Revising National Myths Through Queer Kinship in Percival Everett’s Wounded

Abstract

This article reads Percival Everett’s 2009 novel Wounded as a narrative of new regionalism that engages with coalitional politics and reimagines important figures in the Western genre, such as masculinity, the family, and the frontier. By engaging with the remediation of Matthew Shepard’s murder, Everett refutes the power of metronormative narratives and showcases the ways in which crossing social boundaries can create inclusive community in places considered hostile to queer individuals. While many binaries are displaced in the novel, ultimately those of backward/progressive and us/them are reasserted, which displays the frontier’s powerful conceptual hold on the Western genre. The novel, however, does imagine a new role regionalism can play in imagining an American identity—a role that eschews more traditional, individualistic depictions of cowboy masculinity and instead emphasizes collectivity and responsibility toward others that accepts difference in favor of a broader ethic of care.