P-07 “Look at that little macho”: Surveillance and Hegemonic Masculinity in Junot Díaz’s The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Spanning three generations of the Cabral family, Junot Díaz’s The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) explores the prescriptive nature of Dominican masculinity. Theories about masculinity posited by scholars like R.W. Connell, Michael Kimmel, and M. Cristina Alcade, and Michel Foucault’s concept of the panopticon frame my analysis of the surveillance of Oscar de Leon’s and his grandfather Abelard Cabral’s masculinity. Close reading of the novel demonstrates that while resistance appears at the individual level, ultimately, this resistance is futile unless the cultural system that encourages social surveillance, internalization, and thus self-surveillance of masculinity ultimately changes as well.