The US as a Queer Heterotopia: Carlos Fuentes and Viet Thanh Nguyen

Abstract

Abstract: Does queer desire require displacement to become intelligible? Coming-of-age narrative fictions centering queer experiences, desires, and communities often set their formative processes in liminal spaces. The mobility away from home and toward queer sites is extreme when characters leave behind their countries. In the case of two short stories set in the 1970s, Carlos Fuentes's "La pena" ( La frontera de cristal , 1995) and Viet Thanh Nguyen's "The Other Man" ( The Refugees , 2017), US cities serve as the sites where two young migrants undergoing processes of self-exploration face experiences of cultural shock that force them to reevaluate their assumptions about their sexuality. Their struggles overlap with their negotiation of their national identities: how can they desire same-sex partners and be Mexican or Vietnamese? This study analyzes the formative processes of two young men as they identify (and disidentify) with the heteronormative expectations of their cultures of origin and within the US.