Date of Award

Spring 2026

Document Type

Open Access Thesis

Department

Languages, Literatures and Cultures

First Advisor

Mercedez López Rodríguez

Abstract

This thesis proposes the concept of viral landscapes as a critical tool for analyzing representations of HIV/AIDS in contemporary Latin American ‘queer’ literature. Drawing on Gaston Bachelard's notion of poetic space and Sara Ahmed's theory of bodily orientation, this work understands the landscape not as a descriptive backdrop but as a principle of literary creation. Similarly, it adopts cuir — a phonetic and political adaptation of the English ‘queer’ into Spanish — as a critical position specific to the Latin American context, one that inscribes sexual dissidence within genealogies shaped by coloniality, racialization, and structural inequality. From this framework, the thesis maps four configurations of viral landscapes spanning more than a century of dissident writing across the region.

The first chapter examines the literary antecedents of the viral landscape in the poetry of Julián del Casal and in Luis Zapata's El vampiro de la colonia Roma (1979). Drawing on Paul B. Preciado's concept of potentia gaudendi and Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity, the chapter analyzes how these texts construct pre-AIDS landscapes where sexual dissidence produces forms of community, pleasure, and queer becoming that prefigure the crises the virus would unleash.

The second chapter reads Mario Bellatin's Salón de belleza (1994) as an aesthetic laboratory in which disease intervenes in the materiality of the body and challenges biopower, in dialogue with Javier Guerrero's theory of the body as a technology. This analysis is placed in conversation with ‘Hilos de sangre: historias y memorias del VIH/sida en Colombia’ (2023), an oral history project by Pablo Bedoya and Carlos Motta in which memory and creativity emerge as political responses to silence and stigma. The third chapter analyzes the chronicles collected in Pedro Lemebel's Loco afán. Crónicas de sidario (1996), where writing becomes the only possible territory for those bodies that the State and official history attempted to erase through the virus, then through forgetting.

Across all three chapters, this thesis demonstrates that viral landscapes are not merely spaces of death and suffering, but territories where potentia gaudendi persists and transforms itself — in experimental fiction, in oral archives, in performance in political chronicle, and, in activism. Latin American queer writing about HIV/AIDS constitutes a corpus of aesthetic and political resistance whose relevance extends far beyond its historical context and continues to speak to the present.

Rights

© 2026, Cristian Camilo García Tengono

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