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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. I attribute the transgressive nature of genre fiction in this context to its tendency to engage in discourses of difference that challenge, or queer, gender norms by revealing their contingent, constructed nature. In what follows, I elaborate a reading of the novel informed by queer interpretations of science fiction and fantasy. That is not to say that these genres represent a monolithic category in which each book, comic, or film questions heteronormativity. Rather, I intend to show that many of the novel's sci-fi and fantasy intertexts destabilize the masculine codes that define Yunior's Dominican-American male identity.
