Fernando Vallejo’s Ruinous Heterotopias: The Queer Subject in Latin America’s Urban Spaces

Abstract

Following the success of the film version of Fernando Vallejo’s 1994 novel Our Lady of the Assassins, directed by Barbet Schroeder, and of his 2001 novel El desbarrancadero, the Colombian writer attained star status in the Spanish-speaking world. However, Vallejo’s prominence did not temper his hostility toward readers or make his work less resistant to simple readings. On the contrary, the celebration of his best-known novels only highlighted the ironies underlying his narrative technique. Vallejo likes to appeal to readers’ nostalgia, and then reveals that the past they long for is no less ruinous than the present they lament. He seduces readers with the images that Western modernity uses to discipline society—such as that of the noted author or the public intellectual—only to subject them to insult for their complicity in upholding that order, which excludes or marginalizes nonhegemonic subjects. Thus, in Vallejo’s texts, what I call a ruinous heterotopia ultimately undermines nostalgic Westernizing myths of origin, and “home.”