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In an important scene from Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), Yunior de las Casas, the book's narrator, compares Oscar de León, who is dressed as Doctor Who for Halloween, to Oscar Wilde, the homosexual Irish playwright. A subsequent mispronunciation of the word Wilde-Wao-becomes Oscar's moniker as well as the eponymous title of the novel. The scene ties together several themes prevalent throughout the work, including Oscar and Yunior's mutual obsession with genre fiction and the heteronormative teasing to which Oscar is subjected as a consequence of his status as a nerd.1 As this episode makes apparent, an interest in genre fiction is at odds with the performance of the hyper-masculine Dominican male gender identity that Yunior struggles to maintain. Though many critics have explored the use of genre fiction in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the incompatibility between the perceived un-masculine nerdiness of science fiction and fantasy on the one hand and heteronormative models of masculinity on the other is often assumed yet rarely addressed as a critical problem in and of itself. Drawing on the work of Wendy Gay Pearson, Veronica Hollinger, and Joan Gordon, this paper posits that certain works of genre fiction employ discourses of difference which queer heteronormative gender models, thus destabilizing the gender identities internalized by victims of the violence of the Trujillo regime and their descendants in the novel.
The notable presence genre fiction references in Oscar Wao has inspired a number of interpretations. Many critics have focused on the way in which the narrator, Yunior, incorporates elements of science fiction and fantasy literature into his retelling of the life of Oscar and the saga of the De León and Cabral families. A number of these interpretations approach the topic of genre fiction in terms of culture and ethnicity. T.S. Miller argues that genre fiction problematizes the boundaries between literature and lived experience while serving as a metaphor for the act of narration. He concludes that Yunior regards science fiction as a legitimate discourse in both literary and cultural terms which acts as a lens through which he is better able to interpret and understand his experiences in the Dominican diaspora. Daniel Bautista suggests that the role of genre fiction functions as...