Men, Power and Liberation Readings of Masculinities in Spanish American Literatures

Each contribution to this book discusses key issues arising from the portrayal of men and the formation of masculine identities in a range of representative and landmark texts, fictional and non-fictional, drawn from different historical periods and from various countries in the Hispanophone Americas. There is an emphasis on the ways in which writers from Argentina (Manuel Puig), Chile (the Spaniard Alonso de Ercilla y Zuniga and the Chilean Nicolas Palacios), Mexico (Gustavo Sainz and Angeles Mastretta) and the Hispanic USA (Jennifer Harbury and Francisco Goldman) have explored the themes of love, friendship and trust and their transformative power for gender relations in situations and contexts where deception, exploitation and oppression are often disturbingly present.
There is also a discussion of the applications, insights and limitations of different theoretical frameworks and concepts relevant to the task of producing gendered readings, including Connell's 'world gender order' and 'hegemonic masculinity', as well as 'the cult of virility' as characterised by Still and Worton, Chela Sandoval's 'decolonial love' and 'methodology of the oppressed' and Beasley-Murray's 'posthegemony'. This book was originally published as a special issue of Iberian and Latin American Studies.

1. Introduction: Men, power and liberation: readings of masculinities in Spanish American literatures Amit Thakkar and Chris Harris 2. "Una tercera lectura": the cinematic reader and the cult of virility in Manuel Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña (1976) Amit Thakkar 3. Power tug of war: hegemonic and posthegemonic text control in Gustavo Sainz’s Obsesivos días circulares (1969) Victoria Carpenter 4. "But how to speak of such things?": decolonial love, the coloniality of gender, and political struggle in Francisco Goldman’s The Long Night of White Chickens (1992) and Jennifer Harbury’s Bridge of Courage (1994) and Searching for Everardo (1997) Cornelia Gräbner 5. From Araucanian warriors to Mapuche terrorists: contesting discourses of gender, race, and nation in modern Chile (1810-2010) Joanna Crow 6. "De la música y los toros": masculinities and the representation of Carlos Vives in Ángeles Mastretta’s Arráncame la vida (1985) Christopher Harris

Amit Thakkar is Senior Lecturer in Spanish at the Department of European Languages and Cultures at Lancaster University, UK. His research interests include revolution, gender, violence and postcolonial theory in relation to Latin American film and literature. Chris Harris is Professor of Spanish and Head of the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Liverpool, UK. His main research interests are focused on gendered approaches to the post-Revolutionary Mexican novel. He has published on various writers including Castellanos, Poniatowska, Azuela, Yáñez and Rulfo.