Masculinity after Trujillo: The Politics of Gender in Dominican Literature

2. One Phallus for Another: Post-dictatorship Political and Literary Canons

2 One Phallus for Another Post-dictatorship Political and Literary Canons Trujillismo is still governing our country. . . . We are still being governed by trujillistas disguised as democrats, . . . playing a democratic game they don’t really believe in. . . . and so for us the thirty years of the Trujillo era are a national trauma, are a type of shell we have been unable to break out. We live painfully obsessed with those years. And that is why we continue to find in that era a fundamental narrative motif. We can’t understand how we can continue to be what we are. Pedro Vergés, “Challenging the Silence” Thedeathofthedictator,whowasassassinatedin1961,alsoendedhistypeof exalted public performance of hypervirile masculinity by Dominican political leaders. This did not, however, spell the end of the political significance of discourses of masculinity in the Dominican Republic. Notions of masculinity continued to be integral to structuring relations between the political sphere and the Dominican people, to defining notions of “good” and “bad” leadership, and to conceptualizing power relations more broadly. Post-dictatorship politics would ultimately further naturalize this politics of masculinity , and it became part of a widely shared Dominican “common sense.” This, I argue, is reflected in how hegemonic notions of masculinity are often reiterated and reproduced by some of the country’s most important critical and anti-hegemonic voices: Dominican post-dictatorship letrados. In this chapter I trace the problematic traffic of the Trujillato’s gendered legacies in the body of literary works that has most insistently addressed the Trujillo One Phallus for Another: Post-dictatorship Political and Literary Canons · 51 dictatorship: the vast Dominican corpus of dictatorship novels. Specifically, I address this question through the lens of the narratives of the most renowned living Dominican novelist, Marcio Veloz Maggiolo. I focus on his novels De abril en adelante (1975) and Uña y carne: Memorias de la virilidad (1999), not only because of how they foreground the Trujillo dictatorship, but also because of how they capture the shifting relations of Dominican letrados with the political sphere and the state. Ultimately, I suggest that these novels help us understand why key critical and intellectual voices have not,despitetheirbestintentions,beenabletosuccessfullyrevisesomeofthe Trujillato’s lasting discursive legacies in the post-dictatorship period. Changes and Continuities in Post-dictatorship Political Culture A period of turmoil followed Rafael L. Trujillo’s assassination in 1961, as the role that his family members would assume remained unclear. The Trujillos finally left the country in 1962, and Trujillo’s last puppet president, Joaquín Balaguer, who initially continued to head the Dominican government, also was eventually forced into exile. A year later, in 1963, the first post-dictatorship elections were held, the only truly democratic elections for over a decade to come. Juan Bosch, a well-known writer at the time, won the elections as the head of an opposition party he had formed in exile, the Partido Revolucionario Dominicano (PRD). Bosch’s uncontested stature as a writer, however, would not translate into comparable political successes. His efforts to institute significant change, including through policies directed at reducing economic inequities and improving the lives of the majority of the people, were short-lived. After only seven months in power, his government was brought down by a military-led coup supported by business elites who saw their economic interests threatened. The impetus for the coup came from a rhetorical ploy familiar from the Trujillato, the accusation of harboring “communist tendencies,” a charge adamantly levied against Bosch by the Catholic Church and business elites.1 As hopes for a political transformation from above were abrogated by the coup, Dominican sectors from below mobilized. Parts of the population , mainly in the capital, Santo Domingo, as well as some members of the military, began a revolutionary uprising in the spring of 1965 that called for the return of Bosch to the presidency. When the success of the rebellion seemed imminent, the United States again occupied the country, driven by 52 · Masculinity after Trujillo the fear of another Caribbean foothold for communism forming alongside Cuba. Just as the prior U.S. military occupation had facilitated Trujillo’s rise to power, the 1965 occupation led to a re-entrenching of authoritarianism in the country. As the Dominican political scientist Jacqueline Jiménez Polanco notes, “the military intervention of the United States once again became (as had happened during the Trujilloist prelude) the ‘perfect’ vehicle for a new movement toward authoritarianism...