SOURCE: Levine, Linda Gould. “Cristina Peri Rossi's Gender Project: Rewriting Male Subjectivity and Sexuality in Solitario de amor.” In Latin American Women's Writing: Feminist Readings in Theory and Crisis, edited by Anny Brooksbank Jones and Catherine Davies, pp. 148–62. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Levine considers Peri Rossi's conception of androgyny and her reconfiguration of male identity and sexuality in Solitario de amor.

The writings of Cristina Peri Rossi have long seduced the imagination of the critic in search of transgressive models of gender definitions and sexual roles. Brandishing an allusive and enigmatic literary style, her poetry and prose transport the reader to a metaphorical terrain where phallic power is decentred, sexual multiplicity is suggested, and boundaries of gender and identity are continually collapsed and expanded. Acutely aware of the constraints that fixed definitions place on the subject and well versed in contemporary theories which seek to...