Failing the World: The Stakes of Trans Refusal in Rita Indiana's Tentacle

In this thesis, I provide a critical feminist literary analysis of Rita Indiana’s Tentacle to investigate how Indiana mobilizes gender, race, and class to imagine potentially radical queer responses to the violences created by colonialism and neoliberalism as they shape the fate of Hispaniola, the Caribbean, and the climate. Deborah Vargas’s analytic of lo sucio, queer temporalities as described by José Esteban Muñoz and Jack Halberstam, and Jack Halberstam’s theorization of queer failure serve as theoretical frameworks to determine the novel’s use in understanding trans and queer resistance and refusal in the face of biopolitics, neoliberalism and climate change. These frameworks engage with Black and decolonial feminist thought to provide critiques of neoliberalism and understand how slavery, colonization, capitalism and neoliberalism shape our world and the futures we imagine.