“Ver salir los barcos”, “nuestra manera particular de cambiar la ley de los hombres”. A non-productive reading of love and writing in Cristina Peri Rossi

Abstract

Taking as a pretext the poem “Los grandes transatlánticos”, from Inmovilidad de los barcos (1997), this article explores the links between love, desire and textuality in Cristina Peri Rossi’s writing, with special emphasis on her short stories. In front of the negative relationships that characterise advanced capitalism (Illouz 2020), parodied in the Uruguayan writer’s most recent work, the article explores some of the ways in which her writing assumes the risk of interpellation and alteration, while resisting three types of productivity: the production of fixed and stable identities from the perspective of gender and desire; the re/production of those two goods that, according to a certain anti-poetic and anti-erotic economy of scarcity and utility, produce sexual and amorous relations (that is, children and orgasms); and that of the self-absorbed identities of the cisheteropatriarchal sex-affective regime.