Paper short abstract:

By comparing the ambiguous relationship between a transvestite and a revolutionary with that of Pinochet and his wife, Pedro Lemebel questions sexuality and gender norms in dictatorial Chile as well as the social institutions founded upon them.

Paper long abstract:

Pedro Lemebel's novel, set around the 1986 assassination attempt on Augusto Pinochet, absorbs the reader into the world of la Loca del Frente, a 40-something transvestite living in terrible poverty. He chooses to give a voice and a gaze to a protagonist who is almost invisible to the regime, and in so doing allows a uniquely subversive view of dictatorial Chile at a critical political moment. Underneath the theatrical façade of la Loca's imagination, there is a careful deconstruction of some of the most prevalent and undemocratic notions in Chile during the 1980s. In the upside-down world of the novel, nothing is to be taken at face value: women are men, supposed heroes are monsters and cowards, and the most marginalised members of society are inextricably tied to the most powerful. Most importantly of all, Lemebel questions deeply-held notions about sexuality and gender and forces us to ask what we think really makes a woman and what really makes a man. As the Chilean dictatorship was built on a foundation of traditional gender roles, Lemebel's debunking of popular ideas of masculinity and femininity calls into question even the notion of the Dictador, whose rhetoric and public image are shattered by imagined insights into his life which reconstruct him as a coward and a bully.