Date Available
5-4-2014
Year of Publication
2014
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Document Type
Master's Thesis
College
Arts and Sciences
Department/School/Program
English
First Advisor
Dr. Virginia Blum
Abstract
When writing about Junot Díaz’s Drown (1996) Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) and This is How You Lose Her (2012), I focus on the iterations of masculinity depicted and embodied by Yunior de las Casas, the primary narrator of this collection. I explore the links between diaspora, hybridity, masculinity, and trauma, arguing that both socio-historical and personal traumatic experience reverberates through the psyches and bodies of Díaz’s characters. I demonstrate the relationship between Yunior’s navigation of the United States and the Dominican Republic and his ever-shifting sexuality, self-presentation, and gender identity. The physical and discursive spaces he must traverse contain multiple, contradictory narratives about how to be a man; within Díaz’s collection, we witness Yunior’s coming-to-terms with the way that these stories of masculinity are rendered dysfunctional and incoherent. Accordingly, Yunior uses the hegemonic discourses of masculinity as a way to cloak his own queer difference, ambivalently interacting and identifying with characters marked as Other. In this analysis, I read Yunior’s masculinity as reactionary to the expectations of Domincan society, and also explore how he shaped by migration, trauma, and unspeakable queer desire.
Recommended Citation
LeGris, Hannah Fraser, "HYBRIDITY, TRAUMA, AND QUEER IDENTITY: READING MASCULINITY ACROSS THE TEXTS OF JUNOT DÍAZ" (2014). Theses and Dissertations--English. 9.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/9
Included in
Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Literature in English, North America Commons, Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons
