ABSTRACT
Silviano Santiago's Stella Manhattan examines the construct of society along sexual and political axes: its two main events are the exile of the Brazilian protagonist as a result of his homosexuality, and a guerrilla raid on the Manhattan apartment of the Brazilian military attaché because of his fascist alliances. The following argument will seek to establish that at the root of Stella Manhattan's narrative democratization lie the problematics of ambiguous disappearance and the issues which cause it: homosexuality and its abjection. Stella plays with the menacing quality of the abject and the disruptive libidinal excess of homosexuality, by transmuting them into camp sardony which also strives, albeit unsuccessfully, to conceal the wounds incurred through abjection. The aim of Stella Manhattan, it may be surmised, is to restore libidinal creativity to an unfettered state, as postulated by Lyotard.
