Date of Award
Spring 4-20-2012
Document Type
Open Access Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
Gender and Women's Studies
Second Department
Chicano Studies
First Thesis Reader
Chris Guzaitis
Second Thesis Reader
Tomas F. Summers Sandoval, Jr.
Rights Information
© 2012 Berenice Villela
Terms of Use & License Information
Abstract
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.
Recommended Citation
Villela, Berenice, ""Nudge a Mexican and She or He Will Break Out With a Story": Complicating Mexican Immigrant Masculinities through Counternarrative Storytelling" (2012). Scripps Senior Theses. Paper 98.
http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/98