Gorgeous Healing: Liminality in Memoir and Ocean Vuong's "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous" (thesis)

Abstract

Vuong's book is both a textbook and a roadmap to this project. In the text, Vuong's protagonist, Little Dog, similarly strives to understand how to live and love in a world that has been historically violent toward him and his family. A queer, Vietnamese man growing up in Connecticut, his experiences give language to the phenomenon of historical trauma, to the ways in which traumas persist over time and generations, and how that history becomes part of an intersectional experience that is being a person of color -- a child of refugees -- in the United States. Moreover, the book is itself an exercise in not only describing those experiences, but in growing and healing from them. In its structure and style, Vuong not only invokes an academic language to define these experiences, but in the act of writing the text itself provides a model, a roadmap, for others seeking to do the same. Memoir segments, informed by interviews with my grandmother and experiences from my own life, practice and inform both these aspects of Vuong's text. They mutually inform the conclusions -- academic and personal -- throughout this project. These coalesce in a conception of empowerment that is borne of occupying an intersectional identity like mine -- or Little Dog's, which is in turn informed by the theoretical language of theorists Gloria E. Anzaldua and Homi K. Bhabha. [From Introduction]