Reversed Fall: Repression, Apotemnophilia and (Possible) Homosexual Vindication in Virgilio Piñera’s Narrative

Abstract

We will make use of Michel Foucault’s concept of "author-function" to talk about Cuban writer Virgilio Piñera and the connection between his biography and the sexual culture of his time. The treatment of the body in two books by Piñera, La carne de René from 1952 and Cuentos fríos from 1956, displays a particular version of sadomasochistic practices and a conspicuous parallelism with apothemnophilia, the desire for amputation. It is these idiosyncratic representations of transgression, that point to Piñera’s literary persona as a closeted homosexual by the conceptual parameters of the Foucauldian author- function, despite the fact that the Matanzas writer never hid his own homosexuality.