Religious Alienation and "Homosexual Consciousness" in City of Night and Go Tell It on the Mountain

Giles, James R.

doi:10.2307/374856

Cited by 11 publications

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R echy, J ohn

Moreno¹

2010

The Encyclopedia of Twentieth‐Century Fiction

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A prolific writer from the gay and Chicano communities, John Rechy has redefined the American narrative of the late twentieth century by crossing literary genres and challenging cultural perceptions. His many novels, which often blur autobiography with fiction, possess a cinematic quality that reveals the underside of urban spaces and the search for one's identity. Since the late 1950s, Rechy has actively transformed and articulated the way outsiders, particularly homosexuals, have been perceived throughout the United States.

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R echy, J ohn

Moreno¹

2010

The Encyclopedia of Twentieth‐Century Fiction

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Performativity and Performance: Identities and Multi-Dimensional Psychological Passing in Go Tell It on the Mountain

Wang

2023

Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction

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Hiding in John Rechy’s Closet

Miranda

2024

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States

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John Rechy is not interested in representation. Yet Rechy’s refusal to engage with identity using the terms offered to ethnic and queer writers has puzzled critics of his work. This article contends with John Rechy’s evasive novel, City of Night (1963), to reconsider Rechy’s attachment to refusal as a formal and political project that confounds any effort to portray a stable transparent minority subject. Through the novel’s rejection of disclosure and recognition, City of Night moves against forms of political stability (normative coupling, categorical identification, and property ownership) to feature ephemeral spaces in which minoritized people gather and shift around at the very moment the US state is restricting and criminalizing Mexican movement and sedimenting heteronormativity into law. By attending to evasion and refusal, I push the boundaries of Rechy criticism that have found City of Night devoid of politics or attachments to ethnic identity. Rather, I argue that the novel moves against individuation to offer ephemeral moments of entanglement with queer racialized Others through the composite form and figure of the “outsider.” Located in the unincorporated mass or crowd, City of Night’s attachment to the “outsider” thinks across difference to reveal the ways racialization underpins the policing of movement, heteronormativity, and citizenship in the mid-twentieth century. Ultimately, Rechy’s aesthetics of refusal registers the under-examined affinities between migrant, laborer, queer, and brown at the very moment the United States sought to restrict how we think about identity and politics in public.

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Religious Alienation and "Homosexual Consciousness" in City of Night and Go Tell It on the Mountain

Cited by 11 publications

References 0 publications

R echy, J ohn

R echy, J ohn

Performativity and Performance: Identities and Multi-Dimensional Psychological Passing in Go Tell It on the Mountain

Hiding in John Rechy’s Closet

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