- Title
- Disidentifying masculinities: queer Latinx embodiment in Australia
- Creator
- Haro, Adriana
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2022
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- This study explores how young queer Latinx men living in Australia understand, negotiate, and embody masculinities. Latinx men are often associated with ‘machismo’, or dominant, aggressive forms of masculinity. This thesis explores the ways queer Latinx men navigate masculinities as queer, racialised and desired subjects under the gaze and demands of whiteness in Australia. I draw upon queer, feminist and critical race theories to explore how queer Latinx men negotiate and embody masculinities, sexualities, and being ‘other’ in a white dominant cultural context. My original contribution to knowledge is the combination of theoretical concepts alongside a feminist post structural methodology that allow for the multiple intersecting identities (sexuality, race, ethnicity, gender) of men and their bodies to be centred in how they perform masculinities while honouring the intricacy of these tensions. This thesis draws from twenty-one semi-structured in-depth interviews with queer Latinx men and a creative visual method known as sandboxing. This method aims to elicit conversation and allows for reflection and sharing of a visual and symbolic representation of participants’ lives. Furthermore, it provided a visualisation of ‘otherness’ in the Australian context and how this is felt and embodied, allowing further exploration of these themes in interviews. Findings suggest queer Latinx men understand masculinities beyond normative gender binary explanations. Queer masculinities are lived and embodied while negotiating dominant racialised narratives. The fluidity of masculinities surfaces in participants’ reflexive engagement with masculinities and the nuances in negotiating and simultaneously reproducing gender binary norms. Meanwhile some acknowledged they are working on unlearning perceiving femininity as fraught. Participants’ careful negotiation in engaging with feminine culture led to developing the concept ‘feminine threshold’ a theoretical contribution offered in this thesis. These findings hope to contribute to new intersectional understandings of how gender, masculinities and queer identities are lived and negotiated through the racialised norms of whiteness in Australia.
- Subject
- masculinities; creative methods; Latinx; embodiment; queer theory
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1463982
- Identifier
- uon:46883
- Rights
- Copyright 2022 Adriana Haro
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 3 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 433 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |