[eng] Dafne Pidemunt - A Dissident's Discourse: Fragments

In that place where reality is incomprehensible, painful, enjoyed outside the norm, beaten or censored, fiction appears.

Thus, literature shows us other possible worlds, which are pure silenced reality. 

Do we enter into the rule when a right is established? 

The same-sex marriage law, the gender identity law, the trans employment quota in the public sector law, give us a voice. They allow us to "be" a being that perhaps we never wanted to be.

Our amatory forms and our identities are crystallized within the culture. The relationship between anti-system activism and avant-garde art is historical, which at some point will cease to be avant-garde to crystallize in a university.

We are no longer the weirdos who for decades gathered in hidden places (basements, almost windowless, dark places) to read and enjoy each other. Now we have a "visibility" that continues to respond to a cis-tem that for centuries we denounced. We proudly show ourselves at the Buenos Aires International Book Fair, and in some countries that make us fashionable. 

We set up tables of dissident literature, stands, the multinationals of the publishing market put us on the list and the books of LGBTTIQ writers are exhibited as a boom in the windows of large bookstores.

Their contents are usually painful: rapes to teach lessons, prostitution to survive, deaths caused by HIV-related diseases or ways of living with the virus, beatings and abuses. Experiences that society will read as "fiction".

When dissidence is happy, when we generate polyamorous bonds, when we get out of the idea of "marriage and love", or we get married and we enunciate it to open that relationship, and then we write a book of a polyamorous relationship where one is happy and nobody dies... do they sell the same? The visibility of these new forms is still a redoubt of small publishers.

The novel "Las malas", the trans boom of the brilliant Camila Sosa Villada, names the pain, but also names the ties in dissident families that do not correspond to blood ties. Paula Jiménez España and Gabriela Cabezón Cámara laugh. While the poetry of the enormous Macky Corvalán, in her language of lesbian amatory, continues in small shelves. While the novels of happy "trouples" are read by those of us who can identify ourselves, the literature of dissident activism is established in society from pain. Quantity and quantity of books by people who name ourselves outside the hetero-norm, do we no longer suffer because we have a place at the table of the big bookstores? 

Society knows it is a lie, but it likes to believe that it did something right and read Julián Lopez's novel, Lemebel's chronicles, Susy Shock's and Perlongher's poetry. They respect Wilde, Lorca, Woolf, Mistral, Leduc, Mansfield, Djuna Barnes among so many, silencing suffering. 

What cannot be said as something real will be stated as fiction (herds of people who love each other in the same bed, two men who kiss on the corner, a group of lesbians who make a revolution by fucking, others who are raped, a boyfriend who dies in an infectious disease ward, a trans woman whose face is beaten by a client with whom she will remain in love anyway... it is "fiction". 

There, where we do not want to listen, we say: it is fiction. The transvestite friends of the great Pedro Lemebel in that sepia photo of one of the chronicles of “Loco Afán” [Mad Urge], look at us out of the corner of their eyes and ask us not to forget their story.



* Dafne Pidemunt (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1977). Poet, editor and cultural manager. She has published "El juego de las estatuas" [The statues game], "La avidez del silencio" [The greed of silence], and "León no es más que un nombre" [Leon is just a name]. She co-directs the publishing house "La mariposa y la iguana", about gender and sexual diversity. She coordinates the space "Pride and Prejudice" at the Buenos Aires International Book Fair.



[1] Translated from the Spanish by Andrea Balart-Perrier.




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