Abstract

RUBINO, Atilio Raul. A dissent flâneuse in the pharmacopornomegalopolis. Promiscuity, love and city in Plástico cruel de José Sbarra. La ventana [online]. 2021, vol.6, n.53, pp.313-341.  Epub Feb 23, 2021. ISSN 1405-9436.

This article deals with the study of one of the most attractive and least analyzed literary authors from the 1990s, José Sbarra, in his most widely known novel, Plástico cruel, from 1992. I essentially focus on the figure of one of its main characters, Bombón, a transvestite prostitute who calls herself “a whore and a poet”, in order to look into how an apparent opposition that sets different statuses -one that is elevated towards poetry and the other that is degraded to sexuality and materiality- is taken apart by carrying out a deterritorialization of poetry as well as of the body areas and the city spaces of which Paul B. Preciado calls a pharmacopornomegalopolis. Bombón thus becomes a redefinition of the modern flâneur in the context of the establishment of a gay identity, which -according to Perlongher- when trying to broaden the scopes of normality, pushed away new outcasts -such as the transvestite, the fairy or the pickup- to the borders of what is human. At the same time, in Sbarra’s novel, we can also think about a questioning of the naturalization of the body from the pairing natural/artificial. Therefore, the hegemonic bodies (regarding the cisheteronormativity) seem to be unnaturalized. In this sense, it is the character of Bombón the one which, from an abject position, sets itself as a desiring subject (rather than an object of desire or an object for commercial exchange). This way, promiscuity becomes agencement for the own body and a revelation of the fact that love and family are strong devices for body disciplining. With a fragmentary and polyphonic style that goes from lyric to narrative, always with an ironical tone, which sometimes is taken to the absurd, Sbarra’s novel stands out in its time as a strong questioning of the traditional family’s standards as well as of the incipient normalization of gayness.

Keywords : José Sbarra; promiscuity; sexual dissent; Argentine literature; travestism.