P/herversions

Book excerpt: Ana Rossetti is a unique phenomenon in Spanish culture, a performer and a writer who resists categorization within any single genre, gender, period, or medium. One of the most exciting Spanish writers of the last twenty-five years, Rossetti can be both transgressive and playful, employing erotic signs (fetishes, taboos) derived from fashion, literature, design, pornography, psychology, theater, drag, and Catholicism to destabilize critical, analytic, political, social, and gender categories. Critics, however, have faced a dilemma that this book seeks to overcome: how to define her work - which bridges high and low cultures and includes poetry, fiction, essay, fashion, drama, children's literature, and opera - without resorting back to the very categories that her own artistic practice questions.