Kiss of the Spider Woman

Manuel Puig was an Argentine novelist and screenwriter. Puig grew up in a village on the Argentine pampas before moving to Buenos Aires for high school. While there, he fell in love with movies and decided to pursue a career as a film director. He briefly attended the University of Buenos Aires before leaving for film school in Italy. He continued to work on screenplays as he traveled across Europe. He moved back to Argentina in the 1960s and published his first novel, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, in 1968. When the Argentine government become more far-right in the 1970s, the leftist Puig once again left his homeland, and he lived the rest of his life outside of Argentina. He died in Mexico in 1990.

Kiss of the Spider Woman is set during Argentina’s Dirty War, a regime of state violence that lasted from 1976 to 1983. In 1976, a military junta overthrew President Isabel Perón and established a far-right military dictatorship. The junta, led by Jorge Rafael Videla, killed and imprisoned thousands of Argentine citizens that they deemed threats to their power. This included leftist activists like Kiss of the Spider Woman’s Valentin, but it also included journalists, artists, students, and other civilians. The Dirty War ended with the 1983 election of Raúl Alfonsín, which restored democracy to Argentina.

Kiss of the Spider Woman is an early example of contemporary Argentine LGBTQ fiction. Camila Sosa Villada’s 2019 novel Bad Girls explores themes of queerness and gender identity in modern day Argentina, while Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s Slum Virgin (2009) explores homophobia and transphobia as part of broader systems of oppression. Kiss of the Spider Woman also shares similarities with Blackouts, a 2023 novel by Justin Torres. Like Kiss of the Spider Woman, much of the narration in Blackouts takes the form of a conversation between two characters as they discuss their identities as Hispanic gay men. Other novels about queerness and social issues in Latin America include José Donoso’s Hell Hath No Limits (1966), which is about a transgender woman who owns a bordello, and Pedro Lemebel’s My Tender Matador (2001), which follows a romance between a leftist guerilla and his transgender landlady in 1980s Chile.