Mexican Masculinities (review)

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 lo mexicano (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 hombre" [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 engaged in deeply affectionate acts such as holding hands, kissing, fondling each other openly—acts that would be labeled as homoerotic by contemporary standards—without public scorn or reprobation. Beginning in the twentieth century, probably intensified by the discovery of a clandestine homosexual salon in Mexico City in 1901, effeminacy became equated with transvestitism and homosexuality and remained so for a good sixty years, as did the stigma. As effeminacy in men came to signify homosexuality, homosocial bonding took on new meanings. Male bonding among members of the upper class became suspect, "more and more queer" (xxxii), while the barbaric masculinity of lower-class machos retained its import and potency.

With independence from Spain in 1821 Mexico began its national life as a hermaphrodite of sorts, seeking an identity for la madre patria (the mother fatherland). Bequeathed a heritage of powerful feminine icons—the Virgin of Guadalupe (the symbol of Mexican independence), la Malinche (the emblem of conquest and mestizaje)—Mexico needed virility to cast off its colonial impotence and assert its masculinity in an emergent family of nations. In forging a national ideology Mexican thinkers primarily imagined the nation as homosocially constituted, created through brotherly relationships among male citizens. Women were, of course, necessary to the nation's reproduction, but their role in heterosexuality fundamentally threatened civilization, or so some believed. Heterosexual erotic desire, which could lead to adultery, incest, and fornication, was capable of destroying class boundaries, polluting racial purity, and even undermining the integrity of families. Only matrimony, "heterosexuality's civilized form," allowed society to function properly (6). Novelist José T. de Cuéllar articulated such themes in the 1890s, deeming Greek heterosexuality the ideal way Mexican women and men should structure their relationships. The Greeks secluded their women, maintained sexual and pedagogical relationships with young men, and thus avoided prostitution, adultery, and premarital sex. Indeed...