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Article published In: Transnational discourses of peripheral sexualities in the Hispanic world
Edited by Michael J. Horswell and Nuria Godón
[Journal of Language and Sexuality 5:2] 2016
► pp. 276–294

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Desiring futures in Cuban cultural production

 | Dickinson College, Carlisle, USA
Published online: 29 September 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.5.2.07fro
Given that the production of sexual subjects is inextricably bound to language, theorists Lee Edelman and Jasbir Puar investigate the imbrication of the sexual subject in discourses of the Child (Edelman 2004) and the nation-state (Puar 2007). Through an interdisciplinary lens, this essay builds on their conceptual frameworks in its examination of homoerotics and the figure of the Child in Cuban cultural production. Of interest is how peripheral verbal and visual language challenge discourses that fold the sexual subject and the Child into the good of the nation and the coherence of the social order. In Edelman’s argument (2004: 3), the Child and queerness are held apart: the Child is bound to futurity given that the “political order […] returns to the Child as the image of the future it intends” and queerness figures “the place of the social order’s death drive.” The queer poetics of the peripheral language examined in this essay revise the trajectory of Child to “true man,” creating new space for movement of the queer subject and the Child in the political field.
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