Kiss of the Spider Woman (Spanish: El beso de la mujer araña) is a 1976 novel by Argentine writer Manuel Puig.

It depicts the daily conversations between two cellmates in an Argentine prison, Molina and Valentín, and the intimate bond they form in the process.

The conversations between the characters, when not focused on the moment at hand, are recountings of films that Molina has seen, which act as a form of escape from their environment.

[9] Some of the translation proved problematic for Puig including Molina's speech which he could not get to portray the proper sentimental aspects of the voice.

[12] In 1981, Kiss of the Spider Woman won the best Latin American novel of the year from Istituto Italo Latino Americano in Italy.

[14] Molina is in jail for "corruption of a minor", while Valentín is a political prisoner who is part of a revolutionary group trying to overthrow the government.

Toward the middle of the novel, the reader finds out that Molina is actually a spy planted in Valentín's cell to befriend him and try to extract information about his organization.

Molina gets provisions from the outside for his cooperation with the officials in the hopes of keeping up appearances that his mother comes to visit him (thus giving him a reason to leave the cell when he reports to the warden).

The film is a clear piece of Nazi propaganda, but Molina's disinclination to see past its superficial charms is a symptom of his alienation from society, or at least his choice to disengage from the world that has rejected him.

The fourth film concerns a young revolutionary with a penchant for racing cars who meets a sultry older woman and whose father is later kidnapped by guerrillas.

Based on the film I Walked with a Zombie (1943), the fifth story concerns a rich man who marries a woman and brings her to his island home.

[18] Rita Felski, in The Uses of Literature, has argued for an interpretation of Kiss of the Spider Woman as "an exercise in aesthetic re-education," a reading that is indicative of the principles she has laid out in her vision of postcritique.

The footnotes act largely as a representation of Puig's political intention in writing the novel: to present an objective view of homosexuality.

[22] The extended notes deepen the novel's experimental nature while clarifying the book's challenge to traditional psychoanalytic views of homosexuality.