A Threat to the Nation: México Marimacho and Female Masculinities in Postrevolutionary Mexico

Literature, among other artistic expressions, played a relevant role in the construction of Mexicanness—lo mexicano—a concept that began to be articulated in the decades following the Mexican Revolution. In this article I examine the novel México marimacho (1933) by Mexican writer Salvador Quevedo y Zubieta (1859–1935), in which I analyze the literary representation of the marimacho—mannish woman—as a female masculinity figure that embodies the cultural and socioeconomic changes that women experienced in the 1920s and 1930s in Mexico. Also, I explore the crucial role played by the patriarchal and heteronormative discourses used in the novel to construct and construe the literary representation of the marimacho: the novel of the revolution and its stereotyped character of the female soldier—la soldadera—and the pervasive medical discourse that in the text dissects and diagnoses the marimacho as an abject and “ill” body present in Mexico’s postrevolutionary era.