Intertextuality and humour as the foundations of Gloria Fuertes' queer poetry

Abstract

This article examines intertextuality as one of the fundamental components of the poetry for adults by the madrilenian writer Gloria Fuertes (1917-1998), as well as its main strategies and manifestations: humour, religiosity, the communicative will, the carnivalesque and failure. In the poetic imagery of this queer author cohabit a christianity sifted by popular culture, marginalised characters, an intense and particular use of humour and parody and an abundant and varied affective landscape. This cohabitation of discourses, subjectivities and texts, the result of an intense intertextuality, gives rise to imaginaries and poetic languages that are inevitably hetedoroxic in her literary production. In this sense, this paper proposes an approach to Fuertes' poetry by understanding the complex and contradictory quality of her spirituality, her humour and her representation of dissident identities as intertexts of her work. As I will argue throughout the different sections, as radically contestatory, dialogic and resistant to rigid canonical classifications, Fuertes' poetry constitutes a queer poetics.