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"Nudge a Mexican and She or He Will Break Out With a Story": Complicating Mexican Immigrant Masculinities through Counternarrative Storytelling

In this thesis, I explore Latino masculinities and contest their uniformity through transforming an oral history conducted with my father into a collection of short stories. Following storytelling traditions of Latino/Mexican culture, I converted an oral history interviews with my dad into a collection of short stories. From these short stories I extracted themes relating to the micro and macro manifestations of gender policing. Drawing from Judith Butler's Theory of performativity and Gloria Anzaldua's theory of Borderland identities, I rethink masculinity and offer Jose Esteban Munoz's theory of disidentification. With these theories in conversation, I analyze the themes of the short stories I present. In Chapter One, I investigate the potential of verguenza and respeto, or shame and respect, to complicate masculinity. In Chapter Two, I critically analyze my father's interaction with INS officials during his interview to become a U.S. resident. In these two sets of stories, I use disidentification to uncover the third space relationship with masculinity. I see this relationship at the intersections of race, class, gender and ability, the identities which come together to leave my father in the borderlands. Ultimately, I complicate masculinity through these analyses, offering a space for a nonoppressive masculinity.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:CLAREMONT/oai:scholarship.claremont.edu:scripps_theses-1101
Date20 April 2012
CreatorsVillela, Berenice
PublisherScholarship @ Claremont
Source SetsClaremont Colleges
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceScripps Senior Theses
Rights© 2012 Berenice Villela

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