Pleasure, reading: Literacy, sexuality and empowerment in queer Chicano narrative

摘要

The theme of reading and writing resonates through the works of Arturo Islas, Richard Rodriguez, and Rigoberto Gonzalez. The very idea of engaging in the production of literature in the form of a novel, a memoir, or an autobiography is already speaking in its own way about a kind of exposing, revealing, or reclaiming. This project seeks to engage the three texts in a critical, theoretically informed conversation guided by the following themes: reading as a pleasurable, voyeuristic act with the intent of escape; family politics and the tensions between the overarching, oppressive notions of masculinity in the problematic context of Chicano culture; and the queer identity of our writers as notions of homosexuality and outness are manifested in the text. While this analysis attempts to answer questions about childhood, language, and sexuality within their works through the lens of psychoanalysis, it also seeks to engage queer, Chicano theorists directly writing to and from this cultural, historical moment.