In this essay, Decena follows Maja Horn's invitation to move historical and literary analysis of Dominican literature away from the masculine ideation mapped in her pioneering Masculinity after Trujillo: The Politics of Gender in Dominican Literature (2014). Through an engagement with the operations of silence in the work of Hilma Contreras and of racialized gender identity formation in the novel Erzulie's Skirt by Ana-Maurine Lara, Decena considers more horizons made possible by the opening in the study of Dominican literature that Horn traces. In addition to registering the contradictory effects of the Rafael Trujillo dictatorship on social and identity formations past and present, Decena echoes Horn in proposing that artistic production by Dominican women during the dictatorship and in the contemporary moment offers alternative and productive theoretical models of sociality and identity formation.
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