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El Machismo Analysis

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In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, the plot follows Oscar as he navigates through life. Initially, it is established that Oscar does not apply to the preconceived stereotypes of the woman-objectifying alpha male in the Latin American culture, el machismo. Oscar defies his culture; specifically in his view of love. Reinstated many times throughout the plot, the men Oscar surrounds himself with have one view of women, to merely hookup with them and to always hit on them. Oscar, although fascinated by sex and its pleasures, is desperately focused on finding romantic love. Oscar experiences many situations in which he realizes the true reality of love, relationships, and the complexity of people. On the contrary, the narrator, …show more content…

Both are males conditioned by a society who defines masculinity in a word, el machismo. All the males in the book are just products of the society they live in. According to Merriam-Webster, machismo is a strong or exaggerated sense of manliness; an assumptive attitude that virility, courage, strength, and entitlement to dominate are attributes or concomitants of masculinity. This definition was quite politically correct and very concise. To understand what actual Latino teenagers/young adults perceive machismo as, I found this definition from urban dictionary: Having an unusually high or exaggerated sense of masculinity. Including an attitude that aggression, strength, sexual prowess, power and control is the measure of someone 's manliness. Also, a machismo man feels having these traits entitles him to respect and obedience from men and women around him. These definitions lead me to believe that boys are raised to feel entitled to objects, authority, woman, and money just because they are male. This is a huge flaw in how boys are raised. Rather than teaching boys to earn respect and to nurture their emotions, a whole culture is teaching the opposite. This affects Yunior because he believes he can be “in love” with Lola and still sleep with other women. He has been conditioned to feel entitlement over every woman he wants, which inevitably leads to him permanently losing Lola. According to machismo, in order for Oscar to

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How they know such difficult words are a different matter and will be discussed in later paragraphs, however the fact stands that masculinity is often correlated with economic power which is linked quite directly as a result of capitalism. Everyone is pursuing American dream where the limit of one’s wealth is the limit of one’s ability to earn it, and in a capitalist society, this is basically one of the core motions of its people. Liberty also plays a role in defining masculinity. It could be understood that womanizer is one of the traits of men by interpreting it as a way for a man to express freedom. Being able to choose any and as much women as you want also linked to power which is also considered as one of the most important traits of being a man.

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Not only does Diaz write novels and short stories, but he also takes action towards exposing the problems that Dominican people especially women face everyday. There might be some people who consider Diaz to be an Antifeminist and also a disgrace to his country, the Dominican Republic, but the only thing that Diaz is doing with his writing is exposing the reality of what its meant to be an immigrate from another country and how machismo affects Feminism in Latin cultures. Diaz shows his feminism by exposing machismo and what women in Latin cultures deal with everyday. Machismo is a term used to describe the dominant male behavior in Latin cultures. Machismo can also be describe as a man objectifying a women as a

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Beli Getting Pregnant The Brief Life Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a novel written by Junot Diaz, a Dominican writer. The novel, that was written in 2007, is about Oscar and his family’s experiences. It also differentiates race and gender in the Dominican Republic.

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In the memoir, The Prince of Los Cocuyos, the performance of masculinity of the people is illuminated. This is seen with most of the men conforming to the gendered expectations of a man, some confidently defying and conforming at the same time, and Riqui not daring to disturb the universe, but having a hard time conforming to all the expectations. As a child when it was just his grandmother giving him a hard time about acting and looking like a man, Riqui defied many of the gendered expectations. However, when these expectations started coming from friends then he started to attempt to act like he was expected. Riqui defies gendered expectations of a boy through his interest in the girly things like Cinderella, dolls and makeovers; however,

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Oscar is an awkward overweight nerd while Yunior was an athlete who could bench 340 pounds. There values were also completely opposite. Oscar is a romantic, caring, faithful, and respectful. Yunior is the stereotypical type of a man that is masculine with no care for anything, a cheater, and no value or sympathy in things. Despite all these differences they became best friends.

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In Latino culture, machismo behavior is defined by men that see inferiority in people and expect obedience from them (mostly non-male-bodied individuals). This is illustrated when Blanca invites the pastor and Claudia, a woman from church, to dinner despite Julio’s distaste for it. As a result, Julio snaps at Blanca after her persistent preaching of a church where she is indirectly disrespected and “‘the women are treated as if they were just there to glorify their husbands, their children, and their pastor’” (Quiñonez, 130). Throughout the novel, Blanca is presented as a pious girl, as if she has not changed from the young schoolgirl that Julio fell in love with when he was young.

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Fabrice Previl 11/10/2017 Despite all the societal changes that took place in the recent years concerning women’s rights, there is still some habits that goes against this progress in the Latino American culture. The idea of machismo is still a rampant problem that exist still to this day. Machismo can be defined as a strong sense of masculine pride. This form of alpha male mentality conveys a sense of gender bias that is transmitted generation to generation and that has a direct impact on the family relationships.

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As a result of this, Oscar would develop an unhealthy obsession towards finding love and losing his virginity, where he would engross himself in sexual and romantic fantasies with girls he liked and have an unhealthy obsession towards them. Often to the point where he would cry in the bathroom in isolation knowing that such fantasies will never be reality (Diaz 23-24). One of the reasons

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In the novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” by Junot Diaz we see masculinity in a whole different level. Masculinity is the main theme in this novel, Junot Diaz uses masculinity to embody the Latino culture but specially the Dominican Republic culture. Junot Diaz uses a language that can be interpreted as rude or even discriminatory towards his own people, but I think that he just wants to be realistic about the issue. On this novel we meet Oscar who is the main protagonist of the novel, and who is constantly being harassed by his own family on how to be a men and how he’s not considered to be a true Dominican. Their definition of a true Dominican man is someone who play sports, get girls, know how to dance and is a really physical/verbally

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At a young age Oscar wanted to be love and to have sex but this something that never happened so he becomes depress and overweight. he soon thinks that it is the curse of the Fuku that Is over him and that is way he is not happy with his love life because he has became a

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Until suffering from a breakup that made changes in his life forcing him to take different actions, attitudes, and values as he grows older. In the beginning, Oscar chose to date two girls at the same time— only lasting a week before he gets heartbroken. Afterwards, he changes his perspective about life by doing negative choices. First, he lets himself down by not caring about his physical looks and becomes overweight and unattractive, “Over the couple years he grew fatter and fatter.

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You had the big difference between Oscar and Yunior. Yunior was your typical Dominican because of all the characteristics he had. In the article The Marvelous History of the Dominican Republic in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao “The narrative sees him transform himself from a ‘normal’ Dominican boy raised in a ‘typical’ Dominican family” (a characterization of Oscar that applies equally to Yunior); although Yunior himself was “one of those Dominican cats everybody’s always going on about,” a “home-run hitter,” a “playboy with a million hits on his jock.” The thing with Yunior was that he didn’t have just one girl he had multiple girls and had sex with multiple girls.

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Through his psychoanalytic theory the writer respectfully expounds males identify with masculinity by not behaving as their female caretakers act. Mr. Carter based

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