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Mexican Masculinities. By ROBERT Mc KE E IRWIN. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Pp. xxxvi + 283. $54.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).
This book is a sweeping survey of the history of Mexican literary representations of the masculine from 1821 to the 1960s. Using novels, essays, short stories, poetry, periodicals, scientific and religious texts, and works in criminology and social psychology, the author sets out to re-create some of the discursive webs of signification on gender and sexuality as Mexican national identity was forged. Drawing on an extensive knowledge of Latin American letters and an even deeper understanding of Mexican culture, Robert McKee Irwin argues that in the gender ideology of the nation Io mexica.no (Mexicanness) was discursively protagonized through intense relationships between young men. National integration was continuously allegorized in literature as intense homosocial relationships between physically strong, charismatic, and particularly handsome studs who inspired in readers an identification with the nation through desire. Indeed, homoerotic desire was the foundation for the ties of patriarchy that formed the nation.
A cacophony of ideas about masculinity vied constantly for dominance in popular and political discourse at any particular time. Two distinct models explained the Mexican male body, its intrinsic characteristics, and its relationship to the body politic, thus informing how the masculine was talked about and performed. Clearly, the most widely held understanding of the relationship between sex and gender was that biology produced two bodies, male and female, that were quite naturally in binary opposition as masculine and feminine. Juxtaposed to this understanding was a notion of a continuum of behaviors, with the masculine and feminine at opposite ends. The popular Mexican injunction that men should "ser muy nombre" [be very manly] pronounced masculinity's variability, its cultural definition based on a set of behaviors, and the recognition that one could "be very manly, not very manly, or even not manly at all" (xx). Accordingly, men could be feminine and women could be masculine. Machismo, or virility, was not innate. It had to be asserted and performed; literally, it had to be won.
These competing systems of gender definition coexisted in Mexico without much explicit notice until the beginning of the twentieth century. Public effeminacy was certainly abhorred in men before 1900, but men often...