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In her first novel, situated in “this soup of islands stewed in hunger and the desire to be someone else” (Sirena Selena 211), Santos-Febres explores the world of transvestites and young male prostitutes following the trajectory of a new star, bolero-singer and seductive diva “Sirena Selena,” from the streets of San Juan, Puerto Rico, to rich audiences in the Dominican Republic. The novel shows feminine characters that resist shame and humiliation by narcissistically focusing on themselves as a means of survival, adhering each to different rigid ideals of femininity permeated by normative systems of value focusing on appearance, financial solvency or ambiguous desire. Their tactics are deployed against a background where the social geography of the islands appears hierarchically ordered with Haiti at the bottom, the Dominican Republic and Cuba in the middle, and Puerto Rico at the top. The novel alludes to the social/political/ economic hierarchies that organize migrations among islands in the Caribbean, always against the powerful backdrop of the United States. Sex tourism is recreated as a profitable industry that relaxes strict machista prejudices and allows for sexual experimentation of those who pay and some degree of social mobility of those whose bodies are for hire.

Perfect Performance for export: shame, narcissism and contaminated ideals in Santos-Febres’ Sirena Selena (2000)