The Seeing I: Queer Desire in Rosario Ferré's "When Women Love Men".

This essay analyzes how Rosario Ferré's short story "When Women Love Men" (1972) challenges the division between self and other, desire and rejection, and fiction and real life. I engage in a close reading of the narrative double "I" presented in the characters of Isabel la Negra, a historical figure who was a prominent, yet controversial Black business owner from Ponce, Puerto Rico and Isabel Luberza, a fictional character who comes from the white, Eurocentric upper-class sugar aristocracy. I argue that a form of queer desire emerges in the racialized division of each character, as they are presented and described in the short story. Isabel la Negra is excessively sensual, sexual, and feminine, and these characteristics are emphasized in the racialized description of her body. Isabel Luberza is obsessively domestic, desexualized, and subservient to the mandates of her social class. Paradoxically, the narrative emphasis on the racialized dichotomy established between Isabel la Negra and Isabel Luberza opens a space in which each woman's physical body becomes de-essentialized through the linguistic convergence of each narrative voice. This decentralization of the body engenders a space of queer desire and identification. It is in this space of desire that the two women challenge the patriarchal structure of Puerto Rican society in the mid-Twenty century by becoming business partners and owners of an upscale brothel and by narratively merging into one, thereby challenging the strict division among class, race, and gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]