Pornoterrorism: Antisocial Dykes in the Spanish Transfeminist Movement

Abstract

This article examines Pornoterrorismo (2011), written by Spanish transfeminist poet and performer Diana J. Torres. In this book, the author mixes autobiographical details with personal reflections that have motivated her work and includes a selection of pornoterrorista poetry. Through a close reading of the narrative and poetic voice, this essay shows how Pornoterrorismo constructs a transfeminist discourse of radical negativity based on the discursive figure of the dyke as a fractured, monstrous subject that ultimately expands the realm of queer negativity. First, I focus on how Torres explores the symbolic potential of dyke sexual practices throughout her narrative in order to challenge some of the underlaying assumptions in the original formulations of the antisocial thesis in queer theory originally elaborated by Lee Edelman and Leo Bersani. I will show how the dyke practices that Torres stages and that she describes in detail reveal the gender bias that marks the original theorization of the antisocial turn in queer theory. Second, I propose queer terrorism as a radical antisocial politics of transfeminist negativity. Here, I argue that there is an affective connection between Torres’s performance with the material effects of terrorism that would be, precisely, that of provoking terror in a heteronormative society. Through the affective violence that is given off through her autobiographical account until the adoption of her artistic name, as well as a detailed analysis of her poem «Hijxs de puta» [Kids of Bitches], I will show how queer terrorism shapes the pornoterrorista answer to the attacks of a heteronormative society. Ultimately, this article aims to contribute to the study and delimitation of a transfeminist literary corpus written by its protagonists —texts that share a legitimization of life experience with a broadening, adaptation, or reinterpretation of feminist queer theory, situated in the contemporary Spanish context.