Postnational Masculinities and Globalization in Junot Díaz and Juan Francisco Ferré

Vivancos-Pérez’s chapter demonstrates how the postnational position is influencing discourses on gender. By comparing Dominican American author Junot Díaz’s This is How You Lose Her (2012) with Spanish writer Juan Francisco Ferré’s Providence (2009) and Karnaval (2012), he argues that both authors display a critique of masculinity as an essential component of a postnational approach to cultural exchange. While Ferré disidentifies with narrative strategies of the fiction of displacement in Hispanic literatures, Díaz’s particular “low theory” emphasizes diasporicity. At the same time, this chapter draws a useful parallel between Díaz’s and Ferré’s explorations of masculinity, which add a new dimension to the transnational turn in Latino/Hispanic studies. Both authors do not simply reject traditional hypermasculine myths but try to explore their specificity within a greater transnational/global context, either by focusing on transculturation, colonial legacies, displacement and marginalization, or by elucidating the dynamic and elusive relationships among global capitalism, identity, and media spectacle.