The Margin and Gender: Repression and Homoerotic Desire in Five Stories by Julio Ramón Ribeyro

Abstract

This article examines five short stories by Julio Ramón Ribeyro (“Un domingo cualquiera,” “Terra incognita,” “Tristes querellas en la vieja quinta,” “Conversación en el parque,” and “Cosas de machos”) to describe how homoerotic desire is textually configured and how it is captured through regimes of social surveillance. Through comparative close reading, it analyzes subtext, focalization, dialogue, slurs, and ellipses that regulate what can and cannot be said in mid-twentieth-century Peru. The framework brings together gender studies and cultural studies with the epistemology of the closet and theories of hegemonic masculinity. It distinguishes between homoerotic desire (an affective or corporeal excess suggested by the text) and homosexualization (a disciplinary classification imposed by others), thereby avoiding automatic identity attributions. As a transversal hypothesis, the article adopts the poetics of weakening: these stories weaken “strong” assumptions about heterosexuality and manhood by showing that the norm depends on reiteration, suspicion, and punishment in order to sustain itself. Findings indicate that the “margin” operates ambivalently: beaches away from witnesses, peripheral bars, or a provincial barracks enable proximity, yet also concentrate risk and facilitate a return to the monitored space, where transgression is rewritten as guilt or renunciation. Sexual dissent intersects with class and race, so intimacy appears already hierarchized and may become transactional or objectifying. Repression ranges from verbal stigma to institutional dispositifs such as medicalization and confinement. The reading foregrounds an economy of insinuation: desire emerges as possibility, but the plot returns it to the norm through fear. Normality is produced through punishment.