Abstract
This article examines the investments of Justin Torres’s debut novel, We the Animals (2012), with Latinidad, queerness and masculinity under the framework of opacity proposed by Édouard Glissant. I argue that Torres’s novel employs opacity—the refusal to be legible to the gaze of a dominant Other—as a way of grappling with the tensions between Latinx and queer identities and textualizing the relationship between queerness and other forms of structural marginalization. I read the novel’s aesthetic strategies in relation to opacity and the institutionalization of creative writing and consider the politics of the novel within a genealogy of US Puerto Rican coming-of-age novels and their relationship to the literary market. Finally, I read the relationships among masculinity, queerness and Latinidad the novel presents and illustrate how it ultimately presents a blueprint for Latinx queer liberation.
Resumen
Este artículo examina las apuestas a la latinidad, la identidad queer, y la masculinidad en la primera novela de Justin Torres, We the Animals (2012) dentro del marco de la opacidad propuesto por Édouard Glissant. Argumentamos que la novela de Torres utiliza la opacidad —la renuencia a ser leíble en los ojos de un “Otro” dominante— como manera de luchar con las tensiones entre la entidad latina y la queer y de textualizar la relación entre ser queer y otras formas de marginación estructural. Interpretamos las estrategias estéticas de la novela en relación con la opacidad y la institucionalización de la escritura creativa, y analizamos las posturas políticas de la novela dentro de una genealogía de libros sobre el paso de la niñez a la adultez de puertorriqueños en los Estados Unidos y sus relaciones con el mercado literario. Por último, interpretamos las relaciones entre masculinidad, identidad queer y latinidad que presenta la novela e ilustramos cómo a la larga esta ofrece un plan de acción para la liberación queer latina.
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Notes
“For Opacity” is the title of the section of Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (1990) in which he articulates the concept.
For a discussion on contemporary engagements with the concept of opacity from a feminist and media perspective, see Zach Blas, “Opacities: An Introduction,” in Camera Obscura 31, no. 2 (1 September 2016): 149–153.
Throughout this essay, I employ the term Latinx to refer to the gender-neutral alternative to Latina/o.
I embrace the term Latinx for its push toward gender inclusivity, especially in the context of a discussion about queer Latinidad that I undertake in this article. Some of the literary works I refer to predate the usage of this term, but I consciously employ it to signal the direction of Latinidad toward queer and nonbinary identification in the present and future, as well as acknowledge its presence in a genealogy that predates the use of the term, which has been gaining academic, institutional and public ground over the past five years. I also employ it as a way to consciously politicize the use of the term with regard to matters not just related to sexuality but also the settler colonial history of Latinx populations, race and colonialism. For more into the debate over the use of Latinx, see “The X in Latinx Is a Wound, not a Trend,” by Alan Pelaez Lopez, Efniks, Sept 13 2018. https://efniks.com/the-deep-dive-pages/2018/9/11/the-x-in-latinx-is-a-wound-not-a-trend and the articles recently published by this journal, such as “Latinx Thoughts: Latinidad with an X,” by Salvador Vidal-Ortiz and Juliana Martinez (Latino Studies, Oct 2018, vol 16.3).
Scholars have proposed other, more specific, definitions of the political as it relates to Latinx literature. Raphael Dalleo and Elena Machado Sáez suggest that Caribbean Latinx literature in particular has had a historical “anticolonial impulse” to engage in “a politics of social justice” (2007, p. 3) that defines itself in response to the marginalization of Latinx people in US society. For a thorough discussion of Latinx literary engagement with politics, see their The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of Post-Sixties Literature.
Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes alternatively calls these narratives “autobiographical fiction” (Queer Ricans 2009, p. 23). The distinction between the categories of memoir, coming-of-age novel and autobiographical fiction are murky and the subject of a debate that exceeds this article, but they all respond to the tendency in Latinx literature to narrate personal lived experience. Throughout the essay, I use the term coming-of-age novel to describe Torres’ work and this broader tendency in Latinx literature.
Significantly, this “we” is substituted for “I” in the closing section of the novel, comprising one long chapter with long subsections that narrate Torres’ foray into adulthood. This section marks a narrative and temporal shift in the novel, suggesting the protagonists’ sexual maturation and liberation.
For a deeper discussion on the relationship between masculinity and erotic/homosexual desire, see “What a Tangled Web!: Masculinity, Abjection, and the Foundations of Puerto Rican Literature in the United States,” by Arnaldo Cruz Malavé.
Sandra Cisneros’s discusses her own experience in the program in Eric Olsen’s and Glenn Schaeffer’s We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love, and Literature at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (Skyhorse, 2011) in words that echo Torres’ experience.
In the text “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse” postcolonial thinker Homi Bhabha claims that colonialism exercises authority through farce. He states that the desire to produce a recognizable “Other” necessitates that mimicry and imitation produce “an excess, a slippage” that shows its own impossibility of authenticity.
This suggestion of queer desire by the mother deserves more close attention that I unfortunately lack the space for.
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Rivera Montes, Z. “For opacity”: Queerness and Latinidad in Justin Torres’ We the Animals. Lat Stud 18, 218–234 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-020-00243-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-020-00243-x