Hypersexuality and Power: The Reproductive State Apparatus

After a rather productive collaboration last week, I will presently attempt to respond to some questions and comments that have been raised hitherto about The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Specifically, I want to explore the notion of sexuality and reproduction from “The Mesh of Power,” in which Foucault argues that a ‘mesh of power’ is the sexual “lever between anatomo-politics and bio-politics,” which leads to the politicization and dis­ci­pli­nar­iza­tion of mechanized and bodily [re]production. I will argue that sex and sexuality are inherently tied to characters’ subjectivities and senses of power (or lack thereof) in Diaz’s novel; Trujillo, moreover, principally constitutes a repressive state apparatus1 within the DR, which actively controls sex among people.

I have previously demonstrated the authoritarian power that Trujillo possessed by subjecting citizens of the DR to his will. I want to expand more on that infamous legacy, examining his voracious sexual exploitation of citizens. Control through sexuality was twofold for Trujillo: first, he objectified and commoditized women as concubines, his vessels for reproduction. Second, he deprived men of their own sexual urges for women (a sort of castration) through fear. Thus, Trujillo enlisted sexuality as a technology “that basically target[ed] individuals right down to their bodies, their behaviors” (Foucault). Readers can observe how sex becomes a mechanized, dehumanized mode of production in Brief Wondrous Life; the objective of copulation is to reproduce laborers that specifically perpetuate Trujillo’s regime and its policies.

Sexual reproduction among the De Leons also ensures the prolongation and germination of fuku, the curse that started with the birth of Belicia. Fuku, as I have argued, is something that is ancestral, geographically distinct, and cross-temporal, a “power and attempt to localize [Dominicans] in their historic and geographic specificity” (Foucault).  Reproduction enables the maintenance of the curse, which Diaz makes explicit at the end of the novel, describing Lola’s daughter: “On a string around her neck: three azabaches: the one that Oscar wore as a baby, the one that Lola wore as a baby, and the one that Beli was given by La Inca upon reaching Sanctuary. Powerful elder magic. Three barrier shields against the Eye. Backed by a six-mile plinth of prayer… One day, though, the Circle will fail. As Circles always do. And for the first time she will hear the word fuku” (Diaz 329-330). Generations after Trujillo’s death, his power over sex, reproduction, and the continuation of families’ lines endures.

Trujillo is one example among many of the hypermasculinized identity that Diaz thematizes within the novel. This identity is both an expectation of Dominican males (i.e. machismo) and a technology of power employed against Dominican women2. Yunior, our favorite womanizing narrator, constantly obsesses over Oscar’s virginity, a symbol of his inability to fully realize his male power. On the final page of the novel, readers learn that Oscar slept with Ybon, whom Yunior sardonically explains is “the one who suggested calling [virginity] something else” (335). Thus, Oscar’s life is incomplete before sex and the novel cannot end without Oscar’s loss of virginity; he requires the fulfillment of sexual desire in order for his identity to come to fruition. Readers witness Oscar’s role as a performer of Dominican identity, which is definitely uncanny and socially precarious (props to Aaron). He is perfectly willing to change his individuality to assume the machismo that other males in his community typify. In this sense, he attempts a reenactment of what he knows, what his family purports to be ideal -- otherwise, he feels impotent. Diaz writes: “[Oscar] tried to polish up what remained of his Dominicanness, tried to be more like his cursing swaggering cousins, if only because he had started to suspect that in their Latin hypermaleness there might be an answer” (Diaz 30). Oscar repeatedly attempts to assure himself and others that he is a Dominican male, and sexuality is the obvious route through which to achieve this identity. This raises some very interesting questions about the historical events that transpired in the DR. If hypersexuality is a primary characteristic of power and identity in male Latinos, how much of this is a historical ramification of Trujillo’s overt sexuality and objectification of women? Do Oscar’s obsessive attempts to lose his virginity actually give him a sense of power? Does Yunior’s constant chiding of Oscar represent a perpetuation of sexuality as power?

1. See Louis Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1970).

2. Women also use sexuality as power in the novel. As I mention in a previous post, Beli uses her overt sexuality to achieve “power and a true sense of self” (Diaz 94). She attempts to instill this power in her daughter, Lola (Diaz 52).