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In 2009, a full three years before Tinder would popularize the "swipe," Grindr debuted as the world's first geosocial dating app for men. Since then, mobile dating has become immensely popular, particularly for so-called "thin markets" such as the LGBTIQ population. A novel like Alberto Fuguet's Sudor (2016), with its frequent WhatsApp conversations, emails, and Grindr exchanges, invites critical reflection on how these new communications technologies might change the stories we tell about modern intimacy, and how a novel itself can be a technology of connection. The gay characters who populate Sudor take their cues from the narrator's cell phone, by far the most frequently caressed entity in this 600-page novel about mediated connections and the decadence of the publishing industry in the Internet age.1 While it may be true that, as the narrator asserts, "Grindr no es para seducir con conversaciones eternas y complicidades literarias," this article sets out to argue that Grindr provides the necessary means for Sudor to create complicit readers (224). That is, this Grindr narrative precipitates readers who are both attendant to and participative in heretofore unmentionable intimacy.
Throughout this article, I analyze how Alberto Fuguet's Sudor serves as a useful case study for considering how a novel in 2017 might function as a technology of posthuman intimacy. We can think of posthuman as a way of understanding the irreversibly connected relationship that our species has with a natural world rapidly being reshaped by technical interventions. Under this new rubric, the concept of the human stops signifying a discrete, material entity. Instead, the posthuman accounts for the shared subjectivity between the human and the non-human, an assemblage (in the words of Deleuze and Guattari). Following the ground-breaking work of Donna Haraway in cyborg studies and the more recent contributions of new materialists like Rosi Braidotti and Bruno Latour, we can productively study so-called human phenomena by paying more attention to the non-human entities -organic or inorganic-around us. For our purposes, we find that human intimacy becomes morethan-human as we consider the many ways intimacy has been catalyzed and mediated vis-å-vis online dating. Within this posthuman configuration, a literary analysis of intimacy enables us to study how characters exercise sexual desire and achieve sexual satisfaction in a way that accounts for the many mediations of this human-non-human assemblage. It also allows us to consider where the novel and reader fit into this very same assemblage.
In 2009, a full three years before Tinder would popularize the "swipe," Grindr debuted as the world's first geosocial dating app for men. Since then, mobile dating has become immensely popular, particularly for so-called "thin markets" such as the LGBTIQ population. A novel like Alberto Fuguet's Sudor (2016), with its frequent WhatsApp conversations, emails, and Grindr exchanges, invites critical reflection on how these new communications technologies might change the stories we tell about modern intimacy, and how a novel itself can be a technology of connection. The gay characters who populate Sudor take their cues from the narrator's cell phone, by far the most frequently caressed entity in this 600-page novel about mediated connections and the decadence of the publishing industry in the Internet age.1 While it may be true that, as the narrator asserts, "Grindr no es para seducir con conversaciones eternas y complicidades literarias," this article sets out to argue that Grindr provides the necessary means for Sudor to create complicit readers (224). That is, this Grindr narrative precipitates readers who are both attendant to and participative in heretofore unmentionable intimacy.
Throughout this article, I analyze how Alberto Fuguet's Sudor serves as a useful case study for considering how a novel in 2017 might function as a technology of posthuman intimacy. We can think of posthuman as a way of understanding the irreversibly connected relationship that our species has with a natural world rapidly being reshaped by technical interventions. Under this new rubric, the concept of the human stops signifying a discrete, material entity. Instead, the posthuman accounts for the shared subjectivity between the human and the non-human, an assemblage (in the words of Deleuze and Guattari). Following the ground-breaking work of Donna Haraway in cyborg studies and the more recent contributions of new materialists like Rosi Braidotti and Bruno Latour, we can productively study so-called human phenomena by paying more attention to the non-human entities -organic or inorganic-around us. For our purposes, we find that human intimacy becomes morethan-human as we consider the many ways intimacy has been catalyzed and mediated vis-å-vis online dating. Within this posthuman configuration, a literary analysis of intimacy enables us to study how characters exercise sexual desire and achieve sexual satisfaction in a way that accounts for the many mediations of this human-non-human assemblage. It also allows us to consider where the novel and reader fit into this very same assemblage.
Fuguet's novel operates as a creative reflection of how Internet applications are changing the way people find and connect with each other, but the novel also functions as a technology of intimacy itself, striving to situate and seduce its own readers into a kind of intimate complicity. This perspective on readerly complicity has been greatly informed by Rita Felski's research on mimesis in The Uses of Literature (2009). Felski describes mimesis as a form of deep intersubjectivity (a term originally coined by George Butte), wherein representation also becomes an invitation: "Literary redescriptions engage us not simply because they are surprising or seductive, but also because they can augment our understanding of how things are" (Felski 86). Using Felski's elaboration of deep intersubjectivity, I suggest that the epistolary form of Sudor, with echoes of the efficient and clipped jargon of online erotic communiqué, makes the novel adept at creating this complicity. In Lauren Berlant's introduction to a special issue on intimacy for Critical Inquiry, Beriant writes, "To intimate is to communicate with the sparest of signs and gestures [...] But intimacy also involves an aspiration for a narrative about something shared, a story about both oneself and others that will turn out in a particular way" (281). One key revelation of Sudor is that, at least within fiction, the Internet can make us more intimate beings, if we understand intimacy as a narrative of shared understanding and shared experience.
I begin my analysis by describing how Fuguet's novel leverages global communications platforms such as text messaging, social media, and geosocial dating applications to approximate the dating rituals of a local gay milieu. In particular, I argue that the integration of Grindr into the plane of the novel affects Sudor in three key ways: the spatiality of the novel becomes a hybrid of offline and online proximities; the character population grows larger and unavoidably more diverse; and the narration assumes the back-and-forth exchange of Web 2.0's voyeurism and exhibitionism. Fuguet's omnipresent gay characters and the explicit intimacy they share makeunsustainable the queer reading practices traditionally enacted within Chilean gay literary criticism, which has up until now relied on LGBTIQ characters speaking from a position of marginality. Fuguet's characters are the ones on the inside, and his narrator has asked us to join. The article proposes that the radical integration of Grindr into the narrative transforms the novel into a site of gay insight and a source of accessible, erotic affect. As such, the article investigates how the novel, as a medium of intimacy, shares necessary know-how and invites readerly participation in this gay, mediated world. The result is an informed, visceral reading experience that creates a pact of complicity between readers and characters traditionally positioned as "other."
A Grindr Narrative
First published in Santiago in April 2016 by Random House, Sudor is narrated by a gay editor named Alf who wants to publish the works of a now-deceased poet and photographer named Rafa. To generate public intrigue in Rafa's work, Alf sets himself to the task of writing a non-fiction account about how Rafa met Alf, seduced Alf, and then died three days later from complications of hemophilia. The action takes place over four days and three nights when Rafa and his father are in Santiago to promote a book of Rafa's photographs, which his father has captioned. Alfaguara has published this extravagant book, "el equivalente a una mamada literaria" according to Alf, to placate Rafa's father, one of Alfaguara's most famous authors (89).2 Despite detesting the book, Alf ends up taking charge of Rafa's Santiago visit, and over the next seventy-two hours, Alf chaperones Rafa as they explore starkly different scenes of Santiago's gay life, including high-class hotel bars, bath houses, and street prostitution. Sudor's story are ends at Club Illuminati, a glitzy gay club in the Bellavista neighborhood of Santiago. There, the twenty-four-year old Rafa slips on a spilled drink and collides with a column on his way to the ground. He bleeds out in minutes as young men dance around him, unaware of the impending disaster. The novel closes with an epilogue in which Rafa's legacy begins to take shape: an Instagrammed photo of Rafa dying announces his well-dressed death, and an obituary, written by his father, cleanses Rafa's life story of many taboo truths. What we read in Sudor is Alf's much less sanitized version of events.
The misadventures of Alf and Rafa take place in 2013 in the capital city of Santiago, home to about 40% of Chile's population. Internet use is on the rise in Santiago, where, according to the Pew Research Center, over 65% of its residents used the Internet in 2013, and close to 40% owned a smartphone ("Emerging Nations"). In comparison with user data from other countries, Chile remains one of the most technologically advanced countries in South America. Globally, Chileans are also some of the most robust users of WhatsApp Messenger, a cross-platform instant messaging application for smartphones; one study from 2015 finds that over 80% of Chilean smartphone owners use WhatsApp, twice the global average (González Isla). This context is important for appreciating the style and form of Fugueťs novel, which prominently features the terse vernacular typically communicated via instant messaging. Sudor's narrator frequently captures Santiago's technophilic milieu, describing the digitally networked lifestyle of "la gente conectada" as festive yet frenzied, empowering but also enslaving.3 These qualifiers also serve to describe the digital timbre of the novel, whose plot, style, and character development repercuss the pace, argot, and constant allure of staying connected.
With Sudor, Fuguet joins other authors in Latin America and beyond who experiment with new forms of epistolary writing sourced from technological advances in communication.4 In the field of Spanish-American narrative, the contemporary archive I have curated includes Daniel Link's La ansiedad: novela trash (2004), a collage of emails, chat room conversations, and medical charts that collectively recount how gay chat rooms disrupt one couple's stability; Alejandro López's highly experimental Kérés cojer? = guan tu fak (2005), which explores how text messaging, digital translators, and emails help a transgender sex worker procure clients and stay in touch with loved ones; and Edmundo Paz Soldán's El delirio de Turing (2003), in which "hacktivists" struggling to locate a site for activism offline log onto a virtual space to network and have cyber sex. More recent notable works include Las citas by Sebastián Flemaiz (2016), a short novel about a series of Facebook flings, and other narratives published digitally, such as "Tuitnovela" by Colombian Héctor Abad Faciolince (2013). Like his contemporaries, Fuguet integrates transcripts from present-day communications technology right into the plane of the narrative; however, one factor makes Sudor truly unique. Both the virtual and physical spaces depicted in the novel are gay friendly, a point central to my argument. The use of Grindr allows Fugueťs novel to cohere in a hybrid space-public and private, virtual and real-that allows for around-the-clock gay intimacy.
When Grindr was fist released, it marked the forefront of geosocial networking apps. Today, around six million men currently use Grindr in nearly 200 countries ("Mobile App Analytics"). Similar dating applications such as GROWLr ("The Gay Bear Social Network"), Tinder ("Any swipe can change your life") and Her ("Made for LGBTIQ women, by LGBTIQ women") have also become popular, though Grindr still remains one of the most prominent dating apps on the market, and certainly the most popular among gay men in Santiago. While Grindr has facilitated many first encounters in Santiago, it is important to qualify its impact on gay santiaguinos by pointing out that Santiago has many gay-friendly spaces, where men can and have been socializing since long before Grindr's debut in Chile. These sites-gay clubs, bathhouses, particular blocks and street corners, bookstores, cultural centers, even individual apartment complexes, etc.-remain of utmost importance for the livelihood of Santiago's thriving gay communities. When used in these places, Grindr becomes more of an icebreaker for meet-and-greets than an essential filter for locating other gay men. Outside of these places, however, Grindr facilitates cruising in otherwise overtly heterosexual environments. In Sudor, this geographic flexibility affords the novel's characters maximum agility when finding the next tryst. (In fact, the most important encuentro in the novel occurs as Rafa is using the restroom in Alfaguara's office building. Rafa opens Grindr and locates the unsuspecting Alf mere steps away.) As Sudor's narrator observes, Grindr makes it possible to spend any moment "on the hunt," no matter where he is in Santiago.
Sudors innovative setting-a posthuman space that overlays the virtual expanse of cyberspace with a highly recognizable Santiago cityscape-transforms how characters experience the space of Santiago. As a mechanism that affects setting, Grindr reconfigures the spatial relationship between proximity and presence without requiring a change of scenery. Were it not for Grindr, Alf would constantly have to move from one place to the next to encounter the quantity and diversity of characters present in Sudor. Described by Alf as a kind of superpower, Grindr allows Alf to traverse space virtually and "see through concrete and clothing" without leaving bed (160). Indeed, the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio has characterized the "ubiquity, instantaneity, and immediacy" fostered by the phenomenon of cyberspace as nothing short of "divine" (Virilio 36). This augmented reality-let's call it Sudor's enhanced "gaydar"-normalizes the presence of gays everywhere in Santiago, locating them without ghettoizing gay desire. For, as Lauren Beriant argues, the drive toward intimacy "can be portable, unattached to a concrete space: a drive that creates spaces around it through practices" (284). With this enhanced sense of presence, gay characters become as omnipresent as their heterosexual counterparts: "Donde ibas, estaban, al menos digitalmente, mandando señales de humo desde el teléfono" (Fuguet 160). In the same way that Grindr makes apparent men who have been traditionally forced into the shadows, this novel reveals a vibrant, variegated community previously out of the purview of Chilean literature.
At the same time, apps like Grindr allow for a degree of anonymous intimacy-no need to use a face shot in your profile or use a real name-and enable users to experiment with discretion. Because an active Grindr profile is enough to identify any user as a man interested in other men, Grindr also in effect eases pressures to adhere to fashions or trends that would homonormatively make one recognizable as gay. For example, one character in Sudor named Renato, who according to the narrator has none of the outward characteristics or mannerisms that would normally signal being part of the gay community, is still readily recognizable on the narrator's Grindr feed. As such, Grindr helps Fuguet's narrative see beyond trite tropes and gay stereotypes. Below, I identify additional ways that Grindr affects character presentation and development in the novel.
One of Sudor's potentially biggest contributions to Chilean literature, and to Latin American literature more broadly, is its ambitious portrayal of the diversity of Santiago's gay population. Fuguet's narrative assembles a multitude of gay characters tenuously affiliated by only two common attributes: a desire for other men and the possession of a smartphone. The incorporation of Grindr into the novel's structure is central to achieving this breadth of characters. The narrator's recurrent use of the location-based social networking app functions as a narrative filter that attenuates the presence of non-gay santiaguinos and catalyzes the rapid and prolific introduction of gay characters. What's more, all of these "Grindr characters" are outside the usual circumference of Alf's social circles (since he prophylactically blocks neighbors and co-workers). As Alf browses through profiles, Fuguet introduces men with different ethnicities, body types, age groups, drug habits, gender expressions, educational attainments, social classes, experience levels, willingness to being "out," and, most obviously, sexual proclivities. These characters then percolate through Alf's dating criteria, and enter or exit the novel accordingly. As Alf serves as a nodal character in this literary social network, the novel's epistolary form structurally reinforces the diversity of its character system.
Thanks to the culturally accepted practice of liberally applying Grindr's "blocking" feature, potential Grindr characters exit the narrative as quickly as the enter, allowing others to appear. As such, one could argue that the novel's character development suffers from one of Grindr's oftcritiqued downsides: quantity over quality. Indeed, the novel is overpopulated, with more characters than are required to carry out the plot's essential movements. Moreover, most of the characters Alf meets via Grindr are minimally described and remain ambiguously named ("¿Franco? ¿Francisco? ¿Fabián?") (181). The novel captures well the density of mediated interactions in social media, which sociologist Sherry Turkle would say is so overwhelming that it degrades our ability to relate to one another.5 The plenitude of irrelevant others in Alf's virtual world means that so many of these will never become significant others. Taken on its own terms, however, Sudor illustrates an impressionistic mosaic of Santiago's gay sexual landscape. The aesthetic value can be found in the plurality of coalesced brushstrokes. The result is a narrative propelled by erotic conversations and salacious rendezvous with a greater variety of characters than readers might find in a more "analog" plot, even a so-called gay one.
Mainstream Gays
Perhaps more than any other author from Latin America, Fuguet's name connotes an embrace of globalized consumer culture and technological advancement. His debut and still best known novel, Mala onda (1991), portrays the influence of U.S. pop culture and consumerism on its seventeen-year-old, upper-class protagonist. As co-editor of McOndo (1996) with Sergio Gómez, Fuguet joined other authors seeking creative license to depart from the stultifying literary expectations left in the wake of the Latin American Boom, including elements of magical realism and folkloric provincialism.6 While many critics dismissed (and continue to discount) McOndo productions as a sold-out, wannabe literature more interested in celebrating neoliberal consumption patterns than promoting democratic freedoms in a post-dictatorship Latin America, two decades later it must be said that the McOndo anthology encouraged a literary movement, however manufactured, that seeks to explore the influence of economic and technological development in supposedly 'underdeveloped' countries.7 The most provocative parallel I find between that early prologue in the McOndo collection and Fuguet's most recent novel over twenty years later is an unwillingness to accept the mantel of exotification. Like the characters in some of his earliest works, those in Sudor pertain to the middle and upper classes of Chilean society, making them anti-heroes of the Chilean left. Being neoliberal gays, as one of the characters self-identifies, also makes them anti-heroes to queer literary scholarship.
The growing numbers of Latin Americanists who write about queer attributes in particular Latin American works, including pioneers David William Foster and Gabriel Giorgi, have traditionally flagged these texts for their unique perspective on sexuality, or on marginality more generally. As Foster put it in his seminal 1991 book, "homosexual characters tend to be the locus of both social alienation and authoritarian repression" (2). Meanwhile, Giorgi describes the practice of reading homosexuality in 1960s Latin American literature as deciphering coded texts from the closet. Such reading practices create a pact between author and reader "'to represent without naming,' to give form and story to the homosexual secret, almost always defined in terms of abjection" (Giorgi 244). This tendency within criticism to search for lo queer-with heightened sensitivities to destabilizing or coded language, transgressive or eccentric characteristics, and hidden, "closeted" meanings-has propagated a reading practice that situates these narratives as tales of the encrypted other, which must be decoded. And yet, applied to Sudor, such a reading practice would seem unwarranted, if not outdated.8 What happens to queer literary criticism when the presence of queer desire within literature approaches the near-divine ubiquity, instantaneity, and immediacy of cyberspace?
Since the novel appeared last April, readers have dubbed it Fuguet's big gay novel. But this isn't just a novel about gay men. As a columnist in The Clinic writes, it'd be akin to saying Moby Dick is a book about whales (Edwards). I read Sudor as a broader commentary, using gays as a sample population, about the nature of intimacy in a digitally connected world. Drawing neat and potent parallels between the queers of literature and cognate marginalized characters suffering from poverty, disability, and other intersectional qualities that have historically disenfranchised bodies and voices has left little space for considering how the behaviors and contributions of queer communities shape and participate in mainstream culture. As we carve out a space for subaltern literature in Latin American literary studies, we must leave room for mainstream gays, including Fuguet's middle class, white, smartphone-carrying types that chase after hegemonic masculinity in their daily beauty routines. The approach I here offer is to study Fuguet's novel without overdetermining the "otherness" of its gay characters.
Because it doesn't marginalize its characters, Sudor marks a strong departure from the work of Chile's best-known queer authors, including the late Pedro Lemebel. Lemebel's work tirelessly reclaimed the language of queer humiliation to call attention to the ways that difference is denigrated in Chile. Almost thirty years after Lemebel first strutted into a meeting of Chilean leftists wearing high heels to read "Manifiesto: Flablo por mi diferencia," Fuguet has published a novel whose gender-normative, affluent gay characters lead a comfortable lifestyle by denying difference. Lemebel's esteemed oeuvre, by contrast, consistently chronicles the margins of Chilean society with a Marxist, genderqueer perspective that calls attention to poverty, employment discrimination, transphobic violence, and other forms of oppression against Chile's sexual minorities. Sudor is clearly at odds with this literary legacy.
Moreover, when Sudor's does engage queer thought, it does so only to reject it as an overly intellectual, imported politic pretending to be more destitute than it is. in the words of one character, "Para ese tipo de intelectuales latinos de Nueva York queer implica ser travesti de Lo Hermida o, mejor, de Çalama, y además ser aymara. Si usas zapatos sin tacos, cagaste: eres maraco pero nunca serás queer, hueón" (212). This last clause ("You're a fag but you'll never be queer, dude") positions queemess as an exclusive identity that can only be claimed by certain gays-those whose gender presentation, race, and geographic origins align with historically marginalized subject positions. Far from the inclusive, "umbrella" term some tout it to be, for Fuguet's character, queer cachet is rooted in exclusivity.
There are stark parallels between how this character criticizes queer identity politics for clinging to marginality and the way that Fuguet criticized the publishing industry in the 1990s for imploring Latin American authors to write from a position of marginality. Unlike some of the bestknown gay characters in Latin American literature, Fuguet's main characters knowingly speak and act from a place of privilege-to maintain that privilege. Fuguet's homonormative gay characters (abajistas at best) do not speak for the sexually or economically oppressed. Alf, for instance, is unapologetic about his predilections for conventionally attractive, urban white men who share his privileged social position. When he does sleep with younger, less established guys--flaites, as Alf sometimes pejoratively calls them-he does so with condescending attitudes of exploitative dominance. While the novel provides impressive coverage of Santiago's gay population, it does not pretend to satisfy any diversity initiative. That is, Alf is not interested in crafting a queer narrative that urges equality for all genders, races, social classes, and abilities. Alf is the type of character who once meets up with a man from Grindr, and upon discovering the man is deaf, promptly leaves the date. He openly admits to misogynist leanings, and his machismo stinks of transphobia. In sum, Fuguet deliberately writes against the script of subaltemity by associating his characters with mainstream consumer culture rather than subculture. No longer considered other by default, the same-sex intimacy portrayed in Sudor becomes more readily recognizable, even relatable, as we contemplate the many ways that digital technology mediates contemporary relationships, sexual or otherwise.
Many readers will justifiably be alarmed by the sentiments expressed by some of Fuguet's characters, especially now that Lemebel is no longer around to maintain a counter-discourse. Will neoliberal gayness be the direction of post-Lemebel literature in Chile? I argue that Fuguet's work warrants another look, particularly by readers who continue to ensure that Lemebel's important legacy remains relevant. For, as Rita Felski wisely writes in Uses of Literature (2009), "That literary works yield limited perspectives does not prevent them from also serving as sources of epistemic insight" (84). In a backhanded fashion, Fuguet's novel looks beyond the unifying ideals of the concept "LGBTIQ"-an ideology that seeks to unite diverse communities together into one movement-to lodge a revelatory critique about the inequalities within that umbrella term.9 Much in the way Fuguet once argued that being Chilean fails to credential him as a mouthpiece for rural Latin America, Sudor's narrator maintains that being gay isn't sufficient qualifications to write about "el mundo marginal." As such, the novel requires readers to approach oppression with greater sensitivity to intersectional experiences-an undertaking Lemebel himself so resoundingly supported.
Fuguet's characters may be the first anti-heroes of gay Chilean literature. Rarely if ever have we seen in Chile-or in Latin America for that matter-such affluent, even snobbish gay characters occupy positions of power rather than of precarity. Perhaps it's time we had such compelling and imperfect gay protagonists. Besides, there are so many gay characters in this novel that being gay ceases to be an identifying or even interesting character trait. I find Fuguet's characters to be groundbreaking precisely because many of them remain so unimpressively mainstream. They drink Red Bull and listen to Bose headphones. They frequent Santiago's many conventional businesses, including Emporio La Rosa, Mr. Jack (the one in Patio Bellavista), OK Market, Easy, and Jumbo. Sure, they also visit gay bars like Bunker and Club Soda, but Sudor makes the case that gay sociality now extends far beyond these traditionally "safe"-and segregated-spaces for gays.
Creating a Complicit Reader
Far from a coming out narrative, Sudor is an invitation to come in. The remaining portion of this article zooms out (to use a technical metaphor) to consider how a novel in 2017 can itself be a technology of intimacy. The narrator's frenetic references to gay bodies in various states of sexual arousal make complicity available as an aesthetic relation-one that licenses a transfer of arousal from object to beholder, or from narrator to reader. This novel proffers both exposure to gay desire and gay sexual norms as well as a summons to participate, at least vicariously.
In her book Alone Together (2011), Sherry Turkle argues that our use of technology has made us less social individuals. Turkle identifies mediated connections, depreciation of privacy, and dependence on instantaneous gratification via technology as symptoms of what she sees as humanity's eroding expectations for interpersonal intimacy. Concerned that bite-sized conversations over the Internet prevent us from learning deeply about each other, she argues that technology is "taking us places we don't want to go." In fact, the novel Sudor incorporates technology and all of these symptoms to do just that-to take readers to a place they traditionally have not wanted to go. Alberto Fuguet's Sudor leaves decorum behind to lead us nose-deep into the steamy, gay sex scenes of Santiago's digitally connected streets.
Like much of Lemebel's work, this well lubricated novel trespasses many rules of literary decorum. Sudor achieves a level of gay sexual explicitness never before seen on the pages of Random House Chile. In Sudor, readers find minute details about how semen dries in a character's pubic hair, how one's fingers smell hours after entering another's rectum, and in what state the narrator finds his own crotch over the course of several days in a heat wave. The novel's details are so minute and so sensual that the narration brings the reader into extremely close proximity with its characters, settings, and events. This proximity, coupled with the narrator's extensive commentary, creates a shared and actionable knowledge base-what I have been calling complicity-for readers from all sexual backgrounds. Below, 1 outline the novel's three modes of forging complicity: narrative participant observation, immersive gay education, and pornographic imagery.
Sudor's frame story, which comprises Part I and the Epilogue, elucidates Alf's motivations and strategies for writing about his brief affair with Rafa. His objective in writing this book (which shares the same name-"Sudor"-as the novel) is to bring greater notoriety to Rafa so that when Alf later publishes Rafa's photography and poetry, this corpus will already have a critical mass of interested consumers: "Sin mito y sin deseo, esos poemas no se leen tan bien. Parte de la misión de un editor es lograr que su autor sea deseado. O mejor aún: follado" (33). Alf carries out his selfappointed duties as Rafa's posthumous editor by writing a book that will call attention to Rafa's sexual desirability, trafficking Rafa as a textual object for future readers. The book, in a metafictional respect, is a marketing tool.
One of Alf's key concerns is how active to be in telling this narrative of seduction: "¿Cómo puedo narrar sin participar del todo? ¿Cómo puedo ser, digamos, pasivo y a la vez activo? O quizás lo adecuado-lo natural-es ser versátil. Moderno. Y piola, claro" (15). This tongue-in-cheek commentary on being "passive" or "active"-a choice stereotypically associated with gay men- couples the act of narrating with the act of sex. Alf implicitly associates sexual positioning with narrative practice: a passive, third-person narrative voice versus an active, first-person one.10 Eschewing traditional stereotypes of gay men as always tops or bottoms but rarely both, Alf slips in and out of first-person narration throughout Part II, often without any break in the page or noticeable change in events. His vertiginous narrative voice, so clearly identifiable in coupled, nearly repeated lines with alternating subjects, is the product of an editor-tumed-author whose original vocation repeatedly resurfaces. As an editor, Alf serves initially not as an agent of Rafa's narrative but as an audience for it. Yet, it is precisely in that audience role that he is eventually precipitated into the very heart of its action. Alf's character is repurposed-first an observer, then a vital participant-with the hope that the text will cause the same to happen to the reader.
As Alf writes himself into and out of focus, his writing also mirrors the give-and-take of online prosumerism.11 His narrative voice formally captures the spirit of an Internet barter culture that, since the dawn of Web 2.0 in the 1990s, has urged voyeurs to become exhibitionists. Smartphones have potentiated platforms that facilitate viewing and sharing personal information online (what Alf calls "la tropa de incontinentes verbales"). Today, men on Grindr use the application to consume potential companions (thus, the moniker "feed" that designates the panel of frequently updated profiles of available men) and, in turn, produce the very commodity that Grindr tenders. I argue that by employing different narrative voices, Alf models the easy transition from following someone else's story to making that narrative a part of one's own. Complicity, writes Alf, is achieved when readers sense and share in the "obsession" an author has with his subject (94). Though readers may follow him with "pudor y asco y un innegable morbo voyeurístico y quizás algo de superioridad," they keep turning the page (105). Given Alf's motivations to make his protagonist appear desirable to readers, it is no stretch to surmise that Sudor encourages horny reading habits and conditions readers to be both passive (in their reception of the text) and active (in their response to it).
The second mode of complicity at work in the novel is its efforts to generate consciousness about the cultural norms of Santiago's contemporary gay dating scene. As Alf critiques online dating profiles throughout the text, his editorializing exposes the reader to the etiquette and vernacular of Internet-mediated dating. The effect is similar to Felski's description of "deep intersubjectivity," usefully operationalized by Felski as a "literary rendering of the way worlds create selves, and how selves perceive and react to worlds made up of other selves" (91). Remarking on Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, Felski argues that the novel "does not just depict a network of social discriminations and judgments, it also enfolds readers, through its inculcation of countless examples, into an experiential familiarity with the logic of such judgments, with what we might call a feel for the game" (92). Alf's perfunctory and even compulsive browsing through Grindr profiles, an act which seems entirely superficial, takes the reader deep into determining patterns of interpersonal attraction and learning rules of engagement. Fuguet has instrumentalized a globally popular cellular application to shed light on the local idiosyncrasies of digitally-networked gay courtship, including what to wear in your profile picture, what slang to use in a text message, and where to go on a first date. Fie even provides insights on how to decorate your apartment, depending on what kind of gay santiaguino you want to attract. After reading dozens of profile descriptions, Alf's reactions to them, and ensuing conversations over instant messaging, the reader finishes Sudor with an actionable education.
Moreover, Alf's categorization of Grindr users (i.e. pendejo, gym queen, power bottom, lumbersexual, etc.) gives readers a feel for the layered taxonomy of gay identifiers. The novel also remarks on the prestige of each of these categories within the social circles inhabited by Fuguet's characters. By way of example, Alf's friend and eventual editor, Puga, complains to Alf about being perceived as bisexual, not because of any inaccuracy but because he claims it's so "90's" (205). Other identifiers are mentioned quickly in passing, without much guidance for unprepared readers. Consider, for example, how Alf describes Renato, a hairy young man who remains ignorant about these various classifications and the mannerisms and appearances associated with them: "Tildarlo de osito sería un error porque no tiene ni la más puta idea de lo que es un oso, un otter, un cub, un chaser" (124). The strong language used in describing Renato's obliviousness is likely to call attention to any lack of gay literacy on the part of the reader as well, prompting the reader to look for contextual clues (there are none) or seek outside guidance.12
What is remarkable about Sudor is that while it occasionally pauses to explain, the novel assumes an ideal reader who is not only gay (like Renato), but also well versed in gay vocabularies. As is typical of most of Fuguet's fiction, Sudor makes full use of the youthful street slang of Santiago, but because the majority of the novel's major and minor characters are gay, Sudor is notable in Fuguet's oeuvre for its use of slang associated with Santiago's gay communities (e.g. huevona, fleto, derretir el helado, quemar el arroz, etc). Sudor's unprecedented discussion of masculine anatomy, gay sex, and gay sexual desire in more or less mainstream Latin American literature even pushes the limits of existing sexually explicit vocabulary in the Spanish language.13 Andrew Brown's recent piece entitled "Googling McOndo" observes the emergence of a reading culture "in which reader, print text and Internet form new kinds of networked readings" (79). Like the stories Brown analyzes, whose implicit soundtracks Brown explores via YouTube, Sudor might best be read with a good Internet connection, or, better yet, someone from these communities. This is an immersive reading experience, one that compels readers to actively seek resources to educate themselves further.
If Sudor's generous use of gay slang prompts readers to extradiegetic edification, its erotic language seeks to provoke readers to a different sort of action. The novel's third mode of complicity is its use of pornographic language. As editor of Alf's "Sudor," Puga encourages Alf to embrace a pornographic register as the two of them discuss Alfs writing project. Puga advises, "Se trata no sólo de escribir de temas gay sino de escribir como un hueón caliente" (83). Critics may debate what it actually means to write as a homy gay man (given the plurality of that positionality), but ail can agree on certain symptoms endemic to sexual arousal. Alf's text is replete with frequent changes in body temperature, perspiration, and other forms of erogenous excitement that accompany descriptions of their respective stimuli: the tastes, smells, images, voices, and textures of his past lovers. This early conversation between Alf and Puga announces the narrative's erotic aims and serves as narrative foreplay for in the hundreds of pages that follow.
Elements incorporated from Grindr-descriptions of various profiles, anecdotes from several hook ups, and visual representations of Grindr messages-facilitate the pornographic register of the novel. As a stylistic influence, Grindr emboldens raunchy, telegraphic language like the following:
"Hey, wn. Sudado?"
"Sí, buscando urgente. Lo que sea."
"Pico, sí. Necesito."
"Tb." (307)
Grindr touts itself as an app for meeting gay or bisexual men, and its design reflects its objective to help users get to know each other by providing a platform conducive to the rapid disclosure of personal information. The ability to flirt with another person and still remain anonymous mitigates the vulnerability of face-to-face courtship, so the language of Grindr tends to be more raw, explicit, and in some ways more revelatory than face-to-face exchanges.
Fuguet's incorporation of Grindr allows the novel to achieve a heightened affective response from readers during these episodes. Once read, the text involves readers, either knowingly or with passive compliance, in explicit knowledge that the Chilean literary establishment has long considered offensive. The deliberate choice to amplify sexually explicit language is one Fuguet directly addresses in metafictional asides throughout the novel. Within one parenthetical, for instance, Alf remarks, "nunca debió cambiar pico por miembro erecto" (291). Relatively early in the novel, the narrator observes, "Hay cosas que se hacen pero no se dicen." As if to demonstrate his outspoken, culturally forbidden style, the very next line reads, "Anoche me culiaron y culié" (107).14 This one-lined testimonial signals his willingness not only to give and receive penetrative sex but also to talk about it openly with slang indigenous to the streets of Santiago. According to Alf and his editor, this raw, sexually charged language is meant to pull the reader into sex scenes and thereby implicate him emotionally and anatomically.
The language of this book is so visceral that potentially arousing scenes may actually arouse, just as potentially disturbing scenes may disgust. Many times these reactions are not mutually exclusive but always serve to implicate the reader. One case in point is the encounter between Alf and a Belgian named Gerard, whose mind Alf associates with cheap porn: "no oculta nada, exhibe todo" (274). In the first few minutes after Alf enters Gerard's room, Gerard asks a barrage of forward questions ("¿Lo tienes grueso?", "¿Quieres tragar mi leche?", and "Te gustan los creampies?"). These uninhibited questions are aimed at a narrator who, admittedly, isn't all that into it, making them all the more likely to strike readers as mistimed or out of place. Sexual proclivities aside, the "uncut" description of the sex scene that follows might make many readers uncomfortable. Descriptions of acrid smells, greasy feels, and salty tastes add to the already highly visual register of the scene. But the reader's initial discomfort should subside with Alf's, as he entreats the reader to become a knowing witness to his willing performance. The sex scene ends in flagrante, with the two men committed to mutual depravity. The very next section of text shows Alf walking away into the refreshing night air, eager to forget Gerard (already blocked on Grindr). This narrative maneuver brings welcome relief to the reader, just as it does to Alf. Like him, we never want to see Gerard again, but we can still smell him.
Consonant with Fuguet's earlier works, Sudor portrays a consumer culture enchanted with technology, but the novel also looks at the other side of this dialectic: how technology has helped us consume each other. More than the sum of its "sexts," the novel critically reflects how the articulation of online and offline sexual norms generates a critical mass of potential sex partners, even in a country where conservative social policies often prevail. As such, the novel provides a working example of the broader effects of Internet technologies on modern intimacy full stop. My approach has highlighted how, as a plot device, geosocial dating apps like Grindr enable characters to locate and quickly contact other users in the vicinity, which in turn grows and diversifies the character demographic of the novel. One narrative consequence of incorporating these newer epistolary elements into the novel, I conclude, is to position its gay characters not as marginal or subaltern, but as every bit as connected (and homy) as the next smartphone user. Fuguet's decision to write "desde lo pomo" instead of from marginality reaches readers on an emotional and anatomical rather than purely political level. Fuguet's complex, non-reductive portrayal of Santiago's gay population could serve as a useful case study for considering the effects of global digitalia on local genitalia.
I find that Sudor's rendering of what many reviewers have dubbed "love in the time of Grindr" suggests that dating apps, as a key narrative device, can help ensure that literary representations of modern intimacy are capacious enough to include a great variety of sexual desires. Much like Grindr, Sudor's posthuman perspective on Santiago works as a geographically specific, sexually arousing narrative "para ligar:" the novel functions as a platform for generating intimacy between readers and the world it depicts. Above, I have argued that elements from Grindr, couched in Alf's commentary, make it narratively possible for Fuguet to involve readers in the erotic scenes portrayed in the novel. No matter a reader's sexual orientation, the novel seeks to educate and arouse, all the while immersing the reader in a paginated world of gay intimacy. With the turn of each page, the novel makes the reader complicit-in word and perhaps deed-in Fuguet's gay and mainstream Santiago.
1 When using the term "gay," I include all man-identified individuals interested in sex with other man-identified individuals, no matter where exactly they fall on spectra of gender and sexuality. I discuss the novel's conscious rejection of a unifying queer identity later in the article.
2 Fuguet loosely bases this father figure on the Latin American Boom author, Carlos Fuentes, who ??-published a similar collection with his son. Fuentes' son also had hemophilia and died suddenly around the age of Fuguet's Rafa.
3 Writes the narrator, "Muchos (el mundillo ligado al arte, a la prensa, a lo audiovisual, los seguidores y los cazadores de tendencias, la supuesta intelectualidad, la gente conectada) juraban que eran parte de una fiesta edénica digital all-inclusive. Adictos a Twitter e Instagram, amarrados a Facebook, clavados en sus celulares y con la sensación de un insólito empoderamiento digital (todos fisgoneaban a todos, todos seguían a todos) que los hacía hablar más de la cuenta, no quedarse en casa tranquilos, escuchar muy poco a los demás y jurar que eran parte del jardín de al lado y de la fiesta interminable" (emphasis is mine 17).
4 See, for example, Virtual Love (1994) by Avodah Offit and Chris Dyer's Wanderlust (2003).
5 In her book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (2015), Turkle writes, "In the new communications culture, interruption is not experienced as interruption but as another connection" (37, emphasis in original).
6 For a comprehensive exploration of McOndo poetics, see Gutiérrez Mouat (2002), Andrew Brown (2016), Jorge Eduardo Benavides (2008), and Rory O'Biyen (2011).
7 Other anthologies whose aims roughly coincide with those of McOndo include Cuentos con Walkman (1993), Líneas aéreas (1999), and Se habla español (2000). For a study of the distinct but related literary movement in Mexico known as the "Crack," see Tomás-Regalado López (2014) and Ignacio Padilla (2004).
8 Even some of the most contemporary criticism on gender and sexuality in Fuguet's work has looked for these "hidden" meanings, including Cristian Opazo's "De armarios у bibliotecas" (2009). I mention these texts not to launch a criticism of their approach or findings, but to suggest that Fuguet's most recent fiction (Sudor, 2016, and No ficción, 2015) requires a nuanced approach.
9 The activism and writing of intersex activist Mauro Cabral is, for example, a resounding reminder of the varying levels of visibility and social acceptance experienced by different groups represented in the LGBTIQ moniker.
10 This sexualized allusion reappears during Alf's first conversation with Rafa, when Rafa comments that he'd like to photograph Alf one day. Alf refuses, saying "Lo mío es estar detrás de las cámaras, de los textos, de los libros, de los autores." Rafa quips, "¿Es activo entonces?" (382). Alf dodges the question initially, but his narration style, not to mention plentiful descriptions of his sex life, indicate versatility.
11 The term "prosumer" was coined by Alvin Toffler, famed author of Future Shock (1970), to characterize the blending of producers and consumers, particularly prolific in the dot-com era (The Third Wave 238).
12 For quick reference, a "chaser" might be of any body type and pursues "bears," typically heavier, hairier, and older gay men. "Otter" typically refers to thinner, hairy gay men. The word "fleto" is Chilean slang for gay or homosexual.
13 In a McOndo-esque maneuver, Fuguet's characters in Sudor sometimes rely on English to express particular words or phrases associated with intercourse. For example, after explaining that the smell of his moistened boxers arouse him ("un aroma a sí mismo, que sale de sus profundidades"), Alf struggles to find a convincing way to clarify that he is turned on by the smell of his "líquido preseminal": "Precum, precum, cuándo puta van a inventar una palabra en español digna: 'Mira, hueón, estás pegote, qué rico, estás lleno de líquido preseminal' no funciona" (290).
l4 In his 2006 novella Bonsai, Alejandro Zambra makes a similar observation regarding the lexicon of sex in Chile. Perhaps aware of this connection, Fuguet references Zambra by name in Sudor when Alf compares Zambra with one of the authors he edits.
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