Modern Argentine Masculinities

Description

Setting new standards in assessing how masculinity in Argentina has been represented in film, literature and music, this collection untangles Argentinian construction of masculinity, manhood and gendered difference from the nineteenth century to the present. With methodologies ranging from literary analysis of novels to historical approaches to the construction and performance of gender, these essays offer a dramatic, new multidisciplinary approach to modern Argentinian masculinity.

 

Sujets

• Technology Policy
• Public Policy
• Political Science
• Performing Arts
• Cultural studies
• Music
• Science

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 16 août 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783200849
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2013 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2013 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Stephanie Sarlos
Copy-editor: Ed Hatton
Production managers: Melanie Marshall and Tom Newman
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-015-3
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-083-2
ePub ISBN: 978-1-78320-084-9
Printed and bound by Hobbs the Printers Ltd, UK
 
 
To my father, Carlos Rocha
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: Imagining Male Subjects: Representing Argentine Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Poetry Anthologies
Marcos Campillo Fenoll
Chapter 2: Maricas and Lunfardos in Buenos Aires: A Critique of the Latino-Mediterranean Model of Sexuality
Pablo Ben
Chapter 3: Masculinities, Modernity and the City in Roberto Arlt’s El juguete rabioso
Gorica Majstorovic
Chapter 4: Afro-Argentines, Papás, Malevos and Patotas : Characterizing Masculinity on the Stages and in the Audiences of Buenos Aires, 1880–1920
Kristen McCleary
Chapter 5: Pariahs in the Wilderness: Abject Masculinity in Horacio Quiroga
Todd S. Garth
Chapter 6:The Military, Movies and Masculinity: Su mejor alumno and Pampa bárbara
Currie K. Thompson
Chapter 7: Masculinity, Performance and Peronist Nationalism in La traición de Rita Hayworth
Erin H. Redmond
Chapter 8:Marginalized Masculinity and Spaces of the Delinquent in Early New Argentine Cinema
Nicolas Poppe
Chapter 9: From Competing Masculinities to Male Bonding: Father–Son Relationships and Nation in Three Argentine Films
Viviana Plotnik
Chapter 10: Money to Burn , Burnt Money : Crime, Violence and Nonheteronormative Masculinities
Assen Kokalov
Chapter 11: Middle-Class Masculinities in Juan José Campanella’s El hijo de la novia and Luna de Avellaneda
Carolina Rocha
Chapter 12: Vulnerable Beings/Vulnerable Subjectivities: An Approach to Masculinities in the Narrative of Rodolfo Fogwill
Karina E. Vázquez
Chapter 13: Melting Masculinities in Carlos Busqued’s Bajo este sol tremendo
Leila Lehnen
Chapter 14: Masculinities at War: The Military versus the Neoliberal in Accounts of the Falklands/Malvinas War
Paola Ehrmantraut
Chapter 15: Basic Instincts, Violence and Sex-Driven Creatures: New Argentine Masculinity or Old ‘Macho’ Culture?
Hugo Hortiguera & Mara Favoretto
Chapter 16: Popular Music and Macho Representation: The Case of Cumbia Villera
Mara Favoretto & Hugo Hortiguera
Contributors
Acknowledgments
This book is the result of collaborative work. Consequently, I am very grateful to all the contributors who have participated in this volume for their expertise, enthusiasm, and patience during the editorial process. Mara Favoretto, Karina Vázquez, Currie Thompson, Marcos Campillo Fenoll, Nicolás Poppe, and Paola Ehrmantraut commented on several of these chapters. Ana Peluffo, César Valverde, Timothy Wilson, and Beatriz Urraca provided insightful feedback about some of the essays. I am indebted to Georgia Seminet for her help with the introduction and to Cacilda Rêgo for her encouragement.
I appreciate the strong support of the Associate Dean for Research of the College of Liberal Arts at Southern Illinois University, Bill Reztlaff, and the staff of the Graduate School, Patience Graybill Condolleone and Teri Gulledge who believed in this project and helped make it a reality. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer for his/her valuable comments and to Melanie Marshall and Tom Newman at Intellect for their wonderful work and assistance during the editorial process.
My thanks also go to David Sheinin with whom I organized two panels at the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) in San Francisco. Many of the authors are grateful for Carolyn Hutchinson’s editorial help. I thank my daughters Camila and Clara for their assistance with technical issues and my sister Evangelina for hosting me during the final stage of this project. My thanks also go to my husband, Armando, for patiently following the development of this project. I am indebted to my editor, Melanie, who has been a steadfast supporter of this project.
Introduction
In a compelling article entitled ‘Contemporary Latin American Perspectives on Masculinity’ published in 2003, Mara Viveros Vigoya surveyed the research on Latin American men and masculinities and stated that ‘scholarship on men and masculinity in Latin America has been carried out principally in anthropology, sociology, and social psychology’ (2003: 29). Two years later in the introduction to the Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities , R.W. Connell, Jeff Hearn and Michael S. Kimmel identified several areas for future scholarship on men and masculinities. These scholars acknowledged that ‘research on men and masculinities is still mainly a First World enterprise’ (2005: 9) and thus pointed to a need for research on the subject covering other geographical regions. In the last seven years, some Latin American countries have been the focus of such inquiries, such as Mexico and Brazil. 1 In the case of Argentina, scholarship on masculinity has been pioneered by the late anthropologist Eduardo P. Archetti, whose book Masculinities: Football, Polo and the Ta ngo deals with the dynamic of identity construction and the evolution of Argentine masculinities during the first decades of the twentieth century. The study of Argentine masculinities has also attracted the attention of several historians such as Pablo Ben, Sandra Gayol, Donna Guy, Valeria Manzano, Natalia Milanesio and Adriana Novoa. However, the scholarship on the representation of Argentine men and masculinities is still scarce: with the exception of Pablo Vila’s work on music, few studies exist that discuss the aesthetic construction of Argentine masculinities. The exceptions are essays by Daniel Balderston, Rebecca Biron and César Valverde, as well as some articles pertaining to literature included in Entre hombres. Masculinidades en el siglo XIX en América Latina edited by Ana Peluffo and Ignacio Sánchez Prado, and my own work on contemporary film (Rocha 2012). This book, then, sets out to shed light on the evolution of masculinities in Argentina and its artistic representation since the nineteenth century to the present, that is to say, from a period in which homo-sociality prevailed to the more recent decades in which important social changes—such as the increase in the number of working women and the economic crises that undermined the role of Argentine men as breadwinners—have taken place. This multi-disciplinary volume is composed of essays that deal with the representation of Argentine masculinities in literature, film, media and music. Organized in chronological order, this volume surveys the development of the social construction of gender as well as the formation of Argentine national identity.
All the essays in this anthology depart from the premise that ‘gender is the social construction of sexual difference’ (Dore 1997: 9). The theoretical work of R.W. Connell, which posits that masculinity ‘is simultaneously a place in gender relations, the practices through which men and women engage that place in gender, and the effects of those practices in bodily experience, personality and culture’ (1995: 71), shapes this study about the social construction of gender in Argentina. Moreover, the discussion of Argentine masculinities has been indistinguishably linked to the cultural evolution of national identity since Argentina’s consolidation as a nation in the nineteenth century, a process oriented toward attaining modernity. In this process manhood has been equated to the creation of an autonomous identity, which resembles, at the macro-level, the production of a distinct national identity (Gilmore 1990: 223–225). Here it is important to consider Jorge Larraín’s statement that ‘the same historical process of identity construction is, from independence onwards, a process of the construction of modernity’ (2000: 6) so as to comprehend that the social construction of gender in Argentina has been influenced by its desired integration into modernity. Modern Argentine Masculinities examines the important changes that Argentine masculinities and their representation have also experienced in the last 160 years in response to the transformations faced by Argentine society as it modernized, extended civic rights to women and immigrants and became a more pluralistic society.
In addition to incorporating insights from masculinity studies, the present volume owes much to feminist scholarship, produced mostly in the last three decades, which has greatly contributed to tracing the dynamic of gender relations in Argentina. Thus, while this volume sheds light on masculinities, these masculinities are very much in dialogue with femininities, as they both mutually influence each other. Moreover, in the last decades, queer studies, understood as a challenge to heterosexual normativity (Foster 2003: ix), have played an important part in calling attention to forms of nonheterosexual masculinities and to the exclusions and marginalization faced by homosexuals as a result of the equation of nation identity with a bourgeois morality (Mosse 1996). To map these changes, a brief historical context is in order.
From its inception as a nation, Argentina was established as a patriarchal society in which gender discourses exalted the public role of men and emphasized the private realm as the ideal place for women. 2 Moreover, during the nineteenth centur