The document analyzes gender dynamics and masculinity in Junot Diaz's works Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. It discusses how the protagonists Yunior and Oscar, despite sharing a Dominican heritage, develop very different senses of masculinity due to their differing paternal influences. Yunior's negative relationship with his father leads him to have unhealthy views of relationships, while Oscar's lack of a father figure and influence from maternal figures in his life allow him to love in a more tender way. The document examines how these varying paternal presences shape the characters' relationships with women and senses of gender.

1. 1
Maggie Basta
ENGL 455/Rodriguez
Essay 1
The Power of the Sexual “inities”
Junot Diaz is an author that centers his works on many important societal themes. One of
the themes that always seems to stand out and reoccur in both the stories within Drown and
Diaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is gender dynamics, especially in the
domestic sphere. It is clear that masculinity and femininity and the way they are represented in
the home can play a significant factor in adolescents and the way they will treat and react to the
opposite sex. Without proper role models, both paternal and maternal, these values may not be
properly instilled, and this can be very detrimental to people’s intimate relationships throughout
their lives. In these two texts, Diaz explores this through protagonists who are two strikingly
different males. One of the reasons for such a difference between them is the influence of the
paternal force in the home (or lack thereof). Although both Oscar and Yunior have been raised
with a similar Dominican heritage and in the northeastern United States, they are two very
different characters when it comes to their masculinity and the way they relate to the opposite
sex.
Yunior is the main character in Drown and the narrator and Oscar’s friend in The Brief
Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Although his father wasn’t a very strong influence in Yunior’s life
until he was nine, when he was present, he often created a negative male impression on him. In
the second story in Drown, “Fiesta 1989” Yunior dissects his feelings toward his father for
readers. Yunior states, “It was like my God-given duty to piss him off, to do everything the way
he hated. Our fights didn’t bother me much. I still wanted him to love me” (p. 27). This already
shows Yunior’s clear desire to gain his father’s love and acceptance. It leads to the assumption

2. 2
that Yunior might be willing to do things he wouldn’t normally do in order to please his father.
In “Fiesta 1989” one of the biggest conflicts is Yunior’s irrational car-sickness. Yunior reflects
on the times him and his father would go on drives in attempt to aid this and how much he
cherished those moments. He writes, “It wasn’t really working but I looked forward to our trips,
even though at the end of each one I’d be sick. These were the only times me and Papi did
anything together. When we were alone he treated me much better, like maybe I was his son or
something” (p. 34). Yunior is even willing to put up with being sick just to spend a little time
with his father. His desire to be close and connect with his father is clear indication of Yunior’s
desire to understand what masculinity is. Spending time with his father is one way to help
Yunior learn about being a man. The only problem with this is the fact that Yunior’s father may
not be the best person to be teaching Yunior.
In this story it is also revealed that Yunior’s father is cheating on his mother and it is
often when on these car trips that he visits her. Although the father may just see this as a “two
birds, one stone” kind of situation, he doesn’t understand that he is giving Yunior the idea that
being a man, especially a Dominican man, is being with more than just one woman at a time.
These behaviors will come to shape Yunior’s life in a quite negative fashion in the future. An
article by Charles Lee tries to understand Yunior’s masculinity in his article “Discourse and
Narrative: Creating Gender Control in Junot Diaz 's the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”. He
defines Yunior’s masculinity as follows, “As we have shown earlier, Yunior’s conception of
masculinity requires that emotional sentimentality and tenderness are not permitted for a proper
performance of masculinity” (Lee, 11). Lee is notices the pattern exhibited by Yunior. In not
only the kind of girls Yunior decides to date, but also the way he treats them are clear indications
of the nature of masculine values that have been instilled on Yunior. In another story in Drown,

3. 3
“Aurora” the kinds of women Yunior dates surface. He describes an encounter with a girl named
Aurora with, “When Cut puts his salsa on the next morning, I wake up, alone, the blood doing
jumping jacks in my head. I see that she’s searched my pockets, left them hanging out of my
pants like tongues. She didn’t even bother to push the fuckers back in” (Diaz, 50). Obviously
Aurora isn’t a good person. She is a thief and doesn’t even try to hide the way she’s taking
advantage of Yunior. If Lee’s interpretation is correct, it might make sense to consider why he
chooses to involve himself with such bad women. He knows that he could never fall too hard or
feel too much for any of these girls. He selects girls that he know he won’t get too emotionally
attached to, because that’s not manly. Although Yunior was lucky enough to have a male
influence for at least some part of his life, the consequences of these negative masculine values
will impact his relationships with women throughout not just Drown, but over the course of
Oscar Wao, a novel, as well.
Indeed, in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao readers see a different side of Diaz’s
male characters. Oscar DeLeon isn’t the typical male that normally inhibits Diaz’s writing. Oscar
not only opposes Diaz’s typical male character, but he also defies the idea of being a Dominican
man. On the first page of Oscar Wao, Diaz establishes this oppositional dynamic. The first
sentence reads, “Our hero was not one of those Dominican cats everybody’s always going on
about – he wasn’t no home-run hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots on his
jock” (p. 11). Not only does this text establish what is expected from a male from Dominican
heritage, but it exposes how Oscar contradicts those assertions. Immediately readers are
introduced to a character that blatantly doesn’t fit the “norm”. Oscar’s life isn’t all that different
from Yunior’s. They are both immigrants from the Dominican Republic and they both end up at
Rutgers University for their love of writing. The one big difference is the lack of male influence

4. 4
(or least of all, favorable influence) in Oscar’s life. The novel is actually focused heavily on the
women that have made up the DeLeon family. Oscar’s father is barely mentioned except for the
fact that he left Oscar’s mom, Beli for another woman, how “Dominican” of him. Oscar, instead
of growing up within the clutches of Dominican masculinity, was surrounded by powerful
maternal figures like his mother and sister, Lola. Although Oscar dreams of obtaining a girl and
losing his virginity, without anyone to ever teach him how to go about accomplishing such a feat,
he grows frustrated and lonely. This could be a consequence of growing up without a male role
model. Near the end of the novel, it becomes clear how maternal power may have deterred Oscar
from being able to ever really be a man. When Oscar finally meets Ybon, the first woman to ever
love him, the women in his life know she’s dangerous. His mother and grandmother try to
convince him to stay away from her with, “La Inca laid one of her Looks of Incredible Power on
him. Hijo, obey your mother. For a moment he almost did. Both women focusing all their
energies on him” (p. 283). This clearly shows how willing his family is to use the maternal
power they know they have in order to sway Oscar. They are aware of their feminine power and
although they are using it to help Oscar, he finds it weakening and a threat to whatever manhood
he has. Their power over his decisions on women allows us to understand Oscar’s inability to
come to terms with his masculinity.
Just because Oscar might not understand totally what it means to be a man, doesn’t make
him a bad person. In fact, Oscar seems like a great guy who cares about his passions and his
family. One way he does seem different is in the type of love he feels. The type of love Oscar has
for females harshly contrasts with the way someone like Yunior feels love toward women.
Yunior has been subjected to a negative, degrading view of masculinity from his father and his
Dominican heritage. This becomes clear when Yunior reflects on his own life after Oscar’s death

5. 5
with, “Me and Lola weren’t doing great…All my fault, of course. Couldn’t keep my rabo in my
pants, even though she was the most fucking beautiful girl in the world” (p. 310). Even though
Yunior is in love with Lola, his idea of masculinity has brain-washed him into continually
cheating on her. His desire to love her and be with her is pronounced loudly in his description of
her beauty, but he just can’t commit to one woman. Oscar on the other hand the way he loves is
described with, “His affection – that gravitational mass of love, fear, longing, desire and lust that
he directed at every girl in the vicinity without regards to looks, age, or availability – broke his
heart each and every day” (p. 23). Yunior may have desire and lust, but his paternal upbringing
renders him devoid of longing, love and fear. Their two ways of loving are strikingly different.
Brygida Gasztold seems to disagree with the way Oscar loves, though. In her article “A
Dominican-American Experience of Not Quite Successful Assimilation: Junot Diaz’s The Brief
Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” she makes some bold statements about Oscar and how
immigrating has affected not only his life, but also the way he loves. Glasztold writes, “His quest
for a date has at its roots not so much his own desire for love and intimacy, but the assurance of
his own masculinity: Oscar seeks endorsement among his peers to dispel his own doubts, which
result from his fatherless childhood and diasporic anxieties” (217). Although I do feel as though
Oscar does need outlets to reinforce what little masculinity he has, I don’t think that tops his
desire for intimacy or the basic need of being loved. When Oscar finally does find love, he dies
for it, which should already be an indication of what lengths he was willing to go to achieve it.
Also in one of his final letters to Yunior he explains his experience of finally losing his virginity.
Yunior states, “He wrote that Ybon had little hairs coming up to almost her bellybutton and that
she crossed her eyes when he entered her but what really got him was not the bam-bam-bam of
sex— it was the little intimacies that he’d never in his whole life anticipated, like combing her

6. 6
hair or getting her underwear off a line or watching her walk naked to the bathroom…” (Diaz,
334). Someone who only wanted sex to assert their masculinity would not focus on the
tenderness and love behind the act. A character like Yunior would focus on the “bam-bam-bam”
of sex or something like the high quality and size of her “womanly characteristics”. Oscar’s way
of loving isn’t wrong or less pure than Yunior’s, yet the maternal influence in the family and in
the home has just caused him to love in a different way compared to someone with a more
assenting masculine influence.
The way gender dynamics are implemented in a household greatly affect the morals and
values young adults develop. The way to treat and react to the opposite sex and even the way
someone feels love and emotions are just a few ways that masculine and feminine values can
influence people. Oscar and Yunior may share a cultural heritage and have an immigrant
experience, yet they are still quite different in the way they treat and respond emotional to
women. The masculine and feminine values instilled upon people will affect the way they love
and treat the opposite sex for the rest of their lives. At least this is definitely the case for most of
Diaz’s male characters.

7. 7