Kiss of the Spider Woman

Manuel Puig (1932-1990) was an Argentine novelist born to middle-class residents of a small Pampas town. Though he would move to Buenos Aires as a young teen, his first experiences of the broader world were the American movies that his mother took him to see (De Robertis, Carolina. “The Art of Queer Liberation: On the Enduring Power of Manuel Puig’s ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman.’” Los Angeles Review of Books, 9 Nov. 2021). This was the “Golden Age” of Hollywood cinema, and the actresses he saw became sources of inspiration for Puig, who would later come out as gay. Alienated from the macho gender norms of his society, Puig identified strongly with femininity throughout his life, sometimes referring to himself as “this woman” (Allan, Jonathan A. “Femininity and Effeminophobia in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 47, no. 3, 2014, pp. 71-87).  

Puig’s love of film would lead him to pursue a career in cinema, but he found little success in Rome, where he studied, and in Buenos Aires. Turning to literature, Puig published his first novel, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, in 1968. The work detailed a boy’s obsession with cinema and reflects Puig’s particular interest in an actress torn between her Hispanic heritage and American culture (Puig would spend much of his life outside his native country) (Wimmer, Natasha. “The Cursi Affair: On Manuel Puig.” The Nation, 21 Apr. 2011). Puig’s most famous work, Kiss of the Spider Woman, was less strictly autobiographical, but his abiding fascination with cinema is evident in the novel’s juxtaposition of movie plots with its main narrative, while Molina’s ambiguous gender identity/orientation mirrors Puig’s own complicated relationship to traditional gender norms. 

Collectively, Puig’s work exists at the crossroads of several movements. It coincided with the Latin American Boom of the 1960s-’70s and displays some of the same interest in postcolonial political themes. Critics have also noted parallels to the New Narrative movement of 1970s-’80s San Francisco—a predominantly queer genre that leaned into subjectivity, experimental form, and an often campy aesthetic. His writing is also sometimes described as pop art, which first emerged in the 1950s and took as its subject matter the kinds of commercialized goods and varieties of entertainment that had not previously been considered “serious” enough for artistic or literary treatment.