Sexo y traición: un diálogo secreto entre Juan Goytisolo y Manuel Puig

Abstract

At first sight, nothing in the personal or literary trajectory would seem to bring together the Spaniard Juan Goytisolo an the Argentinian Manuel Puig, if it were not their homosexual orientation and their belonging to the same generation of angry writers, whose transgressing works were built up in exile far from their repudiated homeland. The role played by Goytisolo in the promotion of the first novel by Puig, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (1968), in which the semiotic function of betrayal is already at work, is not well known. Beyond the anecdote, I  have tried to untangle the deep affinities linking the two heterodox writings, which break up with the ambient ideological and linguistic monolthism, , by crossing the two novels Count Julian by Goytisolo and Kiss of the Spider Woman by Puig. In these texts, the harrowing homoerotic fight of the narrator finds no other outcome than betrayal and expiatory sacrifice.