Misidentification, the Trouble with Assimilation Politics in Latinx Literature
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Date
2021-11-15
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Abstract
This dissertation analyzes the hegemonic and counterhegemonic movements that have entangled the Latinx community from a historical, literary, and artistic perspective and how the processes of exclusion and assimilation inscribed in both of these concepts aided to further marginalize non-normative masculinities.
This interpretation follows the problematization of humanities and interdisciplinarity posed by Gender Studies. This interdisciplinarity combines history, literature, politics, and art. By tackling this issue from these points of view, this dissertation aims to dismantle the creation of nationalistic, gendered, and sexualized identities through these lenses.
At first, we will define how the hegemonic state was created in the United States and the fallacies it built in order to do so. Going through the historiography of the frontier, this first chapter will conceptualize how space and history were deployed to marginalized Hispanic and Native populations through the movement East to West.
In the second chapter I analyze the evolution of counterhegemonic discourses and the making of a new national mythos for the Chicano population through the defense of Aztlán and how this new paradigm nevertheless becomes problematic through the examination of gender roles in it.
In the third chapter we will shift to focus on the escape from this dichotomy through the extrication of the individual from the community. How the gender constructs pushed non-normative men outside of the community. Following three models of masculinity – the intellectual, the sick, and finally the homosexual – this chapter will deconstruct the expulsion of these individuals and the potential ways this exit disrupted their personality.
Finally, we will center our analysis in the movement beyond identity politics and community. How the disengagement from them through what we will call misidentification as a posthegemonic practice to disengage from any assimilationist or normative identity proves to be fundamental for new understandings of the individual.
The conclusion of this dissertation can be summarized in the rejection of the modern concept of the identity, and in the transformation of humanities. Likewise, I conclude in favor of moving beyond monolithical understandings of identity through the withdrawal from the hegemony/counterhegemony power structure.
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Latinx, Gender, Masculinity, Hispanic