ABSTRACT
To address, as this book does, portrayals of the formulation of gendered selfhood in female Spanish American development novels, demands engagement with questions of gender and genre epitomized by the dilemma of Cristina Peri Rossi’s character Morris in La nave de los locos. Morris is one of the many marginalized Others that populate Peri Rossi’s narrative, and the episode referred to in the epigraph sees him wishing to publish a book that declines to adhere neatly to accepted generic categories. When required by the publisher’s submission questionnaire to define the nature of his writing, Morris enters into a humorous exchange with the office receptionist that clearly exposes the ties between dominant configurations of gender and genre-a fact all the more evident in the Spanish language because the same word-género-serves for both. When he tells her that he firmly believes his work is androgynous and cannot be categorized according to the options presented, she replies: ‘There are Doctors for such problems… […] You mustn’t worry too much’.1
