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

This book offers a series of critical contributions to contemporary debates associated with literary and nationalist representations of men and masculinities in the Hispanophone Americas. A variety of theoretical frameworks are deployed and there is a focus on literary texts and discourses from Chile and Argentina in the South to Mexico in the North, and including Hispanic USA. This book was originally published as a special issue of Iberian and Latin American Studies.

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 Zúñiga and the Chilean Nicolás Palacios), Mexico (Gustavo Sainz and Ángeles 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.