To Touch a Story: Crisis and Textual Textures in Argentine Queer Writing

Abstract

This essay examines two queer literary chapbooks published by art gallery/press Belleza y Felicidad (ByF) in the context of the Argentine 2001 social and economic crisis to show that these texts imagine reading as a performance which entails doing, touching, and being touched back. Through their visual, verbal, and material elements, these works imagine new relations between literature and everyday life and practices in a period in which those practices were dramatically altered. Offering a verbal/visual platform from where to reflect on the deployment of touch and the haptic beyond strictly visual or filmic disciplinary realms, these writings exploit their material dimensions to build specifically literary, historically located "textual textures". This article argues that textual textures contribute to shed light on how these works resonate with, register, and critically intervene in the crisis context