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My Tongue's not Straight: Gender, Language and Agency in Contemporary Spanish Queer Epistolary Fictions

Abstract:This article focuses on two short stories, "Carta a mi amante" by Sofía Ruiz and "Cartas" by María Felicitas Jaime, to illustrate how these authors employ the epistolary genre as a form of dialogue between two independent queer female subjects and as an apt literary aesthetic for challenging limited definitions of female sexuality and subjectivity that restrict women to fixed roles and positions within sexual and social discourses. Although perceived as harmless, private texts, in terms of writing, letters have provided women a space of literary agency in which they may challenge exclusionary forms of discourse and gender norms. Employing characteristics of the love letter genre, the authors compose epistolary fictions that ensure the individual subjectivity of both the letter writer and the recipient. In their use of the epistolary genre, these stories emerge as a space of sexual self-construction and a means for challenging heteronormative and exclusionary forms of discourse.