One striking characteristic that heavily influences Kiss of the Spider Woman's postmodernist character however, as well as pertaining to Bakhtin's theories, is the complete absence of a single authoritative narrative voice - even novels that may be considered dialogic still feature some sort of narrator. Most of the footnotes are theories concerned with the development of homosexuality, they are erudite in tone, and bear an obvious relation to the character of Molina as Valentin discloses to his cellmate 'I know very little about people with your type of inclination' (p.59). Puig's use of footnotes outside his narrative text is also a significant voice in Kiss of the Spider Woman. Puig's novel is a melange of disparate voices: a patchwork of diverse discourses drawn from films, popular song, drama, scholarly works and dreams. He believed this concept to be of particular relevance to the novel as a genre. Bakhtin conceived of the term 'dialogism', the notion that most literary texts were comprised of a hierarchy of disparate voices, and that these voices were in turn influenced by other preceding texts. The ideas of the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin were also being translated into English around this time. Kiss of the Spider Woman is Puig's fourth novel, published in 1976, a time when postmodernist theories were first being promulgated. With its experimental structure eclectic intertextual incorporation of other media and predominance of popular forms over aspects of higher culture, Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman certainly lends itself to a postmodernist interpretation.

Kiss of the spider woman puig