Exoticized Love: Gil-Albert’s “Tobeyo o del amor” and the Orientalization of Mexico

Abstract

The last work of Juan Gil-Albert, Tobeyo o del amor. Homenaje a México published in 1990 recovers a sentimental episode lived with a young Mexican during his exile. This article aims to analyze this episode and its uniqueness within the reflection on homoeroticism that runs through his oeuvre. Starting from the commentary on the novel and the comparison with other love fictions, the paper studies a topic little covered in the approaches to his theory of homosexual love: the racialization. The paper shows that in Tobeyo—despite the solid culturalist meditation on this relationship—there is a process of exoticization of the protagonist that responds to a Eurocentric and colonial vision of the indigenous body.