Literary critic Michael Bell proposes an alternative understanding for Garc�a M�rquez's style, as the category magic realism is criticized for being dichotomizing and exoticizing, " what is really at stake is a psychological suppleness which is able to inhabit unsentimentally the daytime world while remaining open to the promptings of those domains which modern culture has, by its own inner logic, necessarily marginalised or repressed . " Garc�a M�rquez and his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza discuss his work in a similar way, " The way you treat reality in your books . . . has been called magical realism.
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The postcolonial era brought about " patriarchal contradictions [ and ] the dichotomized icons of idealized femininity and degraded whoredom, of feminine plenitude and feminine lack . " Women in the Philippines " were removed from the reigning paradigm of patriarchy ( thrice colonized in the process of history, first by the patriarchy within and then by the colonizers from without and then again by the nation-builders ) . " Instead of setting right the wrongs let loose by the colonizing patriarchs, " the national patriarchy continued the colonization of women by desecrating the female body and by degrading women to mere bodies . " The " performative display of violence on the female body ( therefore ) carried out by the country s power-wielders contains, besides its pornographic import, the ominous implication that it will be told and retold as a moral tale to threaten women into submission and subjugation ."
