Browsing by Author "Bortolotto MC"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    A sinful reaction to capitalistt ethics in no quiero quedarme sola y vacíaa (2006)
    (Purdue University Press, 2018-12-14) Bortolotto MC
    In her article “A Sinful Reaction to Capitalist Ethics in No quiero quedarme sola y vacía (2006)” María Celina Bortolotto analyzes how Lozada’s characterization of the main character, La Loca, questions the ideals of free agency offered by consumerist capitalism and the urban gay male ideal under the promise of a liberating gay lifestyle in a social context defined by identity politics. The novel is a fictionalized autobiographical account of Puerto Rican author Angel Lozada’s misadventures in the early 2000s gay scene in New York. This essay plays with the punitive sense of the word “capital” in the seven capital sins as a thematic thread to invite a reflection on the concepts of virtue and value constructed under U.S. Protestant capitalism: the former as emancipatory guilt; the latter as the specific status society grants to objects, practices and people creating, in turn, subjects whose value is purely economic versus those whose lives are deemed (morally) valuable in themselves.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Historias de patitos feos: humor, vergüenza, narcisismo y oralidad en La traición de Rita Hayworth (1968) y La patografía (1998) Ugly Duckling Tales: Humour, Shame, Narcissism and Orality in La traición de Rita Hayworth (1968) and La patografía (1998)
    (Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, 15/08/2017) Bortolotto MC
    Informed by philosophy and psychoanalytical theory, this analysis proposes that Puig and Lozada adopt a humoristic attitude in both novels and experiment with polyphony and orality to define what I call “loca” writing. This narcissistic oral writing adheres to the aesthetics of kitsch and camp to recreate the liminal “surface” of humour (Deleuze 1969) as a rhetorical and philosophical tool to transcend shame and resist normalization with original voices and spaces.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Introduction: The limits of responsibility
    (Anthony Burke University of Adelaide (Australia), 5/05/2016) Lawn J; Bortolotto MC; Worthington K; Meek A
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Los cuerpos de los otros: Mandatos patriarcales y cuerpos rebeldes de mujeres en Elena Sabe (2007) de Claudia Piñeiro
    (MIFLC Review: Journal of the Mountain Interstate Foreign Language Association, 1/04/2021) Bortolotto MC; Farnsworth MS
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Perfect Performance for export: shame, narcissism and contaminated ideals in Santos-Febres' Sirena Selena (2000)
    (University of Miami, 2020-12) Bortolotto MC
    In her first novel, situated in “this soup of islands stewed in hunger and the desire to be someone else” (Sirena Selena 211), Santos-Febres explores the world of transvestites and young male prostitutes following the trajectory of a new star, bolero-singer and seductive diva “Sirena Selena,” from the streets of San Juan, Puerto Rico, to rich audiences in the Dominican Republic. The novel shows feminine characters that resist shame and humiliation by narcissistically focusing on themselves as a means of survival, adhering each to different rigid ideals of femininity permeated by normative systems of value focusing on appearance, financial solvency or ambiguous desire. Their tactics are deployed against a background where the social geography of the islands appears hierarchically ordered with Haiti at the bottom, the Dominican Republic and Cuba in the middle, and Puerto Rico at the top. The novel alludes to the social/political/economic hierarchies that organize migrations among islands in the Caribbean, always against the powerful backdrop of the United States. Sex tourism is recreated as a profitable industry that relaxes strict machista prejudices and allows for sexual experimentation of those who pay and some degree of social mobility of those whose bodies are for hire.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    With the focus on the I/Eye: Shame and narcissism in Ángel Lozada's no quiero quedarme sola y vacfa (2006)
    (HUNTER COLLEGE-CUNY, CENTER PUERTO RICAN STUDIES, 1/03/2012) Bortolotto MC
    This analysis focuses on the novel's protagonist, la Loca, and his narcissistic attempts to negotiate selfhood in narratives where he finds himself repeatedly inscribed in shame. Psychoanalytical theories of shame inform the study of la Loca and the close relationship between shame and narcissism. Ultimately, though, the work uses this character as an entry point to unveil Lozada's acute satire of rigid conceptions of identity, attractiveness, desire, and success as defined by the prevailing narratives of capitalist consumerism, identity politics, and homophobic nationalism in the contemporary United States and the island of Puerto Rico.