In Cuir Dissidence, Francesca Dennstedt uses affect and queer feminist theory to rethink the boundaries and hierarchies of the Mexican literary canon. Steeped in ideas of male genius and intrinsic aesthetic quality, the canon has long marginalized women writers by overlooking their contributions or placing their work into literary categories that perpetuate stereotypes about femininity. In response to this history of erasure and neglect, Dennstedt shows how women writers who identify as non-heterosexual or whose work is focused on critique of heteropatriarchal power structures have challenged the very idea of the canon through affect and non-conformity. Over the course of four chapters, she examines how writers like Inés Arredondo, Rosa Maria Roffiel, and Cristina Rivera Garza employ alternative sexual intimacies, gender dissidence, collective authorship, and experimental blending of genres to actively reject the canon. In addition to these creative readings of Mexican women writers, Dennstedt centers her own affective response to these texts to further challenge the traditional boundaries of literary criticism. The book thus prompts readers to see the intellectual project of these writers as a premeditated act of rebellion, one that can help deconstruct the power structures deeply ingrained in Mexican literature written in Spanish and create a space for these voices to flourish across time.

Francesca Dennstedt is an assistant professor of Hispanic studies at the University of Kentucky.

Introduction: The Canon Deception
Chapter One: Fucking with Death and [Not] Yet Cuir: Choking Eroticism through the Work of Inés Arredondo in Complicity with Kati Horna, Leonora Carrington, and Xitlalitl Rodríguez Mendoza
Chapter Two: The Restorative Possibilities of an Archive of Gender Playfulness: Women’s Mustaches and the Third Gender
Chapter Three: Snap, Snap, Snap! Towards an Affective Cuir Method of Literary Critique
Chapter Four: Communal Writings and the Canon Hoax: The Glu-Glu Fear and Other Elegant Emotions
Coda: Acuerpar la lucha
References
Notes