Margarita Delgado
Justin Torres’ We the Animals is a novel that focuses on the intertwinement of family and queerness. In this essay, I will examine how Torres’ novel elucidates queer realities through its rejection of the heteronormative construct of time and, in turn, demonstrates the narrator’s gender and sexual development while revealing and dismantling toxic notions of masculinity present in the Latinx community.
Justin Torres’ We the Animals centers around an unnamed narrator and his two brothers, Manny and Joel’s, life in upstate New York in the 1980s. The narrative focuses on the narrator’s development of his sexuality through a queering of time that explores his internal and external world. As the narrator grows, his engagement with his gender and sexuality further develops as it becomes shaped by the broken and contradicting familial dynamic. The narrator grows up receiving contradicting behavior from both of his parents and his brothers resulting in a distorted perception of himself that makes it difficult for him to make sense of his queerness. Manny and Joel love and shield the narrator from harm while simultaneously shaming him for his deemed feminine behavior. The mother is often absent mentally which limits the care she can provide for her children but deeply loves them nevertheless. The father, being of Puerto Rican descent, performs abusive acts onto not only the narrator but the rest of the family as well while sometimes being affectionate; he embodies typical machismo and instills these toxic ideas onto his sons which creates turmoil within the narrator as he attempts to come to terms with his queer identity. Torres’ emphasis on heteronormative ways of thinking present in the narrator’s family put in conversation with the narrator’s self-actualization reveals how the warping of time instigates a nonlinear life development in queer lives.
I use Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds as a theoretical framework for understanding time in relation to queerness to depict We the Animals’ narrator’s presentation of queer temporalities as he engages with his gender and sexuality under nonlinear time. In Freeman’s Time Binds, Freeman states that time binds is when the “…naked flesh is bound into socially meaningful embodiment through temporal regulation: binding is what turns mere existence into a form of mastery in a process…” (Freeman 3). Freeman refers to this “form of mastery in a process” as “chrononormativity” (Freeman 3). Freeman uses this term to explain the heteronormative temporal that we are all expected to adhere to. Alongside Freeman, I will also use Flores’ analysis on how We the Animals engages with familial closeness to uncover queered masculinity and dismiss the binary. Flores says, “Latinx male subjectivity is not binary but instead a confluence of contradictory identities” (Flores 7). Thus, the notion of what masculinity looks like in the Latinx community being depicted as a contradiction in the novel discloses Torres’ reimagining of masculinity. In turn, the queering of masculinity through the family’s closeness further puts Freeman’s idea of time binds into play in subject to the narrator’s queer reality.
In We the Animals, Torres marks the importance of the narrator’s perception of masculinity in relation to from the beginning of the novel. The narrator’s mother tells the narrator to say six forever and not grow up because there is “…no softness anywhere, only Paps and boys turning into Paps” (Torres 17). The mother’s perception of the father reveals his domineering macho masculinity. This hypermasculinity surrounding the father and the son’s admiration towards him demonstrates the gendered norms men need to follow in order to be perceived well by society. When the narrator takes a hold of his mother’s face and kisses her, he says, “She cussed me and Jesus, and the tears dropped, and I was seven” (Torres 17). This shift in the narrator’s life signals the beginning of his self-actualization regarding his masculinity and sexuality. The narrator enters an area of life where he must learn to behave according to the heteronormative construct of time. In Time Binds, Freeman explains that “Manipulations of time convert historically specific regimes of asymmetrical power into seemingly ordinary bodily tempos and routines, which in turn organize the value and meaning of time” (Freeman 3). The narrator turning seven and begins to grow up represents this manipulation of time Freeman refers to. Here commences the narrator’s experience of queer temporality as he begins to observe queered masculinity that develops his masculinity and sexuality.
Torres portrays the narrator’s father with a hetero-patriarchal attitude while contradicting it by showing how he is unable to hold up to these standards; thus, resulting in the queering of masculinity that shapes the narrator’s queer reality. The narrator says that “He was like an animal, our father, ruddy and physical and instinctive…” (Torres 45). However, shortly after, the narrator proclaims: “We were all together in the bathroom, in this moment, and nothing was wrong. My brothers and I were clean and fed and not afraid of growing up” (Torres 46). The contrast on the narrator’s experience and perception of his father show his inability to sustain the heteronormative masculinity ideal. Thus, the narrator’s masculinity gets queered as well; he must comply and present in a “masculine” manner like his father and his brothers. As a result, this becomes important in the way his queerness develops. Keating says, “Working to orientate yourself toward heteronormativity when you tend to veer off into queerness is a physical effort” (Keating). The narrator continuously struggles to adhere to the heteronormative construct of time finding it difficult due to internal and external factors.
Towards the end of the novel, Torres includes a chapter called “The Night I Was Made” where we can see the disclosure and focus on the narrator’s engagement with his masculinity and sexuality. While the narrator is with his brother, he says, “They smelled my difference—my sharp, pansy scent…All at once they were disgusted, and jealous, and deeply protective, and deeply proud” (Torres 104). The brothers exhibit contradicting actions against one another to show the dilemma the narrator faces when it comes to his sexuality. The narrator is bound and loved by his brothers dearly, but at the same time, he is ridiculed for presenting a non-heteronormative quality like sensitivity. In turn, this makes his journey of discovering himself more difficult as he is torn by contradictory behaviors. Flores states, “Intimacy exposes the inherent tensions within families that cause the reification of heteronormative patriarchal social norms while also challenging these same expectations” (Flores 7). We can see this depicted through the narrator’s relationship with his brothers. His brothers and the narrator have been raised to perform a typical version of macho masculinity while at the same time being shown a differing side. In the end, the narrator becomes intimate with a driver and exclaims: “He made me!” and “I’m made!” (Torres 114). Here, the narrator’s first encounter with intimacy takes place in an unconventional setting. This reveals Freeman’s idea of time binds as the narrator experiences things in a manner that goes against the heteronormative construct of time. The narrator’s encounter with the driver eschews chrononormativity and displays a moment that is meaningful and essential to his identity.
In the novel’s final chapters, the narrator’s sexuality gets discovered when they find his journal in which he writes about all of his fantasies with men. When they confront the narrator about it, he lashes out at them. The narrator says, “I said and did animal, unforgivable things. What else, but to take me to the zoo?” (Torres 117). The narrator’s failure to embody heteronormative temporality results in him being taken to a mental hospital. Prior to this discovery, the narrator was deemed highly by his parents; the narrator recounts how his parents referred to him as different from his brothers as he possessed potential to do something more with his life. However, this crumbles down once his queerness comes to light. Freeman says that “…the discipline of “timing” engenders a sense of being and belonging that feels natural…” (Freeman 18). Society makes queer individuals feel like they need to adhere to the “natural” temporality in order to perform according to heteronormative temporality. The narrator’s failure to do so depicts how queer people experience time differently than nonqueer people; they must endure different things, so they do not follow a linear time frame. In order for the narrator to become a master of his sexuality, he had to revalue his relationship to temporality.
Throughout this paper, I argued that Torres’ We the Animals centers on the protagonist narrator’s self-actualization as he navigates and explores his masculinity and sexuality. The nonlinear time the narrator follows rejects the heteronormative construct of time; thus, engaging in Freeman’s theory of time binds. Freeman’s theory reveals how queer people experience time in a distinct way to nonqueer people. Torres is able to elucidate this by showing the narrator’s temporal experience as it relates to his sexuality and queered masculinity. Through Torres’ novel, queer temporalities in subject to Freeman’s time binds and its relation to not only gender and sexuality but to familial closeness as well.
Works Cited
Freeman, E. (2010). Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke Univ. Press.
Ramos Flores, Nicolás. “En Familia: Queer Intimacy and the Disruption of Latinx Masculinity in Justin Torres’ We the Animals (2011).” Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures, vol. 6, no. 2, 2022, pp. 5–23. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=mzh&AN=202432768246&site=eds-live&scope=site.
Rylan, J. (2020, October 16). “Heterotemporality and Queer time.” Medium. https://radiantbutch.medium.com/heterotemporality-and-queer-time-b91cce4f538e
Torres, J. (2011). We the Animals. MARINER Books.