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This chapter will juxtapose Viet Thanh Nguyen’s short story “The Other Man” from his 2017 collection The Refugees with James Baldwin’s 1956 Giovanni’s Room to examine how the representations of alienated queer bodies that appear in each can, together, help to redress traumatic pasts through the retelling of stories. Nguyen’s piece of a young Vietnamese refugee in America exploring his sexuality seems to pay tribute to Baldwin’s famous novella with its engagement of Lacanian mirror reflections, representations of disembodied selfhoods, and each protagonists’ wilful navigation towards a future free of painful memories marked by what they see as their perversity. In both stories, David and Liem use mirror reflections of their bodies to project an “other,” doubled self, and to negotiate their association with desire, with each ultimately becoming estranged from their somatic experience. Engaging Sara Ahmed’s work on disorientations of queer corporeality, as well as theories of trauma, memory, and narrative outlining the importance of a collaborate witness of painful testimonies, this chapter explores how reading the echoing depictions of the self-exile of queer bodies in tandem contributes to the forging of restorative discourses mitigating queer traumas.

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Painful Reflections: Trauma Narratives, Disorientations, and Re-membering the Queer Body in Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and Nguyen’s “The Other Man”

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  • 发表日期：

    2025年

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  • Ann Catherine Hoag

摘要

This chapter will juxtapose Viet Thanh Nguyen’s short story “The Other Man” from his 2017 collection The Refugees with James Baldwin’s 1956 Giovanni’s Room to examine how the representations of alienated queer bodies that appear in each can, together, help to redress traumatic pasts through the retelling of stories. Nguyen’s piece of a young Vietnamese refugee in America exploring his sexuality seems to pay tribute to Baldwin’s famous novella with its engagement of Lacanian mirror reflections, representations of disembodied selfhoods, and each protagonists’ wilful navigation towards a future free of painful memories marked by what they see as their perversity. In both stories, David and Liem use mirror reflections of their bodies to project an “other,” doubled self, and to negotiate their association with desire, with each ultimately becoming estranged from their somatic experience. Engaging Sara Ahmed’s work on disorientations of queer corporeality, as well as theories of trauma, memory, and narrative outlining the importance of a collaborate witness of painful testimonies, this chapter explores how reading the echoing depictions of the self-exile of queer bodies in tandem contributes to the forging of restorative discourses mitigating queer traumas.