Despite being hopelessly obsessed with beautiful women, he is constantly bullied and overlooked due to his “nerdiness”- his enthusiasm for science-fiction and fantasy genres-and his obesity. Beli and Abelard, as contemporaries of Trujillo, suffer direct and indirect persecution generating from his regime Oscar, on the other hand, who is born in New Jersey as the result of migration, is persecuted his entire life by his failure to fit the standards of a hypersexual Dominican masculinity that affects him across borders. The narrator, Yunior, is Oscar’s friend and Lola’s on-and-off boyfriend, who meets the siblings during their college years at Rutgers University and ends up documenting Oscar’s life and death, a task that involves uncovering the experiences of generations of Oscar’s family as well the Dominican Republic’s national history of dictatorship and colonialism. Oscar’s story is interwoven with those of his sister, Lola, his mother, Belicia (Beli), and his grandfather, Dr. The novel’s Dominican-American protagonist Oscar is born in New Jersey as a result of his mother’s migration, and the events of the novel take place in the characters’ movement between New Jersey and the Dominican Republic. National and historical trauma is linked to personal trauma through the stories of Oscar, Lola, and Yunior, whose personal struggles become political as they mirror their parent generations’ struggles within an era of national and historical violence. In the novel, the legacy of colonialism and dictatorship is personalized and modernized through the younger generation of Dominican diaspora. Hypersexualization becomes a mode of exposing and projecting the trauma of rape. In this chapter, I argue that Diaz simultaneously critiques and embodies masculine failure through his hypersexualization of the female characters of Oscar Wao. Thus Diaz establishes hypersexualization as an indication of trauma. In both cases, trauma is induced by a failed masculinity within a Dominican culture that condones the hypersexualization of both women and men in the name of patriarchal privilege.

Rape is the central thread that ties individual trauma to historic trauma throughout the novel, Yunior’s recounting of Trujillo’s regime of sexual violence becomes a way of articulating an unspoken, personal rape trauma. This connection is made through the novel’s main narrator, Yunior, who weaves together the stories of the marginalized Dominican subjects traumatized during the brutal dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is widely studied and celebrated for its portrayal of colonialism, dictatorship, and migration from the Dominican Republic in particular, it is known for connecting individual trauma with a larger national trauma through its depiction of sexualized colonial violence as an intergenerational curse called the fukú. Masculine Failure: Rape Culture and Intergenerational Trauma in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Intergenerational trauma in oscar wao