“disfRuto disfRutaR”: corporeality, cross-dressing, and jouissaNce in carmen boullosa’s dueRme sara a. potter the wounded, defiant body of m. de Fleurcy/claire Fleurcy/clara Flor is the center of gravity in carmen boullosa’s 1994 novel duerme. the novel’s opening chapter focuses on the narrator-protagonist’s physical sensations: she cannot speak or move but can perceive what is going on around her, so that the reader is introduced to her through emotions and corporeal sensa- tions: cold, pain, amusement, fear. claire’s body is later drained of blood and filled with pure water from ancient streams by an indigenous woman, which grants her eternal life. this water also traps her, since she will fall into an eternal, ageless sleep if she ever leaves the Valley of mexico. despite these difficulties, claire finds ways of extracting pleasure from all of the identities she occupies throughout the course of the novel, ranging across genders, nationalities, and ethnicities, vitally living out each identity (pirott-Quintero 1). in this article, i argue that claire’s insistence on being born to and for physical pleasure serves to interrogate the gendered, racial, and social identi- ties that she occupies over the course of the novel. through her cross-dress- ing protagonist, boullosa establishes a profound questioning of the intensely hierarchical social castes created by new spain’ s obsession with social status via dress and limpieza de sangre during the earlier years of the Viceroyalty (1521-1821). to keep this interrogative pleasure at the forefront of my analysis, i pro- pose a reading of duerme as a barthesian text of bliss and of pleasure, a text of pleasure (plaisir) that “comes from culture and does not break with it” that is also a text of bliss (jouissance) which “imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts . . . unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psycho- logical assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relationship with language” (14). While barthes did not write his text with the colonial era or mexico in mind, boullosa’s textual play Romance Notes 57.1 (2017): 25-35