“For opacity”: Queerness and Latinidad in Justin Torres’ We the Animals; [“Por la opacidad”: Identidad queer y latinidad en We the Animals de Justin Torres]

This article examines the investments of Justin Torres’s debut novel, We the Animals (2012), with Latinidad, queerness and masculinity under the framework of opacity proposed by Édouard Glissant. I argue that Torres’s novel employs opacity—the refusal to be legible to the gaze of a dominant Other—as a way of grappling with the tensions between Latinx and queer identities and textualizing the relationship between queerness and other forms of structural marginalization. I read the novel’s aesthetic strategies in relation to opacity and the institutionalization of creative writing and consider the politics of the novel within a genealogy of US Puerto Rican coming-of-age novels and their relationship to the literary market. Finally, I read the relationships among masculinity, queerness and Latinidad the novel presents and illustrate how it ultimately presents a blueprint for Latinx queer liberation. © 2020, Springer Nature Limited.