A King Dyed Pink is Doomed to Die is a poetry collection concerned with cruelties waged against queer people—how even the most seemingly innocuous habits of cishet society proliferate a vast catalog of ongoing violence, from microaggressions to murder. Disrupting the accompanying complicity of silence (mine and others') involves not only invoking a propulsive "I" lyric (at once playful and elegiac, confessional and enraged, horny and ashamed) but also creating an unabashed mess of formal modes (theater, journalism, surrealism, visuality, 21st century technology) that, unlike heteronormativity, refuses tidy categorization. Death haunts these poems, whether it be a pigeon fatally dyed pink for a gender reveal party or a queer brutally murdered in a small Virginia town months before I moved there. As I metabolize the grief, rage, and despair resulting from past and current injustices, I turn to tender futurity: in this violent world, how can we—queers and accomplices—still cultivate pleasure and love? / Master of Fine Arts / A King Dyed Pink is Doomed to Die is a poetry collection that reckons with violence waged against queer people. How do even the most seemingly innocuous hetero habits perpetuate cruelty, whether it be big or small? At once horny and rageful, silly and elegiac, these poems draw from theater, journalism, surrealism, visuality, modern technology, and other modes to disrupt a culture of binaries and tidy categorizations. The specter of death haunts this book as much the tragedy of two actual ones: a pigeon fatally dyed pink for a gender reveal party and a queer brutally murdered in Blacksburg, Virginia, months before I moved there. Even as I reckon with nasty realities, I invoke tenderness in my hopes for the future: in this violent world, how can we—queers and accomplices—cultivate pleasure and love?
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/118943 |
| Date | 09 May 2024 |
| Creators | Fuoco, Dante |
| Contributors | English, Terazawa, Sophia Emi, Queen, Khadijah, Patel, Soham Suresh |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf |
| Rights | Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ |
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