Feminism : The Erotics Of Black Self Making By Cuba, And Deborah Pruitt And Suzanne Lafont 's Article

Castillo Bueno, Maria De Los Reyes, and Daisy Rubiera Castillo. Reyita: The Life of a Black Cuban Woman in the Twentieth Century. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000. Print.

African American women have long been stereotyped, discriminated against and generalized in this country. They have had to face both being black in America while also being a woman in America. African American women encountered and still do encounter double discrimination of both sex and race (Cuthbert, 117). Women like Elise Johnson McDougald, Marion Vera Cuthbert and Alice Dunbar-Nelson all tried to shed light on what it was like to be an African American woman living in the 20th century yet literature often portrayed them as emotional, hypersexual, unintelligent and of lesser worth. The literature highlighted that African American women have to serve both their employer and their husbands and families. They are not supposed to have an opinion or stand up for themselves, especially to a white man. ***Concluding sentence?

This highlights that Chicanas prefer Chicanos more than they prefer each other; they perpetuate gender hierarchy by constantly placing males above females. Chicanas fear the criticism they will endure if they defy gender boundaries. Joan Riviere addresses this phenomenon in her essay “Womanliness as a Masquerade. Her essay explores the discomfort that woman feel when they act outside of the boundaries established by a male dominated society. In one example, she describes a

We live in a society where for decades we have been socialized to believe that there are only two genders: male and female. The idea of gender is socially constructed. Society and culture create gender roles and through those roles we all learn to enact our specific roles. With this in mind, this essay will seek to examine how gender shapes the structural and lived experiences of Chicanxs and Latinxs in the U.S. This essay will draw from Abrego, Acosta, Ocampo, and the documentary “No mas bebés” to see how gender affects an individual’s experiences in the U.S.

The effects of the Cuban Revolution on women’s lives and gender relations in Cuba from 1959 to 1990 include that some say women have not reached equality yet with men, women gained more opportunities for themselves, economy and politics, and also how women still had responsibility for children and home, not men.

Machismo, or male chauvinism, is a concept that characterizes many Latin American male behaviors, most importantly those associated with masculinity and pride. This concept, most likely introduced to New Spain by Spanish conquistadors who embodied these traits, was then adopted and integrated as a part of Mexican culture going forward. Because of male masculinity prevailing over feminine traits during the 17th century, misogyny and the oppression of women became a norm in Mexican culture. Struggling to be valued in Mexico, women turned to literature and art to voice their opinions and expose the machismo in Mexican culture. Through literature and art, is where feminism in Mexico arose and is continually strengthen in. This paper will discuss the ways in which Mexican feminist literature and art over time have exposed and challenged machismo, misogyny, and the Mexican patriarchy since the Spanish Conquest.

Asencio’s study tries to understand how Puerto Rican lesbians deal with their gender, sexuality, and ethnonationality, living in another country. The study focus on the experience of migrant Porto Rican lesbians regarding their multiple identities as women, lesbians, Porto Ricans, and migrants, the complexities of the issues and the strategies employed to survive, and the relationship among gender, sexuality. Ethnonationality, migration, and geographical location. The author reinforces that there is almost none study about lesbians Latinas, and she points out that the experience of those women could contribute to social science with the understanding of gender, race, culture, sexuality, and issues of multiple identities and oppressions.

In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the reader gets a sense of what the expectations are of Dominican men and women. Junot Díaz uses Oscar in contrast to the other male characters to present the expectations of the Dominican male. On the other hand, Díaz presents the women in the text, especially Belicia, La Inca, Lola, and Jenni, as strong characters in their own rights, but the male characters, with the exception of Oscar, have a desire to display their masculinity to maintain power over these women. It would be unfair to say that the women bring the abuse unto themselves, but rather it is their culture that makes the abuse acceptable and almost to a certain extent—expected.

The Effects of the Cuban Revolution on Women’s lives and Gender relations in Cuba from 1959 to 1990

The readings for this week consisted of the second half of Conceiving Cuba by Elise Andaya (2014). This half of the book focused on abortion, gendered work and surviving through migration (Andaya, 2014). Overall, Andaya (2014) focuses less on reproductive health and women than one would expect, and instead provides more of a critique of the shortcomings of the socialist revolution in Cuba. These critiques get in the way of Andaya’s (2014) narrative and ultimately detract from the discussion of reproductive health in Cuba.

In Junot Diaz’s short story, “Drown” masculinity is a cultural imperative that prohibits young men, particularly those of Latino decent, from being able to express love in a meaningful way, or follow the desires of their heart. There are several factors prohibiting them from this pursuit. The absence of a father figure in the narrator’s life, and indeed in the life of many young Latino men, lead them to develop their own ideas of masculinity based on scant memories of their father prior to abandonment, or a fictionalized version told to them by others, as proposed by critic John Riofrio. Riofrio also asserts that this

True masculine force goes back, in family stories from the Dominican Republic, with Trujillo's dictatorship shaping manhood perception in the Dominican culture. Oscar is incapable of rising to male-standard imposed by

These extravagant women were revered by their generation, and according to the Cuban foreign minister in 1958, Andrés Vargas Gómez, "She was a sacred creature and it was her right to have precedence in all things." While the number of professional women in Cuba grew throughout the first half of the twentieth century (lawyers, doctors, businesswomen, journalists, teachers, and musicians), the huge discrepancy between them and the average Cuban woman was not shrinking. The view of women as pura o putas existed, and equality was a long way away. According to Lois M. Smith and Alfred Padula, the long-term deficit of women in times of slavery played a significant role in the construction of sexual relations in Cuba (p 9). During slavery in Cuba, there were very few slave women, and white women only represented ten percent of the Cuban population.

In “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/ Modern Gender System,” Maria Lugones offers the idea that gender targets women of color. Lugones brings up the research of Oyeronke Oyewumi, who looked into how gender affected the structure of the Yoruba people, especially since gender was not a concept that was originally part of their culture. Once the idea of “women,” was implemented into the community through colonization, women were identified in contrast to men who were then considered the “norm.” (Lugones). If the women did not have a penis, they were reduced as women, beneath men and they no longer had any power in their communities. The Yoruba men accepted this idea and then collaborated with colonists to further oppress women (Lugones). Paula

And how to bury them. Inside their hearts. Concealed in their blood. They were strong women, then. Tough women. Women who gave birth in the fields today, and returned to raise their hoe and lift their load two afternoons later; wthin fourty-eight hours. In the same fields. Yes” (37). Throughout the Caribbean, the small population of white people controlled the majority of the wealth. Like everywhere else in the world, money is directly associated with power and social class. Women being seen as men’s inferiors, rather than their partners, is a social construction that plagues areas that have been affected by colonialism. That puts black women at the bottom of the social latter, with wealthy white men at the to; consequently, black women were viewed as disposable.