SOURCE: Martin-Clark, Philip. “(Homo)sexual Identities.” In Art, Gender, and Sexuality: New Readings of Cernuda's Later Poetry, pp. 55-73. Leeds, England: Maney Publishing, 2000.

In the following essay, Martin-Clark focuses on themes of sexual orientation in Cernuda's poetry, stressing the concept of a “gender-transitive identity” in the author's later work.

In this chapter, I examine the different and, at times, contradictory discourses through which male same-sex desire is represented in Cernuda's last four books of poetry. Throughout the chapter, I show how Cernuda's later poetry draws on gender-separatist, gender-transitive, universalizing, and minoritizing understandings of sexual relations between men. In highlighting the coexistence of differing discourses of (homo)sexual definition in Cernuda's later poetry, I wish to problematize the unity of the category ‘male homosexuality’ as well as the description of the sexuality found in that poetry as ‘homosexual’. Although I emphasize the limitations of this description, my intention is...