The oxymoron of sexual sovereignty: Some Puerto Rican literary reflections

What is the relationship of sexuality, especially queer sexuality, to sovereignty in a colonial setting such as Puerto Rico′s? This essay revisits sexuality as a troubling, and often oxymoronic, trope for the formation of a geographically bounded sense of community or nation in modern Puerto Rican texts. What is the relationship of this sexual trope to Puerto Rico′s political status as defined by the U.S. Supreme Court in its also notoriously oxymoronic Insular Cases? Does the excessive sexual trope to which Puerto Rican literary texts insistently return point to an area of agency or selfdetermination still worth pursuing or advocating? Through an examination of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben′s recent meditations on sovereignty and on its implications for political action in what he calls our contemporary, globalized state of exception this essay explores those timely questions. And it does so, especially, by returning to the work that inspired Agamben′s meditations, the work of the German Jewish philosopher and critic, Walter Benjamin.