The exiled Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas, regarded as a dangerous “counter-revolutionary” by his government, uses alternative sexualities as both means and metaphor of social insurgence. As a writer, he foregrounds traumatic and personalized issues of politics and sexuality–critiquing both communism and capitalism–in order to explicate the meaning of freedom from homosexual and human rights perspectives. This article investigates how Arenas pushes the limits of satire and the absurd as postcolonial strategies for liberating oppressed masculinities. © 2009 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Autobiography Resistance Homo-eroticism Satire Carnivalesque Post-revolution Repression

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