“Para que yo pudiera amarte / Virginia Woolf tuvo que escribir Orlando”: Cristina Peri Rossi’s autobiographical writing

Abstract

This article is built around the autobiographical attempts of Uruguayan-Spanish writer Cristina Peri Rossi, who, in 2020, publishes La insumisa, a volume that can be properly called autobiography although her ouvré at large and her poetical works in particular can be seen as unique autobiographical fictions as Peri Rossi’s literary production at large transgresses the boundaries that divide the literary genders to express her vital experience. This work pays attention to the articulation of lesbian desire and love and, in order to do so, departs from the lines that appear in its title establishing a connection, within the “lesbian context,” with other women writers who, in the past and simultaneously, have tried to inscribe in the symbolic language a lesbian desire unnamed until the end of the 19th century. Thus, this essay provides a little incursion into the scientific discourse that builds up narratives such as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) linking this discourse with Cristina Peri Rossi’s autobiographical writing.