Mexican Masculinities

by Irwin, Robert McKee

• ISBN13: 9780816640713
• ISBN10: 0816640718
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-02-01
• Publisher: Univ of Minnesota Pr

Summary

The first of its kind and a powerful challenge to customary views of gender and sexuality in the life and literature of Mexico, this book traces literary representations of masculinity in Mexico from independence in 1810 to the 1960s, and shows how these intersect with the constructions of nation and nationality. The rhetoric of "Mexicanness" makes constant use of images of masculinity, though it does so in shifting and often contradictory ways. Robert McKee Irwin's work follows these shifts from the male homosocial bonding that was central to notions of national integration in the nineteenth century, to questioning of gender norms stirred by science and scandals at the turn of the century, to the virulent reaction against gender chaos after the Mexican revolution, to the association of Mexicanness with machismo and homophobia in the literature of the 1940s and 1950s--even as male homosexuality was established as an integral part of national culture. As the first historical study of how masculinity and, particularly, homosexuality were understood in Mexico in t

Author Biography

Robert McKee Irwin is assistant professor and director of undergraduate studies in Spanish and Portuguese at Tulane University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Introduction: The Hidden Vices of los Hijos de la Chingada	xi
Early Paradoxes of Masculinity and Male Homosocial Bonding: The Nineteenth Century	1	(49)
Criminal Male Sexuality: The Turn of the Century	50	(66)
Virile Literature and Effeminate Literature: The 1920s and 1930s	116	(71)
Homosexual Panic: The 1940s and 1950s	187	(38)
Conclusion: The Trials and Tribulations of los Hijos de la Chingada	225	(6)
Notes	231	(22)
Bibliography	253	(20)
Index	273