Lo extraño del animal. Towards a Queer Ecology in Olvido García Valdés's Poetry

Abstract

The poetry of Olvido García Valdés has been studied in opposition to patriarchal discourse. Indeed, the poet says that she writes "radically in feminine". The grammar of gender supposes, in this sense, a privileged locus of emission of the poetic speech. However, the affective dialogue with nature, a crucial element in the Valdesian poetics of strangeness, destabilizes sexual integrity in the poetic subjectivity. This argument is grounded in a methodology that juxtaposes the transformational power of emotional/affective energy accumulated in the poem, with the spatial form of a queer ecology that manifests the existential continuity between the self and a gender neutral other. In the poetry of García Valdés, the representation of the affective dynamism of the body in language exceeds the grammatical constitution of its own limits, a textual excess that results in questioning the discursive coherence of the sexual experience in the poem.