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.

Excerpt

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.

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