Geografias de resistencia: Espacio poetico y homosexualidad masculina en la poesia espanola contemporanea

This dissertation investigates the relationship between poetic form, spatial representation and male homosexuality. Its theoretical framework derives from recent research in cultural geography that emphasizes the relevance of gender and sexuality to our understanding of space. Unlike readings that focus on the universal dimension of the poetic self, this study presents an analysis of poetic space that locates gender and sexuality at the forefront of the hermeneutic process. The reading provides new insights into the contextual specificity of poetry, a specificity that far from being extrinsic to the text, is inevitably embedded in it. Through the poetic representation of three spatial arrangements---the body, the landscape, the city---the dissertation establishes a process of sexual resistance that is effected within social space.; The first chapter examines the crisis of poetic subjectivity confronting the homo/heterosexual definition in Federico Garcia Lorca. This crisis produces a tropology of the body through death, silence, secrecy, and unproductive sexuality that constitutes a system of knowledge, a metaphysics of presence of male homosexuality. The second chapter considers Luis Cernuda's masterful articulation of homosexual desire through traditional poetic resources such as myth and nature. Their aesthetic manipulation through verbal imagery in Cernuda's poetry produces a series of poetic landscapes that are both the medium and the outcome of an inner sexual exile, which later materializes in geographical space. Finally, the spatial trajectory of this dissertation concludes with the paradigm of social space, the city, as represented in the urban poetics of Jaime Gil de Biedma: the poetic self is seen constituting itself via homoerotic experience in different settings in the city. From domestic space to parks, bars, cafes, and hotel rooms, this urban dynamic of love, desire, and eroticism points to the relevance of the culture of everyday life in the creative process, as well as to a social habitus in direct opposition to the ideological tenets of compulsory heterosexuality. Hence, this dissertation has studied this triumvirate as a group in order to demonstrate how a homosexual and homosocial subjectivity appears inscribed in an aesthetic vision of space.