That kind of obscuring has happened with Kiss of the Spider Woman’s legacy, in part because the book encountered commercial success, being adapted into a film and a Broadway musical, and in part because its enshrinement has mostly been framed by a heterosexual literary establishment. It’s true about what we publish now, and also about the works that came before and made our moment possible, even if they’ve been forgotten or have been canonized in a manner that obscures their radical hearts.

Today, in 2021, this remains true, all the more so for marginalized communities and the books that arise from them, that arise from us. For novels wield power through the shaping of worlds. What I hold to be true, in my body and mind, and what I wish to make visible and plain, is that a novel written against the grain of dominant society not only can bring a new voice into being but can also shift the future through the birthing of that voice. They can hold new visions for humanity, deep underneath the narrative, hidden from view, like a woman smuggling subversive blueprints beneath her dress. Novels can be entertainments, of course, but they can also be much more than that. I’d had an experience that, at the time, I could not yet put into words. That had never happened to me with a book before, nor has it happened since. And so, in defiance of the conventions of pre-feminist literary criticism, I will tell you a secret about my own Uruguayan, lesbian, and genderqueer body: the first time I read Kiss of the Spider Woman, years ago, I wept so hard that I could not breathe. There is a subjectivity to reading that runs deep in our bones and can contribute to the depths of our knowing. When I consider its impact on literature and culture within and beyond Latin America, and on readers, including myself, I recall something a lesbian journalist once told me during an interview: I can only read your book with the body I have. Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, the Argentinean masterpiece, does each of these things, but, above all, it does the latter. And then there are seminal works that demand our ongoing attention because the full scope of their resonance, urgency, and vision is only visible once the world has started catching up to what the author bravely and brazenly immortalized on the page. Some offer aesthetic beauty and universal themes that transcend eras and cultures. Some serve as eloquent time capsules, portraying a world now gone.

Kiss of a spider woman book