Gender, Post-9/11, and Ugly Feelings
Gender, Post-9/11, and Ugly Feelings
This chapter studies two texts that use humor and irony to deal with broken dreams and with ugly feelings caused by the inability to perform the dominant culture's expectations of race and gender. The protagonists in Alex Gilvarry's postmodern novel From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant and in Keshni Kashyap and Mari Araki's Tina's Mouth: An Existential Comic Diary struggle to dissolve rigid categories of masculinity, femininity, and race. They both want to lead the lives of ordinary Americans but are misrecognized, and have to work through cultural expectations generated by their brown bodies, answering to the hopes of their families and friends and to the fantasies created by literature, film, and media.
Keywords: terrorism, postmodern novel, graphic novel, masculinity, South Asian American, Filipino American, 9/11, historiographic metafiction, Alex Gilvarry, Keshni Kashyap, Mari Araki
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