Queer Exposures: Roberto Bolaño, Sexuality, and Photography

Please join us for the second LACUSL Speakers Series of the 2021-2022 academic year.

Queer Exposures: Roberto Bolaño, Sexuality, and Photography

Dr. Ryan Long, Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Maryland

Tuesday, November 16th, 3:30 p.m.
Via Zoom. Register in advance here.

Queer sexuality and photography disturb linear temporalities such as normative social development and the subordination of the past to the present. Close readings of selected novels, short stories, and poems by Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003), demonstrate that queerness and photography also disturb linear conceptions of an author’s trajectory. The political context that influenced Bolaño’s career underscores the significance of these and other temporal disturbances. Especially salient are the defeat of militant leftism, writ large in Bolaño’s work as the “Revolution,” and the ascendency of neoliberalism. My presentation exposes Bolaño’s texts to one another by emphasizing queer characters and photographic imagery, including ekphrases of actual and invented photographs. I propose that this methodology of exposure establishes temporalities within and among Bolaño’s texts that suggest a persistently critical simultaneity, a sense of time and place that refuses teleological domestication.