How I Came to Love . . .

As prefaces to academic books go, Sergio de la Mora’s in Cinemachismo is one to remember. The author acknowledges the titillating pleasures he felt in coming across a nude picture of the Mexican actor, singer, and overall popular cultural icon Pedro Infante. How, de la Mora asks, does Mexico’s beloved “son” come to participate in the sexualized spectacle of self-objectification? But more important, de la Mora suggests, how can we, as cultural critics, use the pleasures derived from consuming sexualized mass cultural icons to practice alternative reading practices and to produce critically engaged queer scholarship? After the quasi-confessional mode of anecdotal retelling de la Mora writes: “At that moment I realized that Infante’s cultural legacy was ripe for queer appropriation and rereading through a different interpretative lens” (ix). And this is what he does so well in Cinemachismo.

Case in point: in his second chapter, “Pedro Infante Unveiled,” de la Mora analyzes the representation of the male bonding rituals in four of Infante’s “buddy movies” “to tease out the anxieties around the relationship between gender and style, manhood and national identifications, as these are shaped by the intersection of age, class, ethnic, racial, regional, and sexual differences” (69). By paying close attention to the ambiguities in the performance of masculinity (i.e., the excessive male bonding in the films’ narrative, visual, and aural codes — the macho constructed in the cinema, as the book title’s neologism suggests), de la Mora proposes that the notion of Mexican masculinity “is not fixed and monolithic but open to contestation, change, and resignification” (70). Informed by queer theory, this engaged process of reading Infante’s ambiguous performance of masculinity within the films’ narratives and in his public self-presentation as a sex object is one of de la Mora’s clearest contributions toward creating a history of queer visibility in Mexican film and cultural studies (17).

Yet another one of Cinemachismo’s strengths resides in the author’s insistence that in order to understand further how masculinity (including the notion of the macho) and the state are mutually constitutive and to comprehend how “gender differences and relationships of power” are constructed and maintained, a key site that needs to be explored is prostitution (14). In chapter 1, “Midnight Virgin,” de la Mora’s reading practices juxtapose early-twentieth-century narratives that helped codify the figure of the “fallen woman” as necessary for a narrative of male control and advancement (read here: power), with more contemporary ones that, in rewriting the figure of the prostitute, decodify the trope of the “fallen woman” in literary and cinematic representations and, by extension, female sexuality in Mexican culture. But far from suggesting that Cinemachismo’s author creates a that-was-then-this-is-now argument in regard to representations of female sexuality, de la Mora’s nuanced readings of female sexuality also open up the possibility for understanding prostitution and the brothel-cabaret as spaces of desire and female agency.

However, as de la Mora’s informed analysis of Mexican film discourse also argues, the construction of heterosexual masculinity in Mexican culture also necessitates another figure besides the female prostitute or the “male buddy.” Chapter 3, “The Last Dance,” offers up a reading of the “macho’s sexual Other, the joto [in Mexican slang, a male homosexual, usually excessively effeminate or queeny], a key figure in a subgenre of the prostitution melodrama” (17). The fichera films, commercialized sex comedies that became popular in the 1970s, more often than not featured an effeminate male character that functioned as the “yardstick for measuring ‘real’ men” (18). And, as de la Mora makes his readers aware, “this inclusion is double-edged. On the one hand, it makes male homosexuality visible; on the other, this visibility is only possible at the price of stereotyping gay men with negatively coded characteristics, including weakness, frivolity, and narcissism, attributed to ‘femininity’ by misogynistic discourse” (112). The “macho’s sexual Other,” however, has been represented in more...