SOURCE: “Pubis Angelical: Where Puig Meets Lacan,” in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 38, No. 1, Fall, 1997, pp. 65-77.

In the following essay, Zimmerman traces the role of Lacanian psychoanalysis in Puig's Pubis Angelical.

Manuel Puig: [C]an people change their eroticism after a certain age? I believe it's almost impossible. Those sexual fantasies have crystallized during adolescence and imprison you forever.

—Ronald Christ, “A Last Interview with Manuel Puig,” 572

Any time we talk about body types, scenarios, or fantasies, we're talking about linguistically structured entities. They may take the form of images in one's mind, but they are at least in part ordered by the signifier, and thus at least potentially signifying and meaningful.

—Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject, 12

On 17 April 1989, at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, Manuel Puig (1932–1990) gave a public reading from his sixth novel, Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages...