Valentina Pucci

PhD Candidate, Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature
Guiliano Fellow, Fall 2024

Blas Matamoro (Buenos Aires, 1942-), developed a multifaceted career as an essayist, novelist, literary critic, translator, and editor after graduating as a lawyer from the University of Buenos Aires in 1966. In 1971, he co-founded the Frente de Liberación Homosexual (FLH), one of Argentina's first LGBT rights organizations, alongside other intellectuals and writers like Juan José Sebreli, Manuel Puig, and others. His life trajectory changed dramatically in 1976 when his essay Olimpo [Olympus] was banned by the military dictatorship, forcing his exile to Madrid, Spain, where he has lived since then. With over thirty published books spanning from the essay La ciudad del tango (1969) to recent narrative works like Taller de otoño (2023), Matamoro's extensive work reflects his position as an independent intellectual operating outside traditional academic institutions. My research investigates how Matamoro's personal archive and literary production reveal strategies of self-representation and authorship that are queer because they use what I term “oblique representational mechanisms” particularly concerning the emergence of homosexual rights movements from the 1960s onward in Argentina. Rather than framing writing as a transparent window to identity, I consider how it creates a contingent space where the body appears as simultaneously present and absent, manifesting as sexed, gendered, and racialized.

Matamoro's “Personal Archive” reveals a carefully constructed public persona that navigates multiple tensions: between exile and belonging, between sexual politics and literary identity, and between institutional marginality and intellectual authority. The “capricious” order of the documents suggests not transparent self-revelation but strategic self-presentation—what I characterize as a performative negotiation with multiple audiences and institutions. This performativity allowed Matamoro to navigate relationships with LGBTQ+ movements, state apparatuses, and cultural institutions without being fully defined by any of them. His position as an independent intellectual

-outside formal academic structures yet engaged in rigorous critical practice- exemplifies how marginalized subjects can create alternative spaces of authority through persistent textual production and strategic self-positioning.

Rather than providing definitive answers about the relationship between sexuality, exile, and authorship in Matamoro's work, this research opens questions about how archives themselves function as narratives that both reveal and conceal. Understanding Matamoro's corpus requires attending to these dynamics of disclosure and opacity, recognizing how the "fog" that permeates his writing extends to the very construction of his archival presence—neither fully transparent nor completely obscured, but rather strategically navigating the politics of visibility in both literary and sexual domains.