Gender Role Reversal? Analyzing Junot Diaz's 'Drown' and Sandra Cisneros' 'Woman Hollering Creek'

Thesis: In the short story “Woman Hollering Creek,” Sandra Cisneros emphasizes the importance of having a female figure to look up to in order to overcome the oppression women are subjected to in a patriarchal society.

In the story "Woman Hollering Creek" Sandra Cisneros discusses the issues of living life as a married woman through a character named Cleofilas; a character who is married to a man who abuses her physically and mentally .Cisneros reveals the way the culture puts a difference between a male and a female, men above women. Cisneros has been famous about writing stories about the latino culture and how women are treated; she explain what they go through as a child, teen and when they are married; always dominated by men because of how the culture has been adapted. "Woman Hollering Creek" is one of the best examples. A character who grows up without a mother and who has no one to guid and give her advise about life.

“The boys and the girls live in separate worlds.” - House On Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. Simply because of our gender, we are expected to take different roles in our lives, especially in Esperanza’s society, many people view that women have to become a housewife or work in a factory. Anyone can take a role, no gender has to dominate. I learned from Esperanza that more danger is on women, because we are usually viewed as weak and unable to defend ourselves, as Esperanza got sexually assaulted this proved true to some cases, but not all women are the

“Beautiful and Cruel” marks the beginning of Esperanza’s “own quiet war” against machismo (Hispanic culture powered by men). She refuses to neither tame herself nor wait for a husband, and this rebellion is reflected in her leaving the “table like a man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate (Cisneros 89).” Cisneros gives Esperanza a self-empowered voice and a desire for personal possessions, thing that she can call her own: Esperanza’s “power is her own (Cisneros 89).” Cisneros discusses two important themes: maintaining one’s own power and challenging the cultural and social expectations one is supposed to fulfill. Esperanza’s mission to create her own identity is manifest by her decision to not “lay (her) neck on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain (Cisneros 88).” Cisneros’ rough language and violent images of self-bondage reveal the contempt with which Esperanza views many of her peers whose only goal is to become a wife. To learn how to guard her power

In “Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Transvestite in the New World” by Catalina de Erauso, a female-born transvestite conquers the Spanish World on her journey to disguise herself as a man and inflicts violence both on and off the battlefield. Catalina discovers her hidden role in society as she compares herself to her brothers advantage in life, as they are granted money and freedom in living their own lives. Erauso decides to take action of this act of inequality by forming a rebellion, as she pledges to threaten the social order.The gender roles allotted to both men and women in the Spanish world represent the significance of societal expectations in order to identify the importance of gender in determining one’s position in the social order in the Spanish World.

Catalina de Erauso’s memoir, Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World, depicts gender relations in the early 17th century Spain. Erauso, through her detailed narrative of personal encounters with transvestism, reveals significant implications of the roles and expectations of the gender binary during this era. Her memoir evidently portrays gender binaries in dress, emotion, and interaction within society as she describes aspects of her journey from the perspective of both a woman and man. The male gender exhibits idealized masculine qualities, such as being violent and spontaneous, and the female gender exhibits idealized feminine qualities, such as emotional suppression and tranquility. Erauso expresses the distinct

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.

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

Sandra Cisneros’s short story “Never Marry a Mexican” deals heavily with the concept of myth in literature, more specifically the myth La Malinche, which focuses on women, and how their lives are spun in the shadows on men (Fitts). Myths help power some of the beliefs of entire cultures or civilizations. She gives the reader the mind of a Mexican-American woman who seems traitorous to her friends, family and people she is close to. This causes destruction in her path in the form of love, power, heartbreak, hatred, and an intent to do harm to another, which are themes of myth in literature. The unreliable narrator of this story was created in this story with the purpose to show her confusion and what coming from two completely different

A life in the city of Seguin, Texas was not as easy as Cleofilas, the protagonist of the story thought it would be. The author, Cisneros describes the life women went through as a Latino wife through Cleofilas. Luckily, Cisneros is a Mexican-American herself and had provided the opportunity to see what life is like from two window of the different cultures. Also, it allowed her to write the story from a woman’s point of view, painting a vision of the types of problems many women went through as a Latino housewife. This allows readers to analyze the characters and events using a feminist critical view. In the short story “Women Hollering Creek” Sandra Cineros portrays the theme of expectation versus reality not only through cleofilas’s thoughts but also through her marriage and television in order to display how the hardship of women in a patriarchal society can destroy a woman’s life.

Collectively, these literary images go to describe a young ethnic man, probably of Latin descent, who lives with his mother in a poverty stricken area. The careful recitation of instruction given to the younger man seems to demonstrate an intricate knowledge the narrators has accrued from both predecessors and experience. Singularly, this part of the story is very powerful in that it shows a young man having to hide who he is and where he comes from in an effort to seem appealing to women, and speaks volumes about the deception that both genders go through all in name of the chase.

In the two short stories, “Woman Hollering Creek” by Sandra Cisneros and “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, both use the theme of societal expectations and discrimination of women as the basis of their plots.

In the style of the largely abstract and elusive world of Mexican literature, Alvaro Enrique’s Escape from Suicide City and Dumbo’s Feather demonstrate their elements of gender and sexuality in a similarly subtle and implicative manner. They don’t offer any direct argument or criticism with regard to this topic, but instead offer readers the ability to observe gender and sexuality under the first-person point of view of their main characters. In Suicide City, readers peek at the world through the eyes of a Mexican chef whose perception of gender is colored by a heightened awareness of cultural differences and the betrayal of his ex-wife. On the other hand, in the few pages of Dumbo’s Feather, the main character’s perception of gender is more limited by his interaction with his supportive family members. Despite these differences, the two share the uniting factor of being Mexican men, which make them highly susceptible to the machismo culture.

The emasculation of Pedro in Esquivel’s novel deconstructs the prescriptive roles of romance and Mexican society, redefining the patriarchal context in a 3rd wave feminist ambition. Esquivel’s textual construction mirrors the genre of Mexican women’s fiction. Through these codes as a foundation of the novel’s structure, Esquivel parodies the formulaic roles of the feminine, and wages an assault on these constructs, empowering the women of the text. Furthermore the traditional romantic narrative arc in which the text follows is unhinged through Pedro’s emasculation, disregarding the male hero figure, and vilifying the expectations of a patriarchal

In Maria de Zayas’ La tracion en la amistad. This comparative study shows the connection between the two characters, Don Juan and Fenisa. In the essay, Larson discussed gender reversals in the La traición, where Fenisa is the echo of Don Juan Tenorio in Burlador which they were represented as trickster and having many lovers. This shows the subversion of gender representation because this shows how the females are also manipulative. Zayas, the dramatist, shows the inclination of women to lust. Unlike in the stereotypes of women that they are expected to be submissive and the idea of repressing desires, Fenisa was shown as a female character manipulating men for her desires. It challenged the idea of taming the wild nature of women. The character of Fenisa resembles Don Juan that shows lust and selfishness. This intertext challenged the gender binaries and/or gender oppositions that contemporary writers tend to lean into. Larson explored the relationships between men and women in the novel, noting how the two dramas dealt with social issues. She commented how ‘Zayas' play is simultaneously an inversion, a subversion, and a comic copy of the Burlador, especially with regard to the relationships between men and women, power and authority, seduction and deception, subject and object’