Writing beyond stereotypes : self-reflexivity and black masculinity In Erasure By Percival Everett

Abstract

This undergraduate thesis aims to analyze how Percival Everett’s self-reflexive writing in Erasure (2001) exposes the processes through which Black masculinities are produced, interpreted, and regulated by racial, social, gendered, and commercial expectations. This study examines the construction of the protagonist Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a Black writer whose work is rejected because it does not correspond to the expectations regarding representations of Blackness considered marketable by the U. S. publishing industry. Through the analysis of metafiction, parody, intertextuality, intermedial references, and linguistic experimentation, the study investigates how the novel questions the transformation of Black identity and male experience into commercial literary categories. This investigation leads into the examination of My Pafology, a novel created under the authorial persona Stagg R. Leigh, demonstrating how Monk reproduces and exaggerates images of violence, hypermasculinity, misogyny, absent fatherhood, and social vulnerability in order to reveal the artificial character of stereotypical representations of Blackness. Drawing on the theoretical contributions of scholars such as Madelyn Jablon (1997), bell hooks (1992, 2004), Patricia Hill Collins (2004), Raewyn Connell and James W. Messerschmidt (2005), E. Patrick Johnson (2019), and Linda Hutcheon (1980, 1985), the thesis further discusses how Monk’s close relationships present contradictory creative and negotiated forms of masculinity shaped by care, vulnerability, authority, and emotional restraint. The study demonstrates that Erasure presents Black masculinity not as a fixed identity, but as an unstable and situated construction continuously marked by individual experience, affective relationships, literary conventions, and institutional expectations.