The uneasy masculinities of dissidence and exile: Reinaldo Arenas’s fight for textual‐sexual freedom

Abstract

The exiled Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas, regarded as a dangerous “counter‐revolutionary” by his government, uses alternative sexualities as both means and metaphor of social insurgence. As a writer, he foregrounds traumatic and personalized issues of politics and sexuality – critiquing both communism and capitalism – in order to explicate the meaning of freedom from homosexual and human rights perspectives. This article investigates how Arenas pushes the limits of satire and the absurd as postcolonial strategies for liberating oppressed masculinities.

Keywords:

• repression
• resistance
• autobiography
• homo‐eroticism
• post‐revolution
• satire
• carnivalesque

Notes

1. Pentagony (or Pentagonia) is Arenas’s “own term for a series of novels that treat Cuba, homosexuality, the process of literary creation, and the struggle for individual expression” (http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/catalog/show_comment/806).