ABSTRACT
Chapter Two introduces a modified scribe metaphor in which a rebellious scribe queers the venerated literary tradition by surreptitiously altering the books he is supposed to copy. This disruptive writing intervention is called ‘Mazuf’s gesture’ after the name of José Luis de Juan’s protagonist in This Breathing World, a novel analysed at the beginning of the chapter as a paradigmatic example of this strategy. The central idea of the chapter is that the intent to subversively rewrite literary motifs and various homoerotic traditions from an individualised queer perspective is typical of all the authors examined in Queer Rebels, including Juan Gil-Albert, whose novella Valentín (1974) queers Shakespeare’s dramas. Given that Valentín is more aligned with the-turn-of-the-century fiction than with novels from the 1970s and 1980s, the novella is included in the analysis. While often effective as an emancipatory strategy, the intertextually informed queer rewriting of literary tradition not always succeeds, as evinced by Luis G. Martín’s La muerte de Tadzio [Tadzio’s Death], a rewrite of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, which reinforces the common stereotypes of homosexuals, instead of interrogating and/or dismantling them.
