P/Herversions: Critical Studies of Ana Rossetti

Ana Rossetti is a unique phenomenon in Spanish culture, a performer and writer who resists categorization within any single genre, gender, period, or medium. She began as a performer, and she has returned repeatedly to artistic performance, playfully inverting and perverting norms, continually and radically transforming her public image, and mixing high and low culture. Rossetti’s work employs unstable signifiers derived from fashion, literature, design, pornography, psychology, theater, drag, and Catholicism to destabilize critical, analytic, political, social, and gender categories. She has dabbled in most genres, including fiction, essay, drama, children’s literature, and opera, and she has collaborated with visual artists, popular singers, and fashion designers. Rossetti’s cultural practice in itself presents critics with a key hermeneutic problem: how to define her and her work without reverting back to the categories that her artistic practice destabilizes. This book avoids those temptations by presenting a kaleidoscope of critical readings of Rossetti’s texts by leading U.S. scholars, each of whom focuses on a single text, or textual practice, in the case of her lesser known and studied texts.