Consuelo Martinez Reyes

Dr Consuelo Martínez Reyes is Lecturer in Spanish and Latin American Studies at Macquarie University. Her work focuses on the representation of gender, sexuality, and national sentiments in Hispanic Caribbean literature and cinema. She is also a writer and translator. She is the editor and translator of Not the Time to Stay: The Unpublished Plays of Víctor Fragoso (2018, Centro Press) and author of the short story collection En blanco (2018, La Pereza), published in English as Blank Canvases (2021, Lazy Press).

She is currently finishing work on a monograph entitled Queer Nenas: Representing Love between Women in the Hispanic Caribbean. Queer Nenas considers the apparent invisibility of lesbianism throughout the literary and cinematic history of the Hispanic Caribbean (Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic), specifically during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and the way in which certain circumstances simultaneously hide, regulate, and allow the expression of what are considered sexual “deviancies.” The text looks at the ways in which alternative female sexualities have been previously silenced or represented only at the symbolic level, and only recently have found a public voice openly identified as ‘lesbian’ in the islands. Therefore, the book aims to present a history of female characters who love women, thus instituting a lesbian literary and filmic canon in the Hispanic Caribbean.

Her next book project, Decolonial Thinking in Contemporary Puerto Rican Literature, analyses how Puerto Rico’s unique position as a colony of the USA is portrayed in contemporary literature from the island. More specifically, how decolonial thinking (Mignolo) comes up as a result of a confrontation with (fictionalized) past events often erased from canonical versions of history. Scholars have already established the links between the political and the sexual in the case of Puerto Rico -homosexuality as a peripheral identity similar to that of separatists (La Fountain-Stokes), for example. This book aims to further explore such connection in issues like feminist theory, polyamory, and female activism, through the question of de/coloniality. Martínez Reyes proposes that the interaction between politics, gender and sexuality serves as a metaphor for the socio-cultural and political violence imposed upon colonized regions. Puerto Rican literature and its depiction of the tense relation between the island and the United States functions as a case study for the way in which neocolonialism affects the development of local political discourses across Latin America and the world.