Entre las habitaciones y la ocupación de la ciudad: cómo construir la memoria del deseo

Abstract

This article will consider a comparative reading of Habitaciones, by Emma Barradéguy (2020), and Su cuerpo era su gozo, by the Spanish writer Beatriz Gimeno (2005). The former is a work whose literary genre is, to say the least, conflictive. Presented as a novel, it also harbours the characteristics of autofiction and memoir, and it proposes a first-person narrator's journey through the intellectual world and the discovery —and enjoyment— of her desire. On the other hand, Su cuerpo era su gozo is clearly a novel constructed from a third-person narrator who, in turn, configures a narrative from the memory of the protagonist. In this way, the aim of this text is to establish a dialogue between the ways in which both narratives organize and disorganize desire in the detour, as they move in and out of private spaces to traverse, occupy and take over public space. We will pay special attention to the construction of a memory of youth in order to configure desire from the present, taking into account the ways of elaborating the sexual and desiring exploration of childhoods in both novels, also taking into account the socio-political contexts and the particular ideological constructions of each text. The proposal is to highlight the possibilities of resistance of disobedient desire in repressive contexts, and to sustain as a hypothesis that these narratives propose a reorganization of normative desire in terms of destabilising national and heterosexual models.

Keywords: rooms, gender, desire, heterosexuality, deviance.