![]() Throughout the novel, Baldwin builds a mosaic of layered stories, allowing him to entertain competing and often contradictory ideas. Baldwin’s rearrangement of the unaccounted-for potential of attraction is a disruption of focused, one-directional sexuality and a challenge to socially constructed identities offered by the cultural discourse. By not “fixing” his characters’ attractions in a singular direction, Baldwin offers alternative, fluid, and flexible potentialities for sexual desire. Baldwin tells a story of sexual desire without form and in doing so, subverts socially prescribed notions of sexual desire as concrete, definite, and static. Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination”ġIn confronting the limiting confines of social construction, James Baldwin’s Another Country offers itself as a touchstone for the re-imagination of gender, sexual identity, and sexual aim. ![]() To claim that is what I am is to suggest a provisional totalization of this “I”. One is absolutely forced to make perpetual qualifications and one’s own reactions are always canceling each other out…One is always in the position of having to decide between amputation and gangrene.James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
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