SOURCE: Foster, Timothy. “Transgressions in Literature, Politics, and Gender: Peri Rossi's La nave de los locos.” Confluencia 13, no. 1 (fall 1997): 73–86.

In the following essay, Foster examines Peri Rossi's unconventional narrative strategy in La nave de los locos, focusing on her critiques of sociopolitical and gender issues.

Cristina Peri Rossi's novel, La nave de los locos, questions and proposes transgressions of the seemingly “natural” sex-gender-desire continuum—a cultural matrix through which hegemonic heterosexualist discourse makes itself intelligible: gender follows from a specific sexual configuration and desires the opposite of that assignation.¹ In doing so she reveals the hegemonic prevalence of this sociocultural construction and documents its regulatory effects on the individual. As with all ideological constructions, this continuum of sex-gender-desire that differentiates and confers preference has corollaries on both linguistic and political levels. Language functions through a heterosexualist matrix and the State distributes power and favor along lines of cults...