Queer Spirit In Jose Carlos Somoza's Novels

Spanish writer Jose Carlos Somoza was born on 13rd,Nov,1959 in Havana,Cuba.In 1960,Somoza,who was still less than one year old,moved to Spain with his parents for political reasons.Before he became an writer,he worked as a psychiatrist with expertise in medicine and psychiatry.In 1994,he began to contribute articles.As his maiden work published,he decided to dedicate his life to writing.He,who ventured into novel,drama,movie script and essay,is a multifaceted writer.His major magnum opuses are Silencio de Blanca(1996),La caverna de las ideas(2000),Clara y la penumbra(2001),La caja de marfil(2004),Zigzag(2006),El cebo(2010),La cuarta senal(2014),etc.Thanks to the deep thoughts and creativity,his works have been hot on sale,and were awarded with many literature prizes.Among them,La caverna de las ideas won the Gold Dagger Award which was issued by The Crime Writers'Association(CWA)in UK in 2002.Although his works were highly approved by European readers,not much about this works are studied in Spain,not to mention in China.Therefore,this paper focuses on this neglected field in order to inspire more scholars' to pay attention to this writer and his works.This paper takes Silencio de Blanca,La caverna de las ideas,Clara y la penumbra,El cebo y La cuarta senal as representatives to analyze the queer spirit in five novels according to queer theory of western literary criticism.It is divided into three chapters.The first chapter gives an overview of content and development of the queer theory,as well as some scholars'interpretations of this theory.Teresa de Lauretis coined the term first time.She wished to interpret the multiplicity of sex in their own historical contexts.In addition,French post-structuralism theorist Michel Foucalts' analysis of the inner relationship of knowledge,power and sex is a very important catalyst to queer theory.He stressed that sex,in essence,is structured by society to maintain certain power relations.The theory of gender performativity raised by Judith Butler is another fundamental view of queer theory.She stated that gender is performativity and imitation instead of essence.The second chapter illustrates three main aspects of queer spirit in Somoza's novels.First,by erasing the line between masculinity and femininity in Diagoras and Yasintra,masculinity-feminity duality is deconstructed.Second,by describing the misfortune of Vera and Misaki as well as the carnality of Tramaco,the author broke the duality of heterosextuality and homosextuality.At last,Somoza's novels challenged the traditional culture of homosextuality through focus on transvestism,incest and sadomachism.Silencio de Blanca put emphasis on the predicament of transvestist.El cevo and Clara y la penumbra manifest the prevalent sadomachism in sex.This subverted the traditional highly regulated homosextual picture,and described a more open and diverse sex culture.The third chapter indicates three values of Somoza's novels:flashpoints of fine literature,reflections on humanity and opposition to essentialism and deconstruction of identity politics.To sum up,Somoza's novels fully express queer spirit.The profound thoughts and humanistic care behind queer spirit free his works from the embarrassing "enigma-key"mode of detective novels.In the end,it is clear that this thesis is limited to only one angle to analyze the writer and his work.We believe that more topics will be raised in the future by other scholars.