SOURCE: Pérez, Janet. “Masks, Gender Expectations, Machismo and (Criss) Cross-Gender Writing in the Fiction of José Donoso.” Hispanofila 119 (January 1997): 47-58.

In the following essay, Pérez analyzes the way Donoso critiques gender stereotyping and the cult of machismo by using cross-gender themes and symbols in his writing.

Criticism of Donoso to date has tended to categorize his works as social realism or even neo-naturalism during an early period up to the late 1960s and publication of El obsceno pájaro de la noche, [hereafter abbreviated EOPN] and as experimental thereafter. Those novels published after EOPN—a work so fragmented, contradictory, multivocal and multivalent as to defy most efforts at interpretation—have been comparably traditional in format and structure, so that views of Donoso as a social realist have not entirely disappeared, even though freudian, jungian and neo-freudian interpretations are also common and some structuralist and deconstructionist readings...