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Łukasz Smuga (res.)
This article offers a new reading of Luisgé Martín's autobiography El amor del revés (2016) through the lens of affect theory, building on the writings of the American psychologist Silvan Tomkins and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's work on shame and periperformative utterances. A methodological framework proposed by the Polish queer theorist Tomasz Basiuk is used here to compare the configurations of shame in Martín's autobiography with the rhetorical strategies in American gay men's life writings. Performances of shame are foregrounded in the analysis as a salient feature of El amor del revés, in order to argue that they serve as a means to overcome the homophobia internalized by the generations of men who grew up in Spain under Franco's dictatorship. Borrowing Basiuk's key deconstructionist concept, exposure, which conveys the risk taken by gay authors in their autobiographical texts, I posit that Martín writes socially engaged literature, and that in doing so he relies on the coming-out narrative model typical for gay autobiographies to tell the story of his life. Yet he uses rhetorical strategies that reveal the constructedness of the story and of his sexual identity.
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