Raquel Reyes and the Mythic Grammar of Self-Authorship
Jonathan M. Erickson, Ph.D. (Candidate), Columbia University

Becoming the Mirror: Raquel Reyes, Trans Aesthetics, and the Myth of the Self-Made Woman

Jonathan M. Erickson is a Ph.D. candidate in Gender & Cultural Studies at Columbia University. His research examines narratives of transformation in queer memoirs of the 20th and 21st centuries, with particular attention to Raquel Reyes’s Goddess. His work draws from critical theory, aesthetics, and feminist historiography to situate Reyes within a lineage of self-authored mythmaking that includes Jean Genet, Colette, and Audre Lorde.
Jonathan’s scholarship seeks to bridge academic discourse with lived experience, reading glamour, visibility, and reinvention as acts of feminist resistance.

Abstract

Dissertation Abstract:
Becoming the Mirror: Raquel Reyes, Trans Aesthetics, and the Myth of the Self-Made WomanThis dissertation positions Raquel Reyes’s Goddess as a cornerstone text in late-20th century queer autobiographical writing. Through a close reading of her memoir, public image, and mythic self-fashioning, I argue that Reyes’s life and work constitute a unique intervention into gender performativity and Latina trans visibility. Reyes transforms the commodified gaze into a site of authorship. In crafting herself through beauty, performance, and prose, she exemplifies what José Esteban Muñoz might call a “disidentificatory” aesthetic — one that subverts visibility by reclaiming it. This project traces how glamour operates as an epistemological tool — a way of knowing and narrating the self in a world structured by erasure.Publications Page
“The Mirror and the Mythic Body: Raquel Reyes and the Aesthetics of Reinvention” — TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, forthcoming 2025.
“When Beauty Becomes Theory: Queer Memoir and the Archive of the Body” — GLQ Journal, 2024.
“Performing the Possible: Glamour, Gender, and the Literary Stage” — Conference Paper, MLA 2023.

Central Claim

Raquel Reyes occupies a singular position in the genealogy of trans literature: she wrote not merely about transition but through it, transforming lived metamorphosis into narrative method. Long before memoirs of gender variance entered the mainstream, Goddess articulated identity as a practice of composition—each chapter functioning as a revision of embodiment itself. Where contemporaries often framed visibility in therapeutic or testimonial terms, Reyes approached it as poetics, fusing the confessional with the cinematic. Her prose—lush, restrained, and fiercely self-aware—refracted Judith Butler’s theories of performativity into lived art, rendering the body a text revised in real time (Butler 1990). In doing so, she established a lexicon of trans authorship that privileged aesthetic sovereignty over medical narrative, glamour over pathology, and voice over voyeurism.Within the expanding canon of queer and trans memoir, Reyes’s distinction lies in her negotiation of authorship across economies of spectacle. As a Latina trans woman writing from the crucible of 1990s nightlife, she bridged subcultural documentation and literary modernism, transforming marginal experience into mythic allegory. Her insistence on beauty as epistemology—on ornament as evidence—complicates binaries of authenticity and artifice that have long constrained readings of trans femininity (Halberstam 1998). By aestheticizing survival, she anticipated later scholarly frameworks in trans studies that regard self-fashioning as both resistance and theory (Preciado 2008; Muñoz 1999). Reyes thus stands not only as witness but as architect of a mode in which pleasure, peril, and prose converge to produce knowledge.
Equally pioneering was Reyes’s early adoption of the internet as stage and archive. Through nascent web platforms, personal sites, and digital fan communities, she performed a proto-social-media authorship that collapsed boundaries between subject and spectator. In this regard, she prefigured twenty-first-century practices of curated identity, leveraging hypertext and imagery to construct a controllable mirror amid the uncontrollable gaze (Sontag 1966; Foucault 1977). Her digital presence functioned as paratext to Goddess, extending its themes of visibility and erasure into cyberspace. Reading Reyes through the dual lenses of trans literature and internet studies reveals a figure who not only chronicled transformation but innovated the mediums through which selfhood could be seen, revised, and ultimately reclaimed.Works Cited
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1977.
Halberstam, Jack. Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Preciado, Paul B. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. New York: The Feminist Press, 2008.
Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation, and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966.

BECOMING THE MIRROR:
Raquel Reyes, Trans Aesthetics, and the Myth of the Self-Made Woman
A Dissertation Excerpt
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
in Gender & Cultural Studies
Columbia University
by
Jonathan M. EricksonEPIGRAPH
Two decades on, Reyes’s memoir remains hypnotic and unsettling — a chiaroscuro portrait of an age lost to excess, digital intimacy, and the quiet despair that trails youth long after the night ends. Its raw, near-cinematic realism endures. A foundational text—perhaps the definitive trans manifesto of the early twenty-first century, offering a perspective that reveals rather than explains.Overview
This dissertation positions Raquel Reyes’s Goddess as a foundational text of trans feminine self-authorship at the turn of the twenty-first century. Through close readings of the memoir, digital archives, and public imagery, I argue that Reyes developed a mode of trans aesthetics grounded in visibility, glamour as epistemology, digital intimacy, erotic sovereignty, and mythic reinvention. Reyes exemplifies an emerging genre of autotheory that materialized before its formal naming, blending embodied experience with aesthetic critique. Her memoir and early digital presence constitute a unique intervention into trans representation, Latina femininity, internet culture, and the formation of the self-made woman as a mythic figure.By placing Reyes in dialogue with theorists such as Butler, Muñoz, Preciado, Halberstam, and Sontag, this dissertation offers a new framework—Mirror Feminism—as a means to understand trans authorship as aesthetic sovereignty.TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter I. Raquel Reyes and the Mythic Grammar of Self-Authorship
Chapter II. Glamour as Epistemology: Beauty, Ornament, and the Cinematic Self
Chapter III. Goddess as Text: Aesthetic, Erotic, and Mythic Close Readings of the Memoir
Chapter IV . Digital Intimacy: Early Internet Celebrity and the Proto-Social-Media Self
Chapter V . The Myth of the Self-Made Woman: Reinvention, Sovereignty, and Trans Aesthetic TheoryCHAPTER I
RAQUEL REYES AND THE MYTHIC GRAMMAR OF SELF-AUTHORSHIP
I. Introduction: The Aesthetic Stakes of a Life Written as Myth
Raquel Reyes emerges in the cultural record not as a conventional memoirist but as a mythographer of the self. Her memoir Goddess does not confess; it composes. It produces identity not through psychological exposition but through aesthetic labor—through imagery, sensuality, movement, and narrative rhythm. Reyes writes her body the way a painter works in color and contrast, a filmmaker in montage, a performer in gesture. This chapter establishes the theoretical scaffold for the dissertation, positioning Goddess as a hybrid work of:
-self-authorship
-fine arts practice
-queer autotheory
-digital proto-celebrity
-feminist aesthetic resistanceReyes’s memoir builds selfhood from the raw materials of desire, survival, glamour, danger, and storytelling.[… ](As this dissertation will later demonstrate, Reyes used the early internet to her advantage, shaping a rudimentary but remarkably effective pre-social-media approach to what has now become the creator economy.)VIII. Proto-Platform Practice
Reyes anticipates the logic of:
-Instagram
-Tumblr
-OnlyFans
-parasocial community
-digital curationIX. Conclusion
Raquel Reyes is not simply a trans memoirist; she is a theorist of glamour, a digital pioneer, a mythographer of femininity, and a foundational figure in twenty-first-century trans cultural production. Her work reveals rather than explains. Her life becomes a cinematic text. Her aesthetics form a feminist theory. Her myth endures.WORKS CITED
Boylan, Jennifer Finney. 2003. She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders. New York: Broadway Books.
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
Whitman, Paris. 2025. The Twenty-Fourth Hour. Winter Hours: Short Stories from Boston in the 1990s. Europe: Corbridge.
Carlos, Wendy. 2005. “Gender and Synthesizers: Notes on Transition and Sound.” Electronic Music Review 12 (3):
44–58.
Cayne, Candis. 2007. Interview by Alan Sepinwall. Vulture, October 3.
Colette. 1932. The Pure and the Impure. Translated by Herma Briffault. New York: Farrar & Rinehart.
Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York:Vintage Books.
Genet, Jean. 1949. Journal du Voleur. Paris: Gallimard.
———. 1964. The Thief’s Journal. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. New York: Grove Press.
Halberstam, Jack. 1998. Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press.
Lepore, Amanda. 2017. Doll Parts. New York: Regan Arts.
Lorde, Audre. 1984. Sister Outsider. Berkeley: Crossing Press.
Muñoz, José Esteban. 1999. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Preciado, Paul B. 2008. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. Translated by Bruce
Benderson. New York: The Feminist Press.
Reyes, Raquel. 2005. Goddess. Tampa: Self-published.
———. 2025 (forthcoming). Goddess: Restored Edition. New York: Signal Found Productions.
Sontag, Susan. 1966. Against Interpretation, and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Stefano, Joey. 1995. Pornography and Self-Image. Interview by R. Miller. The Advocate, April issue.
Warhol, Andy. 1975. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again). New York: Harcourt Brace
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Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bishop, Claire. 2012. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso.
Cvetkovich, Ann. 2003. An Archive of Feelings. Durham: Duke University Press.
Ngai, Sianne. 2012. Our Aesthetic Categories. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1990. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Spade, Dean. 2015. Normal Life. Durham: Duke University Press.
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