Desire, Song, and Exclusion: Popular Music as a Political-Narrative Force in Tengo miedo torero by Pedro Lemebel
Keywords:
: Pedro Lemebel, bolero, intermedialidad, música popular, deseo disidente.Abstract
This article offers an intermedial reading of Pedro Lemebel’s Tengo miedo torero (2001), focusing on the role of sentimental popular music—particularly boleros—as a structuring force within the novel’s narrative. Through an analysis of the songs cited in the text, the article argues that Lemebel constructs a poetics of travesti desire and social exclusion that subverts traditional political discourses through an aesthetic of emotional excess, kitsch, and melodrama. Music—presented in the novel as “alharaca”—is not a nostalgic background but a form of enunciation that binds body, affect, and resistance. The article proposes that the sequence of songs forms a parallel narrative that organizes the plot through affect, transforming romantic failure into an intimate and dissident epic.
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