Playing Rough: Racial and Gender Stereotypes, Performance and Misreading in the Fiction of Junot Díaz and Dany Laferrière
Year: 2016
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Stereotyping involves the hasty, simplistic reading of a person, situation, or thing, based on a few, salient features. My dissertation examines stereotypes at four interconnected levels: (1) racial and sexual stereotypes applied to human bodies in fictional literary texts; (2) stereotypes applied to authors’ bodies, based on features of their identities; (3) stereotypical readings of texts that conform to popular and/or academic reading practices; and (4) literary genres as stereotypes that direct reading. In the works of fiction I examine, contemporary, Caribbean diasporic male writers of color write first- and second-person narratives that deploy, with irony, a similar principal stereotype. Haitian-Quebecois Dany Laferrière, in his novel Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer, plays with the figure of the Nègre, an exotic, hypersexual, black male immigrant to Montreal who drives white female Blanches wild with desire. Dominican-American Junot Díaz deploys the stereotype of the Dominican stud in his short fiction, Drown and This Is How You Lose Her. There we witness the narrator learn, imitate and perfect the macho, womanizing role that causes female partners to leave him. These texts engage self-reflexively with the stereotypes they deploy and with the writing and reading of texts. They parody the instruction manual genre in their form while, in their content, they depict the subtle mechanisms of male-to-male instruction that form men into the racialized stud role they problematize. My dissertation examines the intersections and ironies of race, gender, sexuality and class in texts that are at once ironic and dead serious. I argue that the writers’ parodic play with a racialized stereotype of masculinity is attractive yet risky, critical yet complicit, for their ironic deployment of stereotypes necessarily reinforces them, even as it seeks to deconstruct them. Furthermore, these provocative, tongue-in-cheek narratives reproduce sexism as they critique racism.
Source: TSpace (University of Toronto)
Author: Karen Fay Yaworski
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2735222723