Constructing Masculinities: Mapping the Male Body in Oscar Zeta Acosta's The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo

Abstract

My study posits how Oscar Zeta Acosta’s novel, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), is structured as a cartography which clearly maps the construction of both masculinity and ethnicity through a series of life experiences. It further examines the various strands configuring and constructing a masculine identity in this fictionalized autobiography by focusing on the multiple manifestations of how masculinities are constructed in society: i.e. school, family, friends, institutions, workplace, the military, and so forth. Acosta’s text structures a critique of both Mexican and Anglo American stereotypes of Chicano masculinities while simultaneously deconstructing a unitary meaning of what it is to be a Mexican/Chicano male.