Queer cosmopolitanism and in-between spaces in María Luisa Bombal’s La última niebla and Clarice Lispector’s Perto do coração selvagem

This project focuses on two examples of Latin American fiction written by women in the early 20th century that exhibit elements of queer textualities. The novels that will serve as the objects of study for this project are Clarice Lispector’s Perto do coração selvagem (1943) and María Luisa Bombal’s La última niebla (1935). With Latin American countries seeking to join the discourse and practice of modernity at the turn of the 20th century, Lispector and Bombal were born—and, in the case of Lispector, displaced—at a time of sociocultural rupture. Their response to this momentous period of sociocultural changes were novels that questioned the traditions predetermining women’s destinies to the domestic private sphere. Furthermore, their novels introduced an in-between space that, one can only assume, many women found themselves resigned to as they yearned for sexual, social, and bodily autonomy. The narrative techniques and queer-coded language and imagery utilized by Lispector and Bombal shape representations of female sexuality in a way that subverts the cisheteronormative systems which repressed queer and female desire. I analyze the interplay of language, sexuality, and narrative structure of Perto do coração selvagem and La última niebla in order to propose a queer reading of both texts. It is not my position that either of these authors are queer themselves; rather, the purpose of this project is to engage in the process of analyzing themes of desire in each novel from a non-heteronormative perspective.