ABSTRACT
Silviano Santiago and Caio Fernando Abreu appear only too aware—perhaps through witnessing some of the failures and Pyrrhic victories of gay rights movements both in Brazil and beyond—that seeking representation within the existing social order implies operating exclusively on its terms, via its oppressive binary logic. Santiago's writing, like Abreu's, transcribes and dismantles social codes, shifting between signification—standard representation which sustains dialectics—and the delirious suspension of sense. In their narratives 'the homosexual' can only flee social oppression by desiring martyrdom: he becomes a self-effacing anarchic force. Santiago's and Abreu's experimentations with language do not aim to give 'the homosexual' a voice, they work to sacrifice him in the hope of a greater good: the future conversion of existing society to conditions of becoming. Binary distinctions in these texts cannot be fixed: the strategic undecidability of the homosexual narrator-protagonists opens up deconstructive interstices of action where social—sexual, anatomical, political—taxonomies founder. Virtual or potential communities thus unfold within this radical 'homo-ness'.
