La Inca and Beli

Walking yourself through the questions to do a feminist critique, analyze how Beli responds to her troubles with the Gangster.  The narrator, who is or is not reliable, characterizes Beli as being somewhat blinded by love.  On page 142, he says, "like everyone in this damned story, she underestimated the depth of the s**** she was in."After reading this entire section thoroughly moving into how Beli ended up in the US, do a feminist critique of how Beli responded to this major tragedy in her life.

Internalized Misogyny

One critic wrote of the treatment of women  in Oscar Wao:
The internalized racism on display in the novel is scary (Oscar’s dark-skinned mother is self-conscious of her skin color, and as a girl will only date light-skinned boys), but not nearly as terrifying as the internalized misogyny that every single female character–even the indefatigable Lola–drinks down with her mother’s milk. Oscar, fat and unattractive, at least survives his childhood, but when a neighborhood girl is similarly afflicted, she goes crazy with self-hatred. Nearly every female character in the novel has a boyfriend who slaps her around, and to whom she goes back again and again. Not a single one of them seems to consider that she doesn’t need a man in her life.


Using a feminist critique, what is an analysis you bring to this idea of internalized misogyny presented in the novel that the above critic is trying to address?  Is this a stereotyped idea about women or is this a reality that the author is trying to bring to the surface?  Do you think the author is just trying to bring realism to his female characters, or is the view of women of color in Oscar Wao simply a patriarchal vision of who we are?  Use excerpts from the text to support your opinion from pgs 75 and beyond.