what happens when we break with this genealogy of literary

criticism, when we stop reinforcing hegemonic masculinity and instead we snap the penis.

As we know, this male literary genealogy has not been overthrown. Feminist, gender and

sexuality approaches have been stuck with the same strategies using different names. I do not

mean this as a negative critique of the colossal work of the scholars that try to resist oppressive

literary systems. I am just aiming to explore what happens if we look at things differently, if we

use failure as a smashing tool. One of these strategies is the visibilization of women’s voices, an

intellectual pursuit that tends to be linked uncritically to identity politics. I understand identity

politics as a theoretical base to build a political and cohesive community that uses personal

identity as a common denominator (Diana Fuss). This resembles the traditional line of "lo

mexicano" (isn’t Octavio Paz writing about identity politics and centering his Mexican dick as a

common denominator?). However, if “lo mexicano” has been extensively discussed both for its

limitations and possibilities, when it comes to gender, identity politics is perceived as an

essentializing joke. This animosity, as Nuala Finnegan explains, suggests that it is premature to

divorce gender and identity politics from the discussion of literary criticism (“Women Writers in

the Land of “Virile” Literature” 339). As a matter of fact, if the work of male writers and literary

critics of “lo mexicano” has shown us anything, it is precisely the role essentialism has played to

keep them in circulation. I like the example of ‘studying women writers just as women writers’

because it is self-explanatory. On the one hand, while it is an essentializing practice, it is one that

allows women writers to circulate and enter the literary sphere. On the other, it allows me to

dismantle the condescending masculine practice of criticizing gendered approaches because they

are stuck on identity politics, by tracing this practice to the traditional genealogy of literary

criticism that is at the core of the Mexican intellectual nation.

I am not the first one to consider the possibilities of failure as a literary feminist practice

in relationship to Mexican literature. In her book Femmenism and the Mexican Woman

Intellectual from Sor Juana to Poniatowska, Emily Hind explores ‘busted criticism’ as a way of

recognizing that as a feminist critic it does not make sense to compete and it is better to embrace

gender as an “analytic malfunction” (2). Thus, Hind proposes “Boob lit” as “a label that pokes

fun at itself, celebrates women and their achievements, and at the same time recognizes the

problem of being stuck with the difficult role of playing woman intellectual” (7). Through

humor, Boob lit admits topics and techniques that are normally considered unintellectual, instead

of expressing a radical way of thinking (10). Indebted to Hind’s work, my own research explores

another kind ‘busted criticism,’ inspired in what I call the lesbian method of cuir critique. Taking

into account the analytic malfunction of gender in relation to cuir studies as a subjectless theory,

I unthink the canon—meaning that I depart from the idea that for cuirnes, entering the literary

sphere through the nation or the intellectual figure is always already a lost battle. I do want to

propose a different way of theorizing the canon that more than expressing a radical way of

thinking, admits unconventional forms of relationality and canon formation.

In combination, Naciones intelectuales, Femmenism and the Mexican Woman, the

 10

numbers that show the continued erasure of women writings, plus the insistence on

representational practices from a gender studies perspective, summarizes the state of literary

criticism in relation to gendered canon constructions in Mexico. Thus, my affective synthesis of

a male century looks like this: 1) There is a continued belief in the inferiority of literature written

by women and by extension, a belief that gender studies is a discipline stuck in grievance; 2)

Identitarian discourses—disguised or not as identity politics—have been a central form of

hegemonic literary criticism since the male debates of “lo mexicano.” And finally, literary

criticism has been obsessed with notions of progress and modernity, and therefore literary history

has been written by collective groups, as Sánchez-Prado brilliantly shows, that describe

distinguishable series of changes. However, and as Hind explains, throughout the twentieth

century, women tend to write in isolation, they don’t adhere to particular aesthetics or

movements, and therefore, it is hard to use their writing to show narratives of progress (10).

Therefore, it is important to consider a non-progressive form of canon building. As I will

suggest, canon as an affective temporal arrangement will need to be divorced from progressive

notions of time and re-orient us to non-metric time—pace, duration, frequency, rhythms.

Taking into account the state of canon formation in the Mexican literary sphere, in the

next section I analyze the beginnings of gay literature to show how in sexuality studies the same

patterns explained here continue to exist. By using Luis Zapata, José Joaquín Blanco and the

work of Miguel Capistrán and Michael K. Schuessler in relation to the work of Rosa María

Roffiel and Criseida Santos Guevara, I show how these lesbian writers snap at the gay male

canon by embracing failure, and by rejecting progress and identity politics. I use their negative

modes of cuir critique to show how a canon might be perceived in terms of affect.

1
In Homos, Leo Bersani connects pleasure not to life, sex and futurity but to the death drive. Following this seminal

 11

work, in No Future, Edelman links queer theory to the death drive to embrace negativity instead of heteronormative
politics of hope and reproduction: “The queer subject, he argues, has been bound epistemologically to negativity, to
nonsense, to antiproduction, to unintelligibility, and—instead of fighting this characterization by dragging queerness
into recognition—he proposes that we embrace the negativity that we, as queer subjects, structurally represent”
(Caserio 823).
2
In “Theoretical Coalitions and Multi-Issue Activism: ‘Our Struggles Will Be Intersectional or They Will Be
Bullshit!’”, Sirma Bilge revisits the concept of intersectionality through an idea of radical relationality, which means
that an intersectional analysis of power not only looks into what she calls categories-of-power analysis but
simultaneously to domains-of-power analysis. For Bilge, categories of power refers to “the operators of power that
are salient in a given society” like race, gender, sexuality, age, to name a few (112). On the other hand, domains of
power is a framework that helps examine the organization of power relations—that is, how power relations are
organized, legitimized, and reactivated through the structural, disciplinary, representational, interpersonal, and
psychic/embodied (112-13).
3
I choose to simplify the ways their literature reflects on issues of sexuality and gender to highlight the fact that it is
a group of men with the epistemological privilege of defining what gay literature looks like and of constructing the
history of the LGBTTTI movement. However, their work is more complex and highlights the patriarchal structures
behind their ideas of gender and sexuality. It is Carlos Monsiváis who performs the limits of their discourse in a
more complex way. From his work with Marta Lamas, compiled under the title Misógino feminista—a title that
makes explicit the monsivarian thought of alternating its misogyny with its defense and deep knowledge of the
Mexican feminist movement—to his uses of queer, Monsiváis’s work (and life) unpacks heteropatriarchy but
doesn’t challenge it. A good example of this is his use of queer that, as William Daniel Holcombe explains in his
article “Lo queer de Carlos Monsiváis: slumming en el ambiente,” only makes the effeminate man visible,
understanding queer in a very limited way—a kind of identity politics that privileges the gay male.
4
The idea of “snap” as a feminist/queer practice is in all her work. For a more concise idea of the term, see the
transcription of her lecture “Snap! Feminist Moments, Feminist Movements” given in Stockholm on May 11 of
2017 and available on her webpage.
5
Another way of looking at this is through Ahmed’s idea of “unhappy archives”: “archives [that] take shape through
the circulation of cultural objects that articulate unhappiness with the history of happiness. An unhappy archive is
one assembled around the struggle against happiness” (The Promise of Happiness 18). In this case, I look into failed
archives as archives that take shape through the circulation of literature that articulates failure—the unsuccessful
entrance to the history of Mexican literature, the frustration with male perceptions of LGBTQ writings to name a
few examples—with the history of success. In this case, this success is measure in terms of canonicity and reception.
6
For Ahmed, the feminist is an affect alien, a killjoy: “Does the feminist kill other people’s joy by pointing out
moments of sexism? Or does she expose the bad feelings that get hidden, displaced, or negated under public signs of
joy? . . . she might even kill joy because she refuses to share an orientation toward certain things as being good
because she does not find the objects that promise happiness to be quite so promising” (The Promise of Happiness
39).
7
Robert McKee Irwin has brilliantly reflected on the virility debates in his book Mexican Masculinities. In the
chapter dedicated to this debate, Irwin argues that it is in the topic of national literature where we can see more
clearly the virulent aspects of gender discourses in the post-revolutionary period. Later he explains that it is in this
moment when “[i]ts [cultural] protagonists now acknowledged an essential ideological link between constructions of
masculinity and male sexuality and of Mexicanness in their debates over national literature and national identity”
(117). See more in “Virile Literature and Effeminate Literature. The 1920s and 1930s.”
8
The quantity of examples showing how in the 21st century the intellectual work of women is still considered
inferior to men, is overwhelming. Just to throw out a couple more examples, Emily Hind cites Cristina Rivera
Garza’s review on a poll done by Nexos regarding the three best novels since 1977 and says: “The glimpse of the
canon reflects the opinion of 60 respondents, 51 of whom are men and nine of whom were women. Rivera Garza
confesses to having been one of the women polled, and I am another. The winners were novels written by men:
Fernando del Paso, José Emilio Pacheco, Juan García Ponce, Salvador Elizondo, and Sergio Pitol. As for women
writers mentioned, nine names appear, and as Rivera Garza notes, “suspiciously” there were also nine women voters
(“El retorno” 42). At least in my case, Rivera Garza is right: I did vote for a woman-authored novel” (7). Another
example is the project of bringing to light the misogyny within Mexican cultural institutions carried out by Maricela
Guerrero, Paula Abramo and Sisí Rodríguez with the provocative hashtag #RopaSucia.
9
Of course there have been moments of resistance to this masculinist approach. As a case in point, El libro vacio
(1958) by Josefina Vicens has been identified by several scholars as a work that exemplifies a transitional period
where an intervention of feminine writing is articulated in the masculine space of literature (Sánchez Prado, "La

 12

destrucción de la literatura viril…" 152). In the nineties, the emergence of gender studies—both in the US and
Mexico—allowed a new wave of interruptions with books such as Plotting Women (1989) by Jean Franco. Franco's
pioneering work adds to the work of Debra Castillo, Fabienne Bradu and to Diana Moran’s group, to the increasing
studies on the work of Rosario Castellanos and Elena Garro, and to the colossal efforts—that remain very much
alive—of uncovering women's writings. Besides, women writers have successfully resisted the patriarchal strategies
of canon formation with their critical and commercial success like Cristina Rivera Garza, Carmen Boullosa and
more recently, Fernanda Melchor with Temporada de huracanes (2017).
10
NOTE: EXPAND THIS WITH HER NEW BOOK.