SOURCE: Feal, Geisdorfer Rosemary. “Cristina Peri Rossi and the Erotic Imagination.” In Reinterpretating the Spanish American Essay: Women Writers of the 19th and 20th Centuries, edited by Doris Meyers, pp. 215–26. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Feal argues that Peri Rossi's treatment of the erotic in Fantasías eróticas is unconventional, asserting that the essays break “with traditional notions of that genre.”

New Year's Eve, 1989. She walks through the door at Daniel's, the small, intimate lesbian bar in Barcelona, after being recognized by the scrutinizing eye of the owner, who guards over her business as if it were “a protective womb that frees [the patrons] from outside hostility” (13). So begins the Preamble to Cristina Peri Rossi's volume of essays entitled Fantasías eróticas (Erotic Fantasies, 1991), in which she cultivates the confessional mode, film criticism, commentary on popular culture, literary criticism, and erotic fictions...