Queering the Margins: Pedro Lemebel's Loco afán

In his collection of chronicles, Loco afan (1995) , Pedro Lemebel, Chilean writer, performance artist, social commentator, public figure and activist, presents a series of interrelated vignettes of the lives of impoverished, marginalized, gay men, taken from his own life experiences in the slums of Santiago de Chile. In this article, Kate Averis examines Lemebel's complex mapping of social identification from his position on the margins, revealing unlikely associations and unexpected schisms. Averis demonstrates the way in which Lemebel resolves the dilemma of intersecting affiliations—class, gender, sexuality—through the discursive representation of identity as a fluid process of ‘becoming’, rather than a static state of being.