The Body as Capital

The Body as Capital

Masculinities in
Contemporary Latin
American Fiction

Vinodh Venkatesh

tucson
The University of Arizona Press
www.uapress.arizona.edu
© 2015 The Arizona Board of Regents
All rights reserved. Published 2015
Printed in the United States of America
20 19 18 17 16 15 6 5 4 3 2 1
ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-0069-7 (paper)
Cover designed by David Drummond
Publication of this book is made possible in part by a subvention from the Department
of Foreign Languages and Literatures, the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences,
and the Provost’s Office at Virginia Tech.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Venkatesh, Vinodh, author.
The body as capital : masculinities in contemporary Latin American fiction / Vinodh
Venkatesh.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8165-0069-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Masculinity in literature. 2. Latin American literature—History and criticism.
3. Human body in literature. 4. Sex role in literature. I. Title.
PQ7081.V429 2015
860.9'353—dc23
2015005389
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
For Narayini and Venkatesh
Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: The Body as Capital 3

Part I. New Historical Masculinities 15

1. Commoditizing the Male Body in Margarita,
está linda la mar 18
2. Marketing Masculinities in Nadie me verá llorar 26
3. Political Masculinities in La fiesta del Chivo 37
4. Queer(ing) Masculinities as the Dictator Falls 45

Part II. Lyrical Readings and the Deterritorialization

of Masculinities 57
5. Defining the Literary OST 61
6. Lyrical Epistemologies and Masculine Desire 69
7. Homosocial Dynamics and the Spatiality of Seduction 80
8. Franz Galich’s Managua, Rock City 91
 viii · Contents

Part III. Novel and Transnational Masculinities 109

9. Glocalized Masculinities of the Barrio Alto 112
10. Materializing the Penis 121
11. Challenging Novel Masculinities 128
Conclusion: Of Tropes and Men 139

Notes 157
Works Cited 171
Index 181
Acknowledgments

Seminars and conversations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel

Hill with Oswaldo Estrada, Alicia Rivero, José Manuel Polo de Bernabé,
and Pablo Gil Casado set the trajectory and tone of my research on mascu-
linities in contemporary Latin American fiction. I am extremely thankful
to have counted on the close reading and thoughtful critique of Juan Car-
los González Espitia, Irene Gómez Castellano, María DeGuzmán, and
Alfredo Sosa-Velasco during the early drafts of this project. Their feedback
was invaluable in moving this project from doctoral work to the book at
hand. In the manuscript’s final stages, the comments and suggestions by
Humberto López Cruz and David William Foster proved to be invaluable.
I also want to thank my editor, Kristen Buckles, for believing in this project—
she and Scott De Herrera at the University of Arizona Press, as well as
Melanie Mallon, have truly been wonderful people to work with. Finally,
Oswaldo was and continues to be a pillar behind my research. To him I
am grateful for countless e-mails and moments of much-needed revelry,
always punctuated by song (his, not mine, as I am tone deaf).
I am appreciative of the Department of Romance Languages and Lit-
eratures for its financial support during my (second) tenure at Chapel Hill
and for fostering an intellectual climate of collegiality, exchange, and spir-
ited conversation. The department graciously supported this project through
the Dana  B. Drake and Isabella Payne Cooper Dissertation Research
Fellowship. I am further indebted to the Graduate School at UNC for the
Thomas F. Ferdinand Summer Research Fellowship. I am also thankful
for the mentoring and support of Gillian Lord, Shifra Armon, and Luis

ix
 x · Acknowledgments

Alvarez- Castro at the University of Florida. My somewhat accidental arrival

in this field would not have happened without their guidance. A big thank
you as well to my colleagues in the Department of Foreign Languages and
Literatures at Virginia Tech.
Nothing in this life would be possible without the laughter and joy shared
with those we hold closest. To my familia chapelhilliana, thank you for
everything throughout these years. I am grateful to Ray Miller and Austin
Worley for their friendship and conversations; in fact, it is in these that I
first began to critically think about masculinities. In Melilla: Joaquín, Mari
Carmen, Chica, Alberto, Kiny, Roma, Luis, Mari Ángeles, and Julia. In
Kuala Lumpur: my parents, Narayini and Venkatesh, who saw me through
my crazy plans of studying literature. To both of you, for always nurturing
me and being the best parents anyone could ask for, thank you for your
wisdom, support, and motivation. To my siblings, Vishnu and Sabitha,
thank you for being a constant source of amusement and encourage-
ment. Last but not least, I want to thank my better half, my partner in
crime, and the person who never forgets to remind me that la vida sale
(sale): Mari Carmen.
Fragments of part 1 have appeared in Chasqui and Explicación de Tex-
tos Literarios. Early versions of the essays on Jaime Bayly and Gioconda Belli
have appeared in Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos and Hispanic
Research Journal, respectively. I am grateful to the editors and publishers of
these venues for granting me permission to reprint this work.
The Body as Capital
Introduction
The Body as Capital

In works on issues of gender in Latin American fiction, criticism has tended

to largely focus and build up from feminist, and more recently, queer per-
spectives, where marked genders are examined for their potential to usurp
and challenge normative orders that tend to repress many for the benefit
of a few. Going against this tide, several recent interventions have flipped
the analytic coin by focusing instead on the masculine condition and how
it regiments the gendered social structures of patriarchy. In this minoritar-
ian trajectory, several critics have reoriented gender studies to analyze how
discourses and representations of masculinity have affected broader cultural
processes.1 Within this line of thought, however, criticism has tended to
treat masculinity, the unmarked gender position, as a monolithic construct
that is rarely afforded the relativist pluralism given to feminine and queer
subjectivities. Therein lies a first point of departure, for I argue that we must
conceive of the masculine not as a solidified, unchanging, and eternal sub-
ject position, but as a fluid, sociohistorically specific, and interrelational
identity that is plural in nature yet often seen as singular in practice.
The second point of departure in these pages is predicated on the im-
pact of recent economic and political policies on the representation and
discursive construct of gender positions in Latin America. Although peri-
ods of first contact, colonization, and movements of independence have
produced tropic and aesthetic conceptions of masculine gendered bodies,
an examination of recent shifts is warranted, especially if we are to con-
sider the neoliberal age as what Gareth Williams calls an underlying shift
in the telos of the region, where the local moves toward the global and the

3
 4 · Introduction

heterogenous make way for the imperial homogenous.2 What, then, is the
role of the masculine in how gendered bodies are deployed in a new stage,
a transnational theater where vestigial semantics and historical symbols
slowly give way to a homogenizing grammar of gender and identity?
In the following pages, I argue that the writing of masculinities in con-
temporary Latin American fiction is reflective of and reactive to the social
and economic processes of neoliberalism. Working through what I contend
to be a neoliberal aesthetic, that is, a distinctly market-based system of repre-
sentation and an economically conscious poetics, I focus on the male body
as a dialogic site of enunciation, arguing that the writing of masculinities
is a project that centers socioeconomic and political concerns and para-
digms on specific sites of the male anatomy. In novels published after 1990
by canonical, well-known, and newer writers from Mexico, Central Amer-
ica, the Caribbean, Peru, and Chile, the male body is a capital commodity
that is metaphorically bartered, segmented, marketed, and sold in works
coinciding with the neoliberal experiment; its movements and circulations
code for textual anxieties and considerations of the changing politico-
economic landscape. The male body as capital is a variant of Gayle Rubin’s
notion of the feminine as a commodity, and a development of Raewyn
Connell’s theorization of “the body inescapable” (Masculinities 52), that
the body as metaphor provides a discursive point of entry into how gender
is constructed and conceived. The body as capital thus operates on micro
and macro levels; that is, it is singularly commoditized in the writing of
specific bodies yet also rendered as a whole in what I argue to be a market
of masculinities.
Such a framework of a “market” and “commodities” is propitious to a
study of how masculinities are written in the neoliberal age. Aside from
being a set of economic and political strategies with defined steps of action,
neoliberalism is a comprehensive paradigm that cannot be ignored as a di-
aloguing agent in late capitalist cultural configurations. It is positioned at
the crossroads of cultural production, ontological to the representation of
social realities and their circulation and, perhaps more important, a vital
step toward the dissemination of a market of homogenizing popular cul-
tural artifacts. Neoliberalism is, furthermore, involved in any collective pro-
cesses of identity politics as it subscripts borders, effectively severing the
ties that previously bound both representations of the body and self to the
symbolic collective or/of nation and non-identitarian notions of sexuality.3
In essence, neoliberalism can be located in the background—as a shading
of a tabula rasa—in the equation of contemporary gender formations. Its
organizational presence underlines current theorems in masculinity
 The Body as Capital · 5

studies, where shifts to transnational gender positions are being theorized

as an overarching matrix to sustained local inquiries. Within this equation
is the proposal that the neoliberal episteme has caused a crisis of sorts in tra-
ditional gender structures, where singular masculinity, or what Raewyn
Connell calls hegemonic masculinity, has historically held an apical posi-
tion.4 Through economic liberalization and the untethering of labor and
production markets, masculinity as hegemon has entered a crisis stage, be-
cause renegotiated labor and familial orders have triggered a widespread
cultural renegotiation of how masculinity operates and is represented as an
organizational position in relation to other gender expressions. This holds
especially true in Latin America, where governments have, since the late
1970s, enacted to varying degrees social and familial policies that are
side effects of the replacement of import substitution industrialization.5
By crisis, I am referring to a change in the order or roles, as women are
increasingly permitted and encouraged to work and lead lives that were
once accorded only to men. Economic autonomy, sexual liberation, and
the right to an education are some of the changes that have affected gender
politics in Latin America. In examining the contemporary constructions
of masculinities, Mabel Burin underscores that relatively recent socioeco-
nomic shifts have led to “la pérdida de un área significativa de poder del
género masculino, y las nuevas configuraciones en las relaciones de poder
entre géneros” (Burin and Meler 124). Such socioeconomic shifts and their
resultant gender reconfigurations are salient results of the broader macro
openings of local markets to foreign economies and economic policies,
as free trade agreements and foreign direct investment increase labor de-
mands and supply and thus shift familial economic roles. These measures,
as can be expected, democratize societies to the extent that conventional
structures and relations are no longer compatible with an open-framed
notion of the market and, as a result, of the social. Writing on the change
of gender roles, Irene Meler furthers the idea that these factors “configuran,
en este período de acumulación capitalista, un contexto adverso en lo que
se refiere al bienestar de los varones” (“La construcción” 122). The crisis in
masculinity, as such, triggers a critical interest in the strategies of change
and coping that men undertake as a result. Meler (121) and Burin (“Pre-
cariedad” 87) develop this notion of crisis in Latin American societies
to argue that forces of globalization and neoliberal tendencies have led
to changes in personal, intimate constructions of masculinity, which in
turn affect the formulations of the masculine in cultural production. A
second line of inquiry, then, which is perhaps more appropriate for cul-
tural criticism, is how and in what configurations masculinity has been
 6 · Introduction

renegotiated, because the traditional system of (national) hegemony is ob-

solete in a postnational age.
We can find within this investigation into the traditional representation
of masculinity an emphasis in creating a hegemonic position based on cer-
tain desired and idealized characteristics (which are both physical and psy-
chical). Looking, for example, at the caudillo, or dictator, novels produced
in Latin America since the nineteenth century, we see a preponderance of
textual constructions of gender that stress the role of male virility, stylized
corporal aesthetics, and an epistemological focus on logic and science as
parts that construct a masculine whole.6 There is a direct linkage made
between the male body and the nation, an idea that George Mosse uses to
create a theoretical framework around the stereotype and countertype in
the production of masculinities. He argues that any bona fide stereotype
of the male ideal must be accompanied by a series of undesirable counter-
types to politically justify the idealized masculine. This framework is ex-
ceedingly apt at reading male gender structures in cultural texts but is
somewhat inaccurate and unwieldy when it comes to examining these
same structures when the nation-state is blurred by transnational markets.
The neoliberal system engages in what is effectively a break from the cus-
tomary symbolic and semantic processes of creating and deifying the
masculine, because the tenets of a closed gendered order are incapable of
adapting to a polyvalenced and global system of bodies and its parts.
The masculine is therefore no longer hinged on only the physical penis
and virility or economic prosperity but is, instead, tangential to globalized
and commercial influences; the philosophy and principles of free market
economics, I argue, are integral to the formation (and subsequent exami-
nation) of gendered bodies in contemporary Latin American cultural pro-
duction.7 Masculinity enters in a direct relationship with the pervading
politico-economic model and is constituted around a capitalization of the
body. I say “capitalization” in two senses: first, the body is metaphor for real
and virtual capital, as a tradable and productive resource; second, there is
a semantic capitalization, that is, the body becomes the BODY, as an em-
phatic site of enunciation and of discursive potential for negotiating con-
structs of subjectivity. On the one hand, we evidence that writing the body
is undertaken primarily through corporal analogisms of free market ide-
ologies, where stress is placed more on the marketability of the body (and
its accompanying symbolic sites, such as the penis, testes, and anus) and
not necessarily on its potential as political symbolic capital.8 On the other
hand, and in a process that is not mutually exclusive to the first, masculini-
ties become a circulating commodity that is quantified, bartered, and
 The Body as Capital · 7

moved across transnational lines and can no longer be considered a closed

national position of gender supremacy or organization. The examination
of contemporary Latin American masculinity, therefore, emphasizes it to be
a plural position and pluridirectional process that is paradoxically local and
global yet not necessarily exemplary in discussions of a transnational gender
order. With this in mind, we can consider neoliberalism as more than a
simple backdrop to recent cultural production and instead as an aesthetic
and politico- organic point of reference.
Fundamental in this reading and analysis of masculinity is a working
definition. I will use the Masculine to identify the idealized and multifac-
eted position of what Connell terms hegemonic masculinity. It is akin, in a
structural sense, to Connell’s apical position but functions on other seman-
tic and symbolic levels, beyond, yet at times in tandem with, variable struc-
tural hierarchies of gender. Through dialogue with the Masculine, femi-
ninities, masculinities, and queerities come into being, taking the Masculine
as a sociohistorically specific normative position. The Masculine, as Ben
Sifuentes-Jáuregui argues, “designs itself from the outside of culture and
society, and doubles an idea of itself as the very interior of that culture
and society” (Transvestism 108). Those characteristics deemed powerful,
desirable (both to the projected and real heterosexual and to the repressed
homosocial imagination vis-à-vis desire), and viable as the pillars of the
social matrix—as organizational tenets—are enshrined as the Masculine,
intrinsically linked to the male body by patriarchal systems. The Masculine
is consecrated and assimilated through aesthetic, discursive, behavioral,
and even sartorial cues and practices and is enabled and reiterated/repro-
duced by all gendered bodies within a given culture and society. The re-
verse process, I want to make clear, is what creates the other non-Masculine
gender expressions, for whatever does not lie within or loosely follow this
specific epistemology of power is relegated to alternative and subservient
roles and positions. This includes the creation of masculinities, those male
(though at times female) approximations to the Masculine that in some
shape or form fall short of embodying the socially and culturally enabled
construct. Aside from being performative, iterative, and sociocultural in
constitution, gender is a tableau vivant defined and brushed over by the
previously (and simultaneously) enabled strokes of the Masculine.
Within this framework of masculinities, the body is engaged in a dia-
lectic process of identification where gender is not attributed to or defined
simply by performance. As Connell, Sifuentes-Jáuregui, and José Quiroga
have restated, gender is a verdant association between the physical body and
those social traits outlined earlier that sustain the image of the Masculine
 8 · Introduction

(as it is nothing more than a projected ideal, a méconnaissance that, de-

pending on level of adherence to or disassociation from, establishes a
gender expression), and we cannot completely do away with the anatomy
of the subject when talking about masculinity. The body is, as Guillermo
Núñez Noriega thoroughly argues, “burdened and crisscrossed by multiple
demands and preconceptions that entail ideas about desire, erotic prac-
tices, and the ultimate expected configuration of one or another gender
identity” (77). It is indeed “inescapable” and becomes a point of critical fo-
cus, for it opens a discussion on how gender systems come into play.
Masculinity is pertinent to any discussion of contemporary gender for-
mations and gains special importance in the Latin American context, where
it has often been minted for its symbolic potential in the cultural produc-
tions in the postindependence era. Doris Sommer’s well-known and arche-
typal Foundational Fictions is a case in point, where the Masculine (and
its associated female lover) facilitates the semantic construction of the na-
tion. In the neoliberal age, however, this connection still remains tangible,
though the link between the male body/character and the nation has been
fragmented, just as neoliberalism has done away with the autonomy of na-
tional economies. The crux of studying the Masculine at this point, then, is
the need to understand how neoliberalism has reconfigured the Masculine,
or perhaps more accurately, how the neoliberal episteme has redesigned it
from the “outside” and within its “interior.” Connell, for example, has theo-
rized transnational business masculinity as a successor or most recent itera-
tion of hegemonic masculinity, to better reflect the late capitalist mode
(“Masculinities and Globalization” 9). This model, while valuable, is not
always met as necessarily true or descriptive, especially in the Latin Amer-
ican context, where competing local masculinities, which may be regional
in deployment, have long been established prior to any real positioning of a
hegemonic variant. They may resist transnational positions, just as these so-
cieties resist the seeming inevitability of cultural homogenization. We will
see this later in the analysis of Jaime Bayly’s El cojo y el loco, where historical
hegemonies are pitted against the transnational business position to develop
a discursive challenge to cultural homogenization. What is being planted,
then, is an analytics that focuses on the Masculine and its relationship to
plural masculinities, femininities, and queerities at the sociohistorical mo-
ment of neoliberalism, because what is being posited is a reimagining of
both how gender is constructed and how it is interplayed with representa-
tions of broader entities, such as the nation, or in this case, its lack.9
It is at this juncture that we can open the previous affirmations to an
analysis of Latin American cultural production that addresses the shift in
 The Body as Capital · 9

gender structures as the Masculine is renegotiated. While at first glance a

broad multidisciplinary perspective may seem most appropriate, I suggest
that a structured interrogation of recent literary production provides a use-
ful litmus for studying contemporary Latin American masculinities. We can
stress, in this instance, the importance of the literary as a historical artifact,
because current narratives can be dialogued with past works—a privilege
not afforded to newer media. This is fundamental, if we take as axiomatic
the importance of the region’s literature in shaping national and indi-
vidual identity from the colonial period to the present (or the role of the
literary/textual in identity formation). Questions asked here include an
interrogation of how current texts written in, and through the marketing
and distribution of, neoliberal mechanisms dialogue with older works and
genres. The literary’s historicity is not its only advantage, for we can also
glean from the written text several intertextual referents to other artifacts
of popular culture, such as the moving image and lyrical music, where the
semantics of gender construction and the negotiation of the Masculine can
take place in what is sometimes called the “low” arts. Recent Latin Ameri-
can fiction is valuable here as a source of study, because post-boom and
McOndo writers have made it a point to reference, develop, and serially
link to other manifestations of popular culture. Important, in this regard,
is the diegetic reception of the popular cultural artifact (whether it be mu-
sical or cinematic) within the narrative, as a symbolic representation of how
subjects may react to the planted gendered imagery/imaginary. I am, how-
ever, by no means stating that the literary is the only viable source material
for an examination of contemporary Latin American masculinities, for simi-
lar studies can and should be undertaken across disciplines such as the
visual arts, mass media, and even ethnography (akin to the latter section of
Connell’s Masculinities).
The advantages that I prescribe to the literary inform the subsequent
chapters in this study, as I link contemporary Latin American textual arti-
facts to critical approaches that draw freely from cultural studies. The point
regarding the relativity of current literature to past iterations is addressed
and developed over the course of part 1, where I examine recent new
historical novels produced in different regions of Latin America. The
organization of this part stresses the need for geographic sensitivity when
approaching such a vast cultural and spatial amalgamation, as I include
texts from Central America, Mexico, the Andean region, the Southern
Cone, and the Caribbean in the subsequent sections. Important in this
survey is the fact that the neoliberal age is not universal to Latin America,
for different countries and regions have had very different relationships
 10 · Introduction

with its tenets. What is notable, however, is that neoliberalism as a politico-

social episteme is far-reaching, going beyond true neoliberal experiments
in how it affects the everyday lives of people.10 The underlying theorem
behind this textual analytics is that local, subnational actors and bodies can
successfully domesticate or scale down macro processes to a tangible
system of representation, manifested through the aesthetics of the text or,
more importantly, in the semantics of the body. Part 1, divided into four
chapters, examines four new historical novels in juxtaposition to the tradi-
tional hegemonic dictator novel to identify how contemporary fiction re-
writes the apical position of the Masculine. These novels provide a dia-
chronic mint of gender constructions, because their “newness” stems, in
some ways, from recent takes on gender in relation to history. I am interested
here in unearthing how cultural production can highlight how the cur-
rent politico-economic episteme influences a traditional genre of gender
construction. I examine how authors such as Cristina Rivera Garza, Pedro
Lemebel, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Sergio Ramírez chose to write and
undermine the dictatorial body to construct, instead, different yet con-
verging masculinities. These novels, I argue, successfully deconstruct the
nationalistic hegemonic position (in this case, represented by the literary
caudillo) and posit alternate textual sites of male identification. There is an
acute authorial focus on how the male body is written, as specific anatomi-
cal positions become the loci that capture broader sociocultural processes
of change. The penis and its potential for masculine virility no longer
codify the Masculine, as what takes their place is an economic under-
standing of the body, reflective perhaps of the destabilization of national
politics in the interest of transnational economics. In this section, my anal-
ysis focuses on the writing of the penis, the testes, and the anus as textual
markers of the neoliberal episteme. I argue that the anus is not only a site
of queering challengers to the Masculine, but also in its inversion a point
of politico-economic critique, as the subsequent staining of the dictator
who loses control of his sphincter muscles expels him from any position
of reproductive viability. There is, as I will develop in later chapters, an
underlying critique of neoliberalism, as the anus emphasizes the scatologi-
cal possibilities when talking about free market policies and their social
aftermath.
The analysis of these new historical fictions sets the stage for the second
benefit I assign to the literary as source material, for it is through Lemeb-
el’s Tengo miedo torero that we transition toward an examination of popu-
lar music as a referent in studying contemporary takes on masculinities. The
novels in part 2 are useful in examining how other means of cultural
 The Body as Capital · 11

production (in this case, literature) assimilate and react to popular musi-
cal compositions (though a case can easily be made for studying the usage
of popular songs in recent cinema from the region). Intrinsic to this chap-
ter is a methodology that takes into account the intricacies of the lyrical text
as an inter- and intratextual referent to the diegesis. I analyze how tradi-
tional genres like the bolero are employed as popular codings of how gen-
dered bodies are constructed, and how they are placed or deployed in rela-
tion to each other, which invariably accentuates their positionality in relation
to the Masculine. An alternative would be to analyze the incursions of the
cinematic into the literary, because the latter provides a contextual matrix
for understanding the reception and assimilation of visual gendered bod-
ies. Such a study falls outside the scope of these pages but would be wel-
come in identifying how neoliberalism affects masculinity in the cinema,
which is arguably a more postnational medium than literature or popular
music. That being said, the novels examined in this chapter directly in-
volve neoliberalism as a dialoguing influence in the constitution of trans-
national gender expressions. This argument is brought to a climax through
the analysis of Franz Galich’s use of the popular music of the Mexican
rock band Maná to create fluid, nonnational masculinities that defy tradi-
tional norms that dictate male identity.
This critical reading, in turn, sets up the questions to be tackled in the
final section, where I examine how contemporary Latin American fiction
reacts to Connell’s theorized position of transnational business masculin-
ity. The readings here may inform scholars in other geocultural fields,
because the neoliberal episteme tends to find synonymous relationships
between a Global North and South. We may ask, then, how local gender
positions react to transnational bodies that erect new relations of hegemony
over traditional power systems. I examine works by Hernán Rodríguez
Matte, Jaime Bayly, and Enrique Serna to elucidate how masculinities are
reconstituted during and as a result of the crisis in gender brought about
by neoliberalism. Intrinsic to this investigation is an understanding that
Latin American masculinities are malleable by, yet challenging of, trans-
national processes and discursive subjectivities. In this line of argumenta-
tion, I furthermore question some of the recent theorizations regarding
global gender positions coming from the field of masculinity studies,
suggesting instead that local considerations cannot be ignored in favor
of homogenizing notions of Masculine uniformity. This line of inquiry
segues into the conclusion, which proposes several masculine tropes that
can be theorized as common archetypes repeated in recent literary pro-
duction. I look at cyborg masculinity in Santiago Roncagliolo’s Tan cerca
 12 · Introduction

de la vida as an example of how technology problematizes the body as a

symbolic and semantic referent in conceiving gender and argue that the
cyborg allows for a way out of transnational hegemony. In this section, I
also look at Gioconda Belli’s La mujer habitada as an example of what I
term revolutionary masculinity, a trope that is often repeated in narratives
that recount the failure of the Left vis-à-vis the onset of the neoliberal age.
As a final note, the texts and authors examined in The Body as Capital
are reflective of what Aníbal González calls writing after the nation (83),
because these fictions escape the traditional boundaries of a national corpus.
Many of the authors here, in fact, do not claim any one nationality, mov-
ing seamlessly across borders like the very commodified gendered bodies
that inhabit their fictions. At times holding multiple passports, living in
foreign capitals, and publishing through the powerhouses of transnational
presses, or in multiple venues such as newspapers, academic journals, edi-
torials, anthologies, and on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter,
the writers collected together here are intimately linked to the neoliberal
paradigm as they partake in a transnational free trade, the marketing and
distribution of both their cultural products and themselves as editorial
capital. They are, in most cases, equally adept at writing about Tokyo and
Barcelona and no longer necessarily locate their fictions in the traditional
spaces and ideologies of Latin American fiction. We can further note that
this grouping of authors does not follow traditional definitions of what
constitutes a literary generation or movement, but they are instead held
together by their participation in a global literary market that is triangu-
lated around the writer, the publisher, and the (mostly North American)
academy, as subject positions generating global fictions that are reactive
to equally global processes. They are effectively grouped under a system
of distribution that prizes, prints, and markets specific texts that are valued
for their potential to enter a global interchange of readers and ideas. Their
selection, however, is fruitful for the cultural critic, because they provide a
wide-angle lens for examining (and in a very real sense, simplifying) the
intricacies of Latin American masculinities (within the idea, of course, of
“Latin American” fiction as a placeholder). Their texts, we must note,
serve as reactive agents to the neoliberal episteme and thereby fabricate
polydimensional matrices of textual masculinities that permit an analysis of
how masculinity can be renegotiated in a global(ized) stage. I am hesitant to
name such a corpus but would tentatively call them Generation Alfaguara,
though one could equally substitute the name of any other large publisher.
As a conclusion to this introduction, I want to invite the reader to view
masculinity outside the constrictions of unmarkedness and to examine and
 The Body as Capital · 13

mint it for its ability to explain and challenge systems of oppression. In that
sense, and in addition to proposing an original methodology to viewing
gender in contemporary Latin American fiction, that is, through an adoption
of Raewyn Connell’s system of masculinity, the following pages dialogue in
some instances with previous gender-based criticism on well-known works
by posturing a masculine-centric analysis. Seen less as a challenge to previ-
ous interventions, these readings move toward a more holistic approxima-
tion of discursive gender that may feed into other angles of criticism.
 part one

New Historical
Masculinities

In a print culture focused on the past, where writers both rising and estab-
lished have repeatedly followed the strategy of fictionalizing the history of
the continent, authors (and critics) have become key instruments in societies’
rewriting of societies. This remembering by means of fiction has continued
to examine the figure of the dictator in Latin America as an organizational
position in political and sexual spheres, as these caudillos sit up as discur-
sive targets, which we can understand to be characterized by an omnipo-
tent and hypervirile masculinity. The importance of history and the exam-
ining of the past have contemporary implications in Latin America before,
during, and after the 1990s. As María Cristina Pons reckons, the rewrit-
ing of the past from the margins and peripheral positions “le da a la novela
histórica latinoamericana contemporánea una dimensión reflexiva y un
carácter político, y no meramente filosófico” (268). These reflections on
the self in relation to the nation, history, and gender lie at the center of the
following pages.
The search for identity is paired with what Gareth Williams calls a shift
in “the underlying telos of the nation” (23), which “is not a single process
of evolution but an accumulation of distinct and uneven processes of tran-
sition toward so- called globalization,” which has been brought about by
“neoliberal restructuring of the nation-state together with the emergence
of the transnational marketplace as a new and dominant force throughout
Latin America” (23). As a foundational work to Williams’s thesis, Néstor
García Canclini observes that part of this process revolves around a disso-
lution of the great narratives that “used to order and hierarchize the periods

15
 16 · Part I

of the patrimony and the flora of cultured and popular works in which so-
cieties and classes recognized each other and consecrated their values”
(243–44). This search is not a process within the nation but is, by necessity
and consequence of economic and political developments, a transnational
questioning. This need for identity comes into play just as capital markets
enjoy a free-floating and deterritorialized era of inversion, where “the goal
of production no longer lies in any specific market, any specific set of con-
sumers or social and individual needs, but rather in its transformation into
that element which by definition has no content or territory” (Jameson, Cul-
tural Turn 153). This shift has necessarily led to both a deterritorialization
and a dematerialization of economic systems. These processes are products
of what economists and politicians call neoliberalism, though the term is
neither an official designation of policy nor a rulebook for states to follow.
It is characterized by three broad components: the privatization of state-
owned enterprises, the implementation of austerity programs to curb pub-
lic spending, and the opening of trade barriers, normally through treaties
and accords that often lack a true juridical backbone. As I explicate in the
introduction, research regarding gender and sexuality has followed a simi-
lar course, with what can be observed as a deterritorialization of theorists
and theories onto the Latin American episteme. While this has taken place
on both economic and critical fields, literary production, in turn, has ex-
perienced a relative boom in caudillo novels.1
These new narratives are not so much concerned with exploring poly-
phonic voices of the dictator (which was in vogue in earlier pieces) as they
are geared toward a presentation of a singular alternative to the official his-
tory championed by regimes. This alternative history, I argue, is substanti-
ated by and fashioned through a retooling of the male body and an explo-
ration of the shift in the underlying telos of masculinity that has been
brought about by neoliberal policies.2 Taking into account Sergio Ramírez’s
Margarita, está linda la mar (1998), Cristina Rivera Garza’s Nadie me verá
llorar (1999), Mario Vargas Llosa’s La fiesta del chivo (2000), and Pedro
Lemebel’s Tengo miedo torero (2001), in these pages I focus on the process
of writing masculinities and the dictator, the construction of texts that are
brought alive by characters inscribed on the surface in black ink yet are
created and come to life in a more than three- dimensional space. This
space, beyond the imaginary and beyond the literary, is polytemporal, poly-
phonic, and polyveracious. Some critics have chosen to call this space the
new historical novel as it decenters traditional constructs of the past in
favor of a new configuration of historical events.3
The choice of novels provides a variety of authors that do and do not
subscribe to the phallic voice of patriarchal systems: Ramírez writes from
 New Historical Masculinities · 17

a position of authority within the Sandinista government; Rivera Garza

writes with a female, though gender-ambiguous, pen; Vargas Llosa takes
the pen at its most phallic, in textual and political terms, though his own
defeat and exile from Peru can be read in his version of the caudillo; and
last, Lemebel queers the text by dressing, transgendering, and metaliter-
izing the pen, providing a glimpse into a countervoice of the hegemonic
that Vargas Llosa explores in his retelling of the death of the Chivo. These
multiple positions in the writing of history vis-à-vis identity are auto-reflexive
of their own tools, as they plant the problematic of the legitimacy of alter-
native versions of history against the traditional dominant masculinity of
the South American dictator figure. These authors, importantly, circum-
scribe the figure of the dictator not through polyphonic confusions or am-
biguities, but instead by putting their own mark on the trope by displacing
the figure along lines of gender composition and sexual expression that
come into dialogue with a socio-structuralist theorization of hierarchical
and plural masculinities.4 In the seminal Masculinities (1995), Raewyn
Connell argues that masculinities exist in a matrix of power dominated by
a hegemonic variant that permits and perpetuates the subjugation of the
feminine subject and gender position by an effective social, political, and
economic strategy (77). These authors, I contend, engage in a displacement
of the dictator that is scripted by and in reaction to the economic and so-
cial changes brought about by end- of-the-century politics in Latin Amer-
ica. As José Olavarría notes, “los procesos macrosociales y económicos, así
como la disponibilidad de recursos que hacen de nexo entre esas políticas
macros y la vida cotidiana” (“La investigación” 328) have come to form a
crisis in masculinity that these novels are reactive to in their literary rei-
maginings of the dictator, which, in turn, implicate all compositions of the
individual in the face of the ever-changing nation-state.
 chapter one

Commoditizing the Male Body

in Margarita, está linda la mar

The possibilities of both spatial and temporal displacements within the new
historical novel are perfectly evidenced in Sergio Ramírez’s Margarita, está
linda la mar. By means of a dual inquiry into the past, Ramírez puts under
the microscope the political dictator Anastasio Somoza García and the poet
and father of modernismo, Rubén Darío, in an intricate wordplay that
stresses the connection between aesthetics and politics in the construct of
the nation-state. In terms of structure, the novel juxtaposes the return of
Darío to Nicaragua in 1907, after his stay in Europe, with the plot to assas-
sinate Somoza García in 1956; Ramírez recounts in candid detail both the
alcoholism of the poet and the antics of the conspirators as they attempt to
organize a foolproof plan to liberate the country.
In a study on contemporary novels of the dictator, Gabriela Polit
Dueñas notes that the novel marks a new phase in the caudillo genre,
as “el carisma, la personalidad y la capacidad personal de encarnar un
poder absoluto—elementos que obsesionaron a los escritores en décadas
anteriores—dejan de ser la preocupación del autor,” and that “tampoco hay
una idealización de la militancia de izquierda” (130). (The latter point
serves as a sort of preemption of postwar Central American fiction that is
ethico-aesthetically disenchanted with the political process.) Polit Dueñas
rightly notes that the assassination of Somoza is carried out by individuals
and is captured as a political happening instead of as a product of a com-
mon political ideal, as the text marks a new phase that shows “un profundo
desencanto con el poder y el quehacer de la política” (130). While this can
be read in the context of apolitical ennui from the Left after the fall of the

18
 Commoditizing the Male Body · 19

Communist bloc and the failure of popular revolutions, such as the Sand-
inistas, the novel can further be conceived along the place of the authorial
and corporal subject within the imagination of the historical past; in the
latter case, we may ask what is the role of the body in fictive rehashes of the
past? Margarita, está linda la mar can be read as a reflection of the per-
sonal on the political, as Ramírez draws parallels between two masculini-
ties that represent the modern Nicaraguan state—the authoritarian politi-
cian and the eloquent man of letters. This dualism in the imagining of the
nation is systematically approached in the novel through the temporal
displacements between the assassination of Somoza by the poet Rigoberto
López Pérez and the return of Darío to the continent after a stay in
Europe.
In her attempt to trace Ramírez’s published work in tandem with his po-
litical life, Polit Dueñas hesitates in performing a close reading of the text
and how it writes gender and sexuality, and what ramifications these have
on the national imaginary. Though she employs a psychoanalytic reading
to construct a connective thread between Darío, López Pérez, and Ramírez,
her analysis does not account for the constructions of masculinities within
the text. This is not to say that the national imaginary is left aside com-
pletely, for she argues that the figure of the poet competes with the dicta-
tor to assert a phallic masculinity that identifies the former as a founding
father of the nation (150). The physical brain of the former, furthermore, is
juxtaposed with the penis as representative of power, best evidenced in the
final pages of the novel as Quirón buries a jar containing Rigoberto’s cas-
trated testicles next to the interred jar containing Darío’s stolen brain.
A psychoanalytic reading of the novel emphasizes the physical and psy-
chical phallus as being the locus mundi of the body politic of the male sub-
ject. This critical practice is not strange to Latin American letters, where
the penis traditionally textualizes the subject’s social position and psycho-
logical makeup. Ramírez’s text, however, upon closer inspection seems to
displace the physical phallus from the penis to the testicles, asserting these
reproductive factories as the source of masculinity and power. Hegemony
is not defined by being able to urinate standing up, as is the desire of La
Caimana, or by being able to sustain an erection, as we note Darío’s impo-
tence, but is instead characterized only by possessing the reproductive
testes of the male. The novel consecrates the centrality of the testes as
physical loci of power when one of the conspirators asserts, “éste es un país
de eunucos. Se engorda más fácil cuando no se tiene testículos” (218).
The eunuch, as we know, lacks testicles but not necessarily a penis, thereby
emphasizing the importance of these productive sexual organs in the
 20 · Chapter 1

construct of the masculine subject. I underline the (economic) productiv-

ity of the testicles because unlike the penis, which serves a coital and uro-
logical purpose, the testicles are solely responsible for creating, storing,
and disseminating the subject either through the prosthesis of the off-
spring or through the aesthetics of a copious ejaculation that, in turn, de-
fines virility. The anatomy of the male thus suggests a deviation from José
Piedra’s notion of the pen(is) in the writing of fiction and historicity, for it
is not necessarily the organic phallus that circumscribes masculinity and
power, but a paradigm of economic productivity that leads to a writing of
the past with the aim of understanding contemporary Latin American
society.1
By emphasizing the corporeality of the male subject in Margarita, está
linda la mar, Ramírez highlights the construct of masculinity within the
novel as a crossroads in understanding the present through a mythification
of the past in his native Nicaragua. As José Ángel Vargas has studied,
Ramírez mythifies and then demythifies important historical figures in
order to construct “un ícono de la realidad de un país que aparece por una
parte pletórico de gloria, y por otra, castigado terriblemente por el poder
político” (33). The leftist revolutionary figure of Sandino is described as
having “los huevos . . . enormes y sonrosados, como la postura del ave fénix”
(Margarita 218). The failure of the Left in contemporary Nicaraguan
politics is addressed in the description of the male’s testicles, albeit in a
positive light, as the novel suggests that they will rise again like the mythi-
cal bird. Their productivity is stressed in opposition to the relative impo-
tency of the penis, for the novel is rife with characters who have failing
organs and belong to the homosocial. To further emphasize the connec-
tion between the testes and subjectivity, Somoza on his deathbed orders
his troops to castrate Rigoberto: he stresses the cutting of the “huevos” and
not the penis. The testes, thus, are codified as corporal signifiers of the male
subject within a broader imaginary of the writing of the nation.
As Somoza’s men round up the plethora of suspects, Rigoberto’s testi-
cles in a bottle are described as resembling a fetus. This last observation
suggests that the nation is birthed from the testicles of the poet, and not
necessarily from the site of ejaculation, that is, his penis. The testes as a
site of origination of biological and ideological seed establish a genealogy
among sons and fathers, and only by eliminating them can the son avenge
the father. Trujillo’s sons in La fiesta del Chivo best represent this trope,
but it is also extant in Ramírez’s narrative. When one of the conspirators,
Cordelio, returns to León, a priest asks him if he is going to hang by the
testicles the colonel who killed his father. The testes represent the connec-
tion between the father and the son, between aesthetic and political
 Commoditizing the Male Body · 21

genealogies, for the son is merely a prosthesis produced in the scrotal sac.
By focusing on the testes, the text hints at an economic understanding of
the nation that is not necessarily connected to the equivalency of the penis
to the Lacanian phallus that Polit Dueñas suggests is pervasive in the novel
(143–50), but instead suggests a model of progeny that is metaphorical of
systems of (re)production.
From an etymological standpoint, the testicles originate from the Latin
witness. They witness virility, masculinity, reproduction, and even, as in
Margarita, está linda la mar, the subjectification and desubjectification of
individuals. From an anatomical standpoint, the testes house the develop-
ment of germ cells into reproductive gametes: only by means of the testicles
can the male individual reproduce. The onus placed on (re)production as a
systemic and epistemological practice establishes a writing of subjectivity
onto the testicles, and not necessarily through the psychics of the phallus.
Masculinity is, therefore, not solely formed by a psychoanalytic construct;
it is also (corporally) manufactured in tandem with the economic idea of
anatomical productivity. We may see this corporal shift as reactive to the
economic changes in Nicaragua after the handover of the government
from Ramírez’s party to the rightwing Unión Nacional Opositora. The new
government headed by Violeta Chamorro institutes socioeconomic policies
that attempt to align the country with neoliberal tendencies in Latin Amer-
ica. Unlike Vargas Llosa’s Peru, which undergoes a Fujishock in the early
nineties, Sandinista Nicaragua refused to incorporate the economic poli-
cies disseminated from the Global North. Written during a shift away from
leftist economic ideals, and Ramírez’s own divorce from national politics,
which he would enshrine in Adiós muchachos: Una memoria de la revolu-
ción Sandinista (1999), Margarita, está linda la mar seems to be conscious of
the economic pinnings of nationhood as borders are permeated. Ramírez’s
emphasis on the testes as a source of masculinity, as a source of virility for
both the leftist poets and the rightist caudillos, reflects the importance of
a bodily coding of economics in imagining the nation. In imagining the
years of Sandinista control, for example, the castrations of Sandino, Rigo-
berto, and three other conspirators reconciles the lack of economic growth
in Nicaragua during the revolution and its inability to undergo an urban
boom. This is reflected in the descriptions of the capital, Managua, in con-
temporary Nicaraguan fiction: it is not the urbanized, cosmopolitan expres-
sion of McOndo, as are other cities such as Santiago and Lima, but is in-
stead deathly and lost, emphasizing Seymour Menton’s notion of a poetics
of disillusionment and Beatriz Cortez’s aesthetics of cynicism in contem-
porary Central American fiction, which I explicate in the study of Franz
Galich’s novels.
 22 · Chapter 1

Just as the testicles are paramount to the connection between mascu-

linity and the national, the printing press is similarly connected to the
community’s imagining of the nation (Anderson 6). This comes as no sur-
prise, as Ramírez continues publishing fiction during his tenure as vice pres-
ident and during his charge of the National Council of Education from
1979 to 1984. The press in Margarita, está linda la mar is the institution
under Somoza that Ramírez undermines by writing gender and sexuality
onto its body. I say “undermines” because he does not adhere to Connell’s
ideas of the hegemonic and how it establishes itself through discourses of
science, objectivism, and the official reporting of history. While the text
highlights the importance of science as a discourse of modernity and prog-
ress in the building of the nation, its interpretation of the topic is centered
on Godofredo, the cuckolded husband of Darío’s lover, who functions as the
demythified man of science. Nicaragua does not enjoy a precise and over-
bearing figure such as Somoza in the latter half of the twentieth century
and must instead contend with “el inventor paralítico que se había caído del
caballo el día de San Juan Bautista” (96). Science is further castrated from
the discussion of the national through the figure of Dr. Baltasar Cisne, a
Darío fanatic and supporter of Somoza’s regime. On the way to León, the
doctor shares a beer with some of the conspirators, who know him from La
Caimana’s brothel. A fictive Jorge Negrete addresses Cisne by asking him
to recount how “le pidió a La Caimana que le consiguiera la mejor de las
muñecas” (108). Cisne ignores the comment, only to have Negrete follow
with “cuénteles por qué ninguna quería con usted, y cuénteles lo que al
fin le dijo aquella morenota rolliza, la Flor de un día: ‘¡Ay, no, yo con usted
no, doctor! No voy a saber si me está cogiendo, o lo estoy pariendo’ ” (108).
The man of science in Ramírez’s early twentieth- century Nicaragua is,
through interpersonal relationships with other masculinities, without a
doubt not the mobilizing, domineering voice associated with Connell’s he-
gemonic masculinity in the structuralizing of society; instead, he’s a weak-
ened object of ridicule, emasculated by competing masculinities within the
gendered theater.
Margarita, está linda la mar does, however, include a reference to Con-
nell’s last strategy of control. The official reporting of history is carried out
by the printing press, which in the novel serves as a meeting point for the
conspirators. The building is guarded by an “empleada, calzada con za-
patos de varón” (144). This is the first step in Ramírez’s undermining of
hegemonic power, as the quasi-transvestite sweeper is hesitant to allow the
preacher Cordelio, one of the conspirators, to enter, because printed on a
tattered sign on the door is a warning: “AQUÍ SOMOS CATÓLICOS Y
 Commoditizing the Male Body · 23

NO ADMITIMOS PROPAGANDA PROTESTANTE” (146). Ramírez is

careful to connect the press to established hierarchies of the hegemony,
such as religion, yet at the same time sidesteps gender norms to subvert the
power of the press under Somoza.
This strategy of connecting the press to authority and then sublating this
very authority by means of gender constructs and writings is best evidenced
in the figure of Rafael Parrales and his journal El Cronista. The journal is
housed in a city block with a funeral parlor and a professional school of
commerce, both of which represent legislative bodies of the state, with the
former legalizing death and the latter education. The funerary alludes to
the military and traditional branches of virile masculinity, with its empha-
sis on the shield. Within the journal, the printing press is operated by
human labor. Ramírez asserts the connection between El Cronista and
the government when he notes that Kid Dinamita, a disgraced boxer who
is condemned to jail after stabbing his wife, physically powers the press; he
is loaned to Rafa by the authorities during the working week, allowed to
leave his cell “como reo de confianza, para que haga girar la pesada
rueda de la prensa manual” (216). Dinamita subscribes to the virile and
violent masculinity that precedes the agenda of science and knowledge,
which dominates movements toward modernity in the early twentieth cen-
tury. He represents a violent and hypersexualized masculinity that Polit
Dueñas connects to the dictator figure. More importantly, though, he re-
flects the commoditization of the body—the emphasis on it as bartered
capital—as his virility and strength are no longer symbols of the nation or
the hegemon but are instead only cogs in the industrial complex of the
state and the Masculine.
Returning to the construction of hegemonic masculinity during
Somoza’s regime in reference to the printing press, note that the owner of
the journal merits attention as he conforms to the thesis of connecting to
and then subverting the institution. The novel provides a genealogy of
ownership of El Cronista ending with Rafael Parrales, who buys the jour-
nal with a loan from his godmother, doña Casimira, who is the mother-in-
law of Somoza. Parrales is further linked to the regime when one of the
conspirators suggests that using the journal as a hideout for Cordelio would
be “como si lo llevaras directo a manos del coronel Melisandro Maravilla”
(288). The apotheosis of this association occurs at the banquet, moments
before Rigoberto assaults Somoza, when Parrales sits at the dictator’s table
and tells him that Rigoberto would be an ideal candidate to work in the
national press (read: propaganda machine) in Managua. Rafa’s penetration
into the hegemonic is formalized when he flirtatiously invites Somoza’s wife
 24 · Chapter 1

to dance (339). This action evokes the notion that women are traded among
hegemonic subjects as capital; in other words, Parrales’s invitation inserts
him into the dominating group.
In this act of courtship, we are reminded that though owning the press
and belonging to the intimate table of the dictator, Parrales is homosexual.
There is some confusion in the novel regarding his sexuality, as he is de-
scribed both as a cochón (302), who in Nicaraguan homosexual circles is
solely penetrated, and as a penetrator. As the conspirators approach El
Cronista, Rafael is described as a “loco peligrosísimo” (208), who sensually
fixates on Norberto. When the other conspirators mock Norberto for this
attention, he staunchly denies any connection with Parrales. Only when
one of the conspirators affirms that “tuyo es tu culo. En eso, yo no me meto”
(209) does Norberto laugh, suggesting that he has been penetrated by the
journalist. Herein lies the subversion of the press, for Parrales is not only a
queered figure but also sexually ambiguous within practice. He is not the
willing penetratee that Roger Lancaster conceptualizes in his sociological
study of homosexuality in Nicaragua but is instead a new archetype that
does not conform to traditional tenets of sexual expression, introduced in
the national imaginary perhaps as a side effect of the shift to open borders.
Parrales ritualizes a practice of seduction, evoking Reinaldo Arenas’s joys
in hunting flesh in the liminal space of the seaside in Antes que anochezca
(1992), as he is the “pescador” who catches a “pez” (205).2 His bait is “un
billete de mil córdobas con el perfil en óvalo de Somoza” (205). The inclu-
sion of this caveat has a dual significance in the text. On the one hand,
sexuality and masculinity can be bought and sold, as it is alluded that the
otherwise heterosexual Norberto fell trap to the “pescador.” Such a seduc-
tion highlights the importance of the body and its productive parts in
constructing the Masculine subject, for masculinity is for all intents and
purposes a commodity that subscribes to the laws and pressures of the
market: it can be bought, sold, negotiated, and ultimately put into a hier-
archical system. Even seemingly heterosexual men can be priced and
convinced to open their orifices (the ultimate sign of emasculation). Het-
erosexuality, it seems, is fluid and undefined, particularly in a neoliberal
episteme, where cash is king and the buyer has the last word.
The inclusion of Somoza’s profile in the scheme, that is, on the bank
note, hints at the dictator’s economic policy, which was shrouded by under-
the-table dealings, oligarchic structures, and hierarchies built around nep-
otism and cronyism. This system impoverished the populace and increased
the divide between rich and poor in Nicaragua. By following the meta-
phorical banknote printed with the caudillo’s portrait, the novel affirms
 Commoditizing the Male Body · 25

that the nation as the unassuming and anonymous “pez” assumed the role
of the sodomee, giving in to bodily and economic pressures to open up. The
nation under such a historical regime effectively becomes a cochón, which,
as one of Somoza’s sergeants asserts, is an “invertido” (302). Similarly, the
nation under any regime that holds capital to be king (such as the neoliberal
state in the post-Sandinista period) will equally be emasculated and placed
into the role of the oppressed. The symbolism of the bank note here is only
another example of how readers may interpolate the historical onto the
present, in addition to viewing it as diegetic of a sociocultural past, as we
can tease out synchronic and diachronic interpretations of the exchange
of money for the anus.
The verb invertir conjures a dual schema of characterization. On one
level, it indicates a changing or substituting of the order, position, or sense
of a thing. The cochón would, therefore, be inverting heteronormative sex-
ual practices and expressions. The verb, however, also has an economic
definition, wherein it signifies the productive application of capital. Can
the sodomee be thought of in terms of economics, as a product of caudillo
and neoliberal economics? I will touch on this later when I analyze in closer
detail Galich’s two novels on post-Sandinista Nicaragua. Returning to the
new historical novel, however, the first entry of the verb invertir is a central
axis in the genre’s task of fictionalizing the historical. But does the second
entry of the verb reverberate in these rewritings of history? Referencing tra-
ditional, heterosexual patriarchal societies, Gayle Rubin theorizes that the
system only functions by means of a traffic in the corporal bodies of women
within the masculine homosocial. From my analysis of Margarita, está linda
la mar, it is evident that a trafficking in bodies is taking place. But is it the
movement of women as possessions between men that defines Ramírez’s
reflection on the past through the optic of the present?
 chapter two

Marketing Masculinities
in Nadie me verá llorar

Cristina Rivera Garza’s Nadie me verá llorar underlines the substitutive pro-
cess of inversion as it recounts the life of a woman in the last years of Por-
firio Díaz’s government and the beginning of the Mexican Revolution. The
novel is constructed around an oppositional gender voice to the main nar-
rative, as the photographer, Joaquín Buitrago, provides Rivera Garza with
a framing device to the narrative of and about Matilda Burgos, a provin-
cial girl from Papantla, Veracruz, who leaves the house of her uncle in Mex-
ico City after a brief involvement with Revolutionary fighters. Matilda
becomes a prostitute, and then later a patient in a psychiatric ward, where
she is classified as being mentally ill after she refuses the advances of a
group of soldiers. Unsurprisingly, the critical gender work to date on the
novel has focused on the feminine/feminist aspects of the transgressive
lead, who turns her back on hegemonic masculinity’s strategies of societal
control.
Upon Matilda’s arrival in Mexico City, the reader can easily piece to-
gether how her uncle, Marcos Burgos, functions as the axis around which
his local society revolves. In a microeconomic sense, he structures and dic-
tates the machinations of the household through a set of rules designed to
inbreed hygiene and order. Mexican society at the beginning of the twen-
tieth century and during the last years of the Porfiriato was underscored by
the project of modernization. As Maricruz Castro Ricalde explains, soci-
ety was structured around institutions of law, hygiene, and order that per-
mitted a national project of modernity (viii). The historicized dictator (in-
cluding the domestic dictator Marcos) further inscribes the importance of

26
 Marketing Masculinities · 27

hygiene onto his own body. He is obsessively preoccupied with cleanliness,

both his own and that of others, and being impeccably dressed.1 Writing
hygienic bodies for these patriarchal men becomes a metonymic inscrip-
tion of writing codes of hygiene and cleanliness onto society, which, as
Ricardo Melgar Bao suggests, is inherent in Latin American projects of
modernity (31)—a nation that is, by virtue of the power structures of govern-
ment, phallogocentric in nature and as a construct.
Keeping this in mind, the hypermasculinity of the political (macro) dic-
tator in Nadie me verá llorar within this matrix is an afterthought, as Rivera
Garza reorients the axis of power to the domestic dictator in the form of
Marcos Burgos, thus posing a case-study system (which is really rhizom-
atic) in understanding the whole. The reorientation of the dictator may also
fall in line with the literary probing of femininity in Mexican society, a con-
nective thread that runs through much of the author’s work, inspired no
doubt by antecedents such as Rosario Castellanos and contemporaries like
Ana Clavel. The author acknowledges this point, stating in an interview
that the original title of the novel was to be Yo, Matilda Burgos (Macías
Rodríguez and Hong), though it was discarded as too similar to testimonio-
style narrative produced by female authors in the twentieth century.
Nadie me verá llorar illustrates a narrative: “de desarraigo tanto vivencial
como intelectual, de buscados puntos-de-fuga, de estar-en-el-fuera-de-lugar,
de una gozosa (aunque también sufrida y a veces violenta y violentada) au-
tonomía, que me gusta mucho, con la que me identifico profundamente y
a la cual no voy a dejar escapar” (Macías Rodríguez and Hong). Rivera
Garza’s own description of her work becomes tangible in the presence of
history and the dictator within the diegesis. Women in Rivera Garza’s
novel gain a level of subjectivity above the simplistic monetary value Rubin
suggests.2 They instead become cogs in a system where “una buena ciu-
dadana, una muchacha decente, una mujer de buenas costumbres tiene
que empezar por aprender los nombres exactos de las horas” (119). Marcos’s
wife, for example, works like an automaton around his schedule and prefer-
ences, which are underscored by the necessities of personal (and symbolic)
hygiene (within the national imaginary). Conversely, within the novel, and
more broadly within the narratives I examine, the lack of personal hygiene
is a first physical step in the desubjectification of bodies, which is followed
by psychological or physical castration as a final blow.3
These acts are, in essence, transgressions of the established matrix of
masculine power within the social context of the diegesis. Rivera Garza
homes in on transgressions to discursively navigate the social body of
masculinity through the feminine character of Matilda, who posits an
 28 · Chapter 2

un- Santa-like prostitute. I refer here, of course, to Federico Gamboa’s

Santa (1903), the novel that is a recurrent intertext in Nadie me verá llorar.
Though Rivera Garza gives a voice to this silenced faction of Mexican so-
ciety that Gamboa synthesizes into the submissive and sexualized Santa—
a type, not a round character—what is really at stake is how this character
maneuvers through the historical and the social to unearth the gendered
mechanisms of control that remain unchanged, or are perhaps better hid-
den, in the present.
If the domestic dictator Marcos Burgos is akin to George Mosse’s idea
of the masculine stereotype (6), then the other men in the text, such as
Joaquín Buitrago, Eduardo Oligochea, Paul Kamack, and Arturo Loayza,
function as countertypes. For a stereotype to come into existence, Mosse
argues, an efficient system and hierarchy of countertypes must first be
constructed. The masculine stereotype is to be strengthened by “the exis-
tence of a negative stereotype of men who not only failed to measure up to
the ideal but who in body and soul were its foil, projecting the exact opposite
of true masculinity” (6). Marcos Burgos thus serves as the most stereotypic
example in Rivera Garza’s examination of masculinity in the text, the writ-
ten subject most approximated to the Masculine as construct and subject
position. He belongs to the new hegemony of knowledge, science, and
modernity—the era of the científicos—that subverts the traditional emphasis
on physical power and aesthetics. This new ethos of science, and by default
its discursive elements, defines the strategies of modernization, whether in
the latter years of the Porfiriato or during contemporary shifts toward an
open market, when westernization and the partaking of the cultural and
economic episteme of the Global North define conditions of the modern.
Marcos demonstrates an avid interest in the project of modernization when
he notes that “si el régimen en verdad creía en el orden y el progreso, . . .
los médicos, y no los políticos, tendrían que dictar estrictas legislaciones
urbanas” (126). Though some readings of the novel have identified Marcos
Burgos as a character who is abjected from the nation due to his provincial
heritage, we can conversely observe how “Marcos desarrolló una fe ciega en
las posibilidades abiertas del futuro, en el progreso de la nación” (124). He
becomes, I argue, a symbol of knowledge-based hegemony, stressing that
the Masculine is sociohistorically conscious and evolutionary. His belong-
ing is tied to an unabashed imitation of the stereotype, as “no sólo imitó [la]
manera de vestir [de sus maestros] sino que además pudo desarrollar la
misma ingravidez de movimientos y la mesura pacífica de sus miradas,”
and that “todos olvidaron que era de Veracruz y, de la misma manera,
todos estuvieron de acuerdo en su brillante futuro” (125). Marcos, though
 Marketing Masculinities · 29

coming from the province, evidences the possibility of simulation and

performance of masculinity as a successful strategy of emulating the stereo-
type. More importantly, the genotype of the subject does not delimit its
possibilities in the gendered order, but its phenotypic performances and
beliefs elude the corporality (at times) of the body.
The morphine-addicted, failed photographer Buitrago, on the other
hand, plays the role of the countertype to the scientific and modernizing
stereotype. As a “sissy” in the economy of masculinity, he is both subjugated
and ontological to the hegemonic. José Piedra defines “the sissy” in gender
relations among men as being a subject that is “ ‘ultra’ feminine, femi-
nized, and/or [whose] effeminate behavior [is] perceived as passive, weak,
and forever ready to suit the bully’s whims” (370). Other characters, such
as the psychiatrist Eduardo Oligochea, who treats Matilda, and Arturo
Loayza, who is Buitrago’s childhood friend and now lawyer, pose middle
grounds between the stereotype and the subordinate masculinities that
populate Rivera Garza’s novel. They slip into the crevices, or gray spaces,
between the gender and subject positions of dominant and subordinate.
As an example, Eduardo Oligochea is a man who places utmost impor-
tance on the precision of science as “tanto en su escritorio como dentro de
su cabeza los objetos y las palabras se mueven con ritmos metódicos,
siguiendo patrones rigurosos pero nimbados de armonía” (103). These “pa-
trones” suggest a connection to Marcos Burgos’s rules of hygiene and the
imitation of his own “patrones”: the professors on whom he modeled his
behavior and countenance. Rivera Garza effectively contrasts his fixation
on language and certainty with the self-narrative of a patient, Roma Ca-
marena. When asked by Oligochea about her parents, she responds, “¿mis
padres? Las putas lo vuelven loco” (101). She sidesteps his questioning and
instead focuses on the philandering husband she blames for her condition.
Eduardo’s medical evaluation of the subject is of interest, as he notes that
“su delirio era polimorfo, destacándose con más claridad la idea de que el
marido la había hecho guaje, y que ella, a su vez, lo había engañado para
vengarse de él. Tenía un delirio de ideas por asociación” (101). His evalua-
tion concludes, “le quedó sólo el resentimiento hacia su esposo al que no
le perdona las faltas que según ella le ha cometido. Locura intermitente.
Violento celosa. Acceso maniaco. Libre e indigente” (102). His precision of
language contrasts sharply with Camarena’s self-styled narrative. Further-
more, an implicit doubt is placed on the woman, who by being interned in
La Castañeda, is now an unwanted societal element. If anything, then, the
female body is abjected in the novel, not the man of science. Oligochea’s
official report places doubt on her husband’s actions but strongly asserts
 30 · Chapter 2

Camarena’s transgressive actions of adultery, which break the code of

order and hygiene. The narrative further notes that “entre las palabras y el
olor, él busca uniformidad, exactitud. Un método científico. Una manera
de explicar la vida del cerebro y la conducta de los hombres basada en
experimentos” (39). The novel, borrowing from Rivera Garza’s doctoral
dissertation, The Masters of the Streets: Bodies, Power and Modernity in
Mexico, 1867–1930, specifies how in 1917, a small group of doctors got to-
gether to (re)configure “el lenguaje de la psiquiatría” (104), so much so that
conditions such as “la verborrea incomprensible de los mayores de cin-
cuenta años,” now “se convierte en demencia senil” (103).
Science becomes a hegemonic textual strategy defined by its economy
of verbiage and the epistemological cache it places on descriptive accuracy,
which in turn permits a definition, separation, and purification of the
national imaginary. Scientific discourse as a hegemonic text is, quite expect-
edly, contrasted with the voice of poetry and poets, returning us to Ramírez’s
juxtaposition of the father of modernismo with the contemporary political
strife of competing modernizing agents. Eduardo affirms that though some
“psiquiatras todavía son poetas, hombres subyugados por las profundidades
ignotas del alma” (39), he is instead what he wants to be, “un profesional
sin poesía” (39). Marcos Burgos adds his two cents that “los bohemios, como
denominaban a los poetas, eran tan peligrosos como los mismos pobres”
(129), who were, and still are, a societal element defined by the “stain” that
Melgar Bao describes as contrary to the construct of a nation.
This fixation on the word, both spoken and written, is specified in Oli-
gochea’s most worrying dream, which is centered on “palabras equívocas”
(105). These “wrong words” are evoked by a relationship the doctor had in
his youth with a young girl from provincial Jalapa, Mercedes Flores, who,
after making love for the first time, tells him “I’m your man. . . . You’re my
woman, Eduardo” (105). The statement displaces the male subject from the
emulation of the Masculine and destabilizes the market of masculinities
that the novel constructs, emphasizing that the linguistic and the symbolic
are ontological to any episteme of gender. Language, therefore, not only
becomes imperative in the discourse of nation, as seen in Marcos Burgos,
but is also primary in the construct of the self, a theme developed in
Rivera Garza’s La cresta de Ilión (2002).
Oligochea, furthermore, is completely dependent on the approval of the
homosocial mass in his self-justification as a mature member of society.
Subjectivity and belonging are essential, and he makes this most clear when
he shows a photo of his fiancée to Joaquín, who notes “la necesidad de apro-
bación en los ojos de su confidente” (52). Eduardo gains subjectivity not by
 Marketing Masculinities · 31

means of the scrotal sack, like Ramírez’s males, but through homosocial
approbation, reminiscent of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s postulates of homo-
erotic desire. Sedgwick describes the homosocial as “a word occasionally
used in history and the social sciences, where it describes social bonds be-
tween persons of the same sex; it is a neologism, obviously formed by anal-
ogy with ‘homosexual,’ and just as obviously meant to be distinguished from
‘homosexual’ ”  (1). The reference to homosexuality corroborates an ap-
plication of the countertype/stereotype model, for the term homosociality
“is applied to such activities as ‘male bonding,’ which may, as in our soci-
ety, be characterized by intense homophobia, fear and hatred of homo-
sexuality” (1). Eduardo’s moment of castration, though political and not
physical, occurs when Buitrago sees that “de repente éste parece un perro
amaestrado o un mozalbete de apenas diecisiete años, ambos con el ho-
cico abierto como si aguardaran palmas en el lomo o regalos” (52). The
climax of the castrating scene, which is to say the metaphorical flaccid
penis or the swallowing of the testicles, occurs when Buitrago chastises
Eduardo: “Vamos Eduardo. No te hagas pendejo. Esto ni siquiera es una
mujer. Cecilia es tu boleto para entrar por la puerta grande a la colonia
Roma” (53). From this we note how the novel dephallicizes Oligochea
through a sustained inquiry into and placement of the relations of power
among men, and not necessarily through the manipulation of the male
body and its organs that the author of Margarita, está linda la mar prefers.
Rivera Garza instead foments a discursive space that dialogues not only
with historic ideas of Mexican masculinity (Irwin xxviii), but also with the
writing of gender into a text that in its new historicity implicates contem-
porary positions and constructs of identity.
The novel creates a market dynamic of competing yet variant mascu-
linities that upholds a singular structure of power that is the Masculine.
Eduardo Oligochea as an example does not conform to the definitions and
expectations of the homosocial and belongs instead to what Connell terms
“complicit” masculinities, “constructed in ways that realize the patriarchal
dividend, without the tensions or risks of being the frontline of troops of
patriarchy” (79). Connell further notes that by sheer numbers, complicit
masculinity is the most pervasive category observed in Western culture, and
“often involve[s] extensive compromises with women rather than naked
domination or an uncontested display of authority” (79). Men in this group
are by necessity complicit with the hegemonic project and their need for
approval from and approximation to the gendered ideal remains unchanged.
They are neither Mosse’s stereotype nor countertype, instead existing in a
crevice between the two. They sustain hegemonic masculinity through
 32 · Chapter 2

their pervasive and unrelenting adulation of the political phallus yet do not
function as a symbolic counterposition. As a result, the novel does not
displace the focus of power between corporal sites, but instead creates a
market of masculinities where men are commoditized as symbolic, struc-
tural, and fluidly functional types. Parting from this framework we can see
how Oligochea, for example, belongs to the stereotype in his stubborn yet
consistent adherence to the language of science but falls from hegemony
as he cannot gain the approbation of a drug-addict photographer who, for
the first time, “le habla de tú” (53). Eduardo’s slippage, both into the crack
between stereotype and countertype and into actions that run against law
and order, is punctuated by an encounter with a young drug addict from a
seemingly wealthy background, who asserts that “todo el mundo rompe las
reglas, doctor, todo el mundo” (97). The speaker belongs to a demographic
that “son, por lo regular, aunque no todos, oficinistas, farmacéuticos, estu-
diantes de leyes o de medicina. Gente como él. Gente a la que puede ver
a los ojos sin conmiseración. Hombres jóvenes de traje, corbata y sombrero
de fieltro que llegan de la mano de sus padres o sus tutores, con el afán de
verlos curados del vicio y el cinismo de las drogas” (98). The youth (like
Eduardo) belongs to the hegemonic class and asserts that, though his father
(like Marcos Burgos) “cree que el país está destinado a encontrar su propia
grandeza” (99), he does not share in the same hope. This disenchantment
with the national rhetoric of modernity and progress is made complicit
with a usage of drugs as a means of escape, an approach that is in stark
discord with the strategies of the dictator Marcos. The theme of drugs and
the subsequent escape from reality brings to the fore Joaquín Buitrago,
who is the opening narrative element in Nadie me verá llorar.
Buitrago at first has the potential of best approximating the stereotype
of masculinity (which is in itself a close approximation to the Masculine),
as he not only comes from a wealthy family but is also blessed with good
looks and education. In his younger days, he could have subscribed to both
the discursive and the aesthetic hegemonies of masculinity. Unlike the
drugged youth who confronts Eduardo, however, Joaquín shows no sem-
blance of belonging to the modernization project. He evidences first signs
of breaking with this rhetoric when, in an almost vampiric state, he observes
“la luz de su propia figura en los aparadores. Lo hace con duda, volviendo
ligeramente el rostro a la derecha y luego a la izquierda, como si temiera
que algún transeúnte se burlara de él” (24). As an insomniac, Buitrago is
also located outside the culture of work and order specified by Marcos
Burgos, going to bed just as “los demás despiertan y la ciudad vuelve a
juntarse en su nudo de ruido y velocidad” (14); away from the markets of
 Marketing Masculinities · 33

economic progress, his subjectivity falls outside the parameters of gen-

dered positions of power. He shows a precocious fixation on subjectivity
like Eduardo but makes no attempts at reconciliation with the homoso-
cial as he lacks his own Cecilia. Joaquín also evidences a break from the
linguistic economy of Oligochea, when the latter questions the former,
who “rara vez tiene respuestas inmediatas o lineales” (33). Furthermore,
“hablar, para Joaquín, es desvariar. Confunde el tiempo de los verbos y
los pronombres” (33). The fall from norms of work and language place
Joaquín in what Connell calls the category of subordinate masculinities,
which unlike the complicit varieties are explicit countertypes to the
stereotype.
Rivera Garza places Buitrago in a central dialectic that frames the novel,
marked by the question “¿cómo se convierte uno en fotógrafo de putas?”
(19, 186). His profession, at first glance, adheres to the hegemonic norms
of hygiene and order, as photographers were hired by state institutions to
photograph and document prostitutes and patients in mental institutions
(Irwin 75), and to document, categorize, and collect the body maintained
within the discursive limits of power. Buitrago, however, comes to focus
on elements of the photographed subject that go beyond simple scientific
documentation. He notes how the prostitutes he photographs “hacía[n]
esfuerzos entre risibles y sinceros por imitar las poses de languidez o de
provocación de las divas” (19). He is less focused on the practice and order
of codifying gendered bodies and more on the aesthetics and nuances, the
poetics and coming into being of these same subjects. Though the man
controls the gaze of the photographic apparatus, the subject in Buitrago’s
photography is the woman, or object of the photograph, as women exist as
independent subjects in the photo. They are conscious of their own move-
ments and are given free rein in the composition of the photo. They
become subjects when the lens becomes a mirroring surface onto which
they model the poses and expressions of vedettes and Hollywood actresses.
Buitrago becomes nothing more than a body holding a camera, a finger
pressing a shutter, displaced from the patriarchal power ontologically im-
posed on the cataloger of bodies. Joaquín is therefore desubjectified and
becomes a portal by which the objects of his photography gain their own
subjectivity, seeing the lens as a mirror. He aims to capture “el lugar en que
una mujer se acepta a sí misma. Allí la seducción no iba hacia afuera ni
era unidireccional; allí, en un gesto indivisible y único, la seducción no
era un anzuelo sino un mapa” (19). This space, or perhaps surface, where
the woman comes to terms with herself recounts a Lacanian mirror stage,
where the subject engages in a Hegelian dialectic with the image in the
 34 · Chapter 2

mirror (lens). Joaquín is further convinced that it is possible to reach that

place. Psychoanalysis holds the opposite to be true, however, which in
turn leads to the futility of Buitrago’s aesthetic project, annulling him
within the dialectic of the lens image.
This futility is further evidenced in his interactions with other members
of the photographic homosocial. One member comments upon seeing Joa-
quin’s portfolio, “¿esto es lo que fuiste a aprender en Roma, flaco? Esto es
un trabajo muy menor” (23). Aside from belittling his art, the speaker also
aesthetically countertypes Buitrago as a flaco, separating him from the
virile and sensual male body that Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba notes in
early twentieth- century Mexican visual and textual culture. Even among
the complicit group of photographers, Buitrago embodies a subordinate
group, a countertype that serves as the antithesis of what man (or the pho-
tographer) should be within the project of modernity.
Instead of populating the novel with a random spattering of men, Ri-
vera Garza establishes a system of comparisons among the male characters
in Nadie me verá llorar by means of ontological equivalencies that later frag-
ment into the multiplicities of men in her fictive society. Buitrago is tied to
Oligochea by working within the world of science but differs from the lat-
ter in that his narrative voice is far removed from the structural and lexical
precision of the psychiatrist. Oligochea is similarly connected to Marcos
Burgos, as both subscribe to the linguistic economy of science. Buitrago is
associated with the lawyer Arturo Loayza, who shares a common childhood.
Both characters were born into wealth and educated; their parents were also
friends. Joaquín demonstrates a calculated adherence to Loayza’s belong-
ing to the hegemonic discourse, modifying his speech to mimic the voice
of order (as the newly arrived Marcos Burgos once did in copying his “pa-
trones”), as “cada una de sus frases contiene al final un punto y aparte. Un
nuevo párrafo” (217). Within this dialectic exercise of comparisons and con-
structs, Buitrago engages Arturo to secure the patrimony left by his par-
ents. While Arturo by day is the stereotype of the wealthy, progressive, and
articulate Mexican man, he shows a slippage into the crevice between ste-
reotype and countertype in the company of Buitrago. We see how “los dos
se observan con una delicadeza casi femenina, un cuidado que sólo están
acostumbrados a practicar frente a las mujeres” (235). Loayza, in Buitrago’s
house, seems to break with one of the tenets of the homosocial, the lack of
expressing homoerotic desire. This feminization of the lawyer stresses
Rivera Garza’s project of questioning the male stereotype, a task seen in
her other novels and among several contemporaries, such as Ana Clavel,
without necessarily mounting an oppositional countertype: Arturo, much
 Marketing Masculinities · 35

like Eduardo, is never discredited from the discursive and professional

spaces of science and law.
Connell’s strategies of hegemonic masculinity include in addition to sci-
ence and law—both sources of objectivism—the role of the press in soci-
ety. Rivera Garza displaces print culture to the realm of the individual, just
as she does with the creation of a market of individual masculinities that
compete and collaborate in the shaping of the nation. The character of
Matilda Burgos is juxtaposed intertextually with the protagonist of Santa,
as Matilda reads the novel while working among other prostitutes in a
brothel. She comments, “sólo las muy atolondradas o francamente estúpi-
das, como Santa, acudían al registro y pasaban por la humillación del exa-
men médico” (162). Matilda carves out a textual niche characterized by a
transgression of this literary tropic figure that does subscribe to patriarchal
norms and regulations of economy and hygiene. Here we note again the
importance placed on cleanliness and hygiene as written onto the body and
as written as a marker or signifier of the power enforced by and erected
around the Masculine. But the literary model in Nadie me verá llorar, much
like the model of masculinity, is not without countervoices. Ligia, Matil-
da’s theatrical and romantic partner, follows a Quijotesque reading of Santa
when she imitates the literary character and finds herself a man who rescues
her from the brothel. She comments, “es el sueño de toda puta, ¿no? Tú
deberías hacer lo mismo. La Modernidad no va a durar toda la vida” (185).
By implication, and not quite accidentally, La Modernidad allows for the
per formance of independent women, and the transgression of social con-
structs and regulations.
Gender roles and models within the literary texts interlaced with Nadie
me verá llorar are not, however, geared only toward the female characters.
Men also have a literary tradition of behavior, of per formance shall we
say, that designates their position within, in complicity with, or outside
patriarchy. In the novels Matilda reads in the house of her uncle’s friend
Columba, she notes that “los héroes son siempre hombres [que] [á]giles de
mente y cuerpo, logran vencer todos los obstáculos para rescatar a las heroí-
nas en el último momento” (140). If men are to be men, like the young
Revolutionary Cástulo Rodríguez, who initiates her into the world outside
the sanitized confines of her uncle’s house, then they too must in some way
dialogue with these literary models. Following with the effects of the liter-
ary in the discursive space and outside it, Jorge Ruffinelli notes an acute
sensibility for language and the epistemological paradigms it opens up in
Rivera Garza’s textual production. He surmises that “Rivera Garza estudia
en su ensayo los lenguajes, y en su novela crea un lenguaje a la vez que
 36 · Chapter 2

explora (a través de sus personajes) el lenguaje. Estamos, al fin, en el centro

de lo literario” (38). The literary and language provide a model and a
playground for identity experimentation and expression, whether it be fol-
lowing the hegemonic system or transgressing it; the displacement of the
dictator from the national to the domestic and the role of the hegemonic
on more intimate and interpersonal relationships are thus intertwined with
the aesthetic exploration of language. Unlike the Nicaraguan poet and pol-
itician, Rivera Garza does not write a personal subjectivity of politics but
instead dedicates Nadie me verá llorar to the consideration of the historical
constructs of genders within the tangential process of creating the national
(gendered) imaginary.
In comparison to Sergio Ramírez’s novel, Nadie me verá llorar is seem-
ingly divorced from contemporary Mexican politics, but it inculcates in-
stead an economy of masculinities reminiscent of free market Mexico, with
its evident positioning of stereotype versus countertypes as competing
brands of the national, and the reconciliation of complicit masculinities
with the hegemonic domestic caudillo. Returning for a moment to Rubin’s
thesis on the commodification of women, it is evident from a structural
reading of Nadie me verá llorar and Margarita, está linda la mar that these
writers conversely commodify male bodies within an economy created and
perpetuated by the Masculine. Returning to the analysis of the verb inver-
tir in Ramírez’s novel, it is relatively uncomplicated to identify how the
Mexican author alludes to the second entry of the verb, as she creates a
market of masculinities that are played off against each other with the end
game of providing a dominant model that colonizes and defines the market
dynamics of gender in the text.
 chapter three

Political Masculinities
in La fiesta del Chivo

Keeping with the economic concept of gender, I here direct our attention
to Mario Vargas Llosa’s much-studied caudillo novel, which explores the
role of masculinity within the authoritarian (semantic, social, political, eco-
nomic) market of Rafael Trujillo’s Dominican Republic. Published a year
after Matilda Burgos’s incursion into the literary, La fiesta del Chivo cre-
ates a renewed interest in the genre of the dictator novel, no doubt because
of the author’s notoriety outside the printed page as well as on it. What is
of primary interest in this text is how gender(ed) systems are constructed
around the allegorical space of the dictatorship, thereby peeling away the
superficial layer that covers how power melds the intimate and dynamic
relations between subject-bodies. As with the other historical novels stud-
ied here, there is, I argue, an implicit reckoning of the present as a tempo-
ral referent to any past fictional discourse and exploration. Though these
authors chose to write historical novels, the “new” modifier includes an
acute reflection on the place of the present as a sociopolitical and chrono-
logical site of enunciation and contestation. As Pons rightly notes, the past
in La fiesta del Chivo “no es un tiempo fijo y concluido, sino cambiante
que se conecta con un presente también cambiante, inacabado, en su
contemporaneidad inconclusa” (262). Vargas Llosa has often cited
“demons” as being the basis of any writing, and as Sabine Köllman has
noted, “politics is one of the most persistent ‘demons’ which . . . provoke
his creativity” (1).1 Keeping with the idea of a textual and structural econ-
omy and commodification of masculinities, I contend that Vargas Llosa
writes masculinities into a critique of authoritarian government, which

37
 38 · Chapter 3

controls both economic and social markets, to investigate how the Mas-
culine reverberates in macrosocial constructs that are inseparable from
the politics of a particular (though arguably universal) regime.
The novel unfolds through the return of Urania Cabral, daughter of a
one-time confidant of the (sanitized and predatory) dictator Rafael Trujillo,
popularly known as El Chivo, to the island of her birth. She cannot
psychologically explain the drive to return and the need to talk to her father,
a father who in a preterit space and time had consented to her rape to re-
gain favor within and in relation to the Masculine. In this sense, as has been
noted by several critics, the novel appears to be structured around the
implicit and explicit violence toward women and the fear engendered by a
patriarchal society that not only commodifies, but also actively barters
with the female body. Following this argumentation, Miguel Gabriel
Ochoa Santos posits that the corporal body, and in particular the female
body, is a discursive site of oppression and transgression (214) in La fiesta.
Although these critiques are essential points of entry into the novel, I be-
lieve that such a gynocentric framework also opens us to the possibilities
of examining masculinities in the text, a condition behind, after all, the
impetus to open ground in a masculinity studies–based cultural criticism
in Latin America. Ochoa Santos, for example, does not pay attention to
the many male (non-Masculine) bodies that are routinely and methodi-
cally violated over the course of the novel.
Much has been said about the historiographic and metaliterary aspects
of La fiesta del Chivo, with even a former Spanish head of state claiming
that the novel is “más verdad que la verdad” in regard to what happened in
the Dominican Republic during Trujillo’s government (Lefere 331). While
this may be up for debate (in the most banal of academic discussions), the
idiosyncrasies of the text reveal a dialogic that goes further than a conver-
sation about terms such as “history” and “truth.” What is of greater value
resides in the interconnections the author traces between bodies and types
that stand in for particular stakeholders in any autocratic system. This web
of relations is brought to the reader through another universal—violence—
which transcends any national or imaginary barriers that would other-
wise localize the narrative. As such, though the violence against
women—specifically, the digital penetration of the young girl performed
by the impotent dictator—may provide a silenced aspect of state repres-
sion and control, I suggest that it simply presents an anachronistic caveat
or anecdote, which permits, as a result, the writing of the narrative voice
of the dictator and Dominican society during the years of the Trujillato.
The novel is punctuated by violence (both subjective and structural) en-
acted by the dictator system in textual and linguistic terms to underscore
 Political Masculinities · 39

the connection between violence(s) and structure(s) in the novel/Trujillato.

Though writing about the Dominican Republic, the author shies away from
using the dialect and lexicon of the island, and his characters—all from di-
verse social and economic classes—speak in a standard Latin American
Spanish. Vargas Llosa further writes violence into (and not by means of)
the text with the use of temporal jumps between the narrative of Urania
and the events of her youth, a narrative technique that readers will recog-
nize from several of his other works, thereby allowing for a broader reading
of the novel away from a simple portrayal or study of the Dominican
Republic. Taking the transnationality of the text to hand, we can thus col-
locate it within a trajectory of fiction that questions and decenters macro
and microstructures in contemporary Latin America, a process begun
with the author’s first best seller.
When the protagonist first talks to her invalid father, for example, her
voice intermingles with a separate narrative of the past. Mention is made
in an impersonal point of view to a celebration in Santo Domingo imme-
diately after Urania addresses her father. Within the objective recounting
of the celebration, Urania speaks, correcting the narration (or herself?),
noting that the name of the city was changed to “Ciudad Trujillo” (133)
during the dictator’s regime. This detail adds to the characterization of the
dictator’s hypermasculinity, if this hegemonic masculinity can be viewed
as being synonymous with the Foucauldian concept of power.2 By gender-
ing the city as a metonymic representation of the oppressive male figure,
the politics of the nation are circumscribed in relation to the centrality
of the city versus peripheral towns, villages, and regions. The urban is, in
effect, gendered along semantic and symbolic lines that dialogue with and
are superimposed on its spatial and cartographic lines, crevices, and nu-
ances. By walking through or existing in juxtaposition with the urban
gendered space, the subject is given a sense of positionality in the structures
controlled and limited by the Masculine. Such a writing of space is noth-
ing new and in fact can describe many a contemporary text that works
the urban in as another character or trope. Later on, Urania’s first meeting
with Ramfis Trujillo is told in the same impersonal style, complete with
dialogue that is not part of her diegesis. Thus, the story within the story
appears as the author creates a separate narrative space, characterized by a
change in narrative voice, one that runs simultaneously and coherently
with Urania’s return to the republic.
As critics have emphasized, the novel can indeed be framed by her con-
temporary situation, which in turn compels the narrative of the past to be
read as what trauma theory will call a traumatic text or a textual represen-
tation of personal trauma (Caruth 24; LaCapra 48). Though this trauma is
 40 · Chapter 3

initially centered on the violence of fear and assault against the female body,
a close reading will note that this violence is actually quite secondary in
terms of the generalized violence exerted in the plot. Men, in fact, are as
much (or even more) victimized by the regime of fear and violence in Var-
gas Llosa’s dictatorship. The revenge exacted by Ramfis after the murder
of his father, for example, is brutal and visceral, as he assumes the position
of hegemonic masculinity, yet it lacks the suspense and textual detective
work on the part of the reader, which is characteristic of the crime perpe-
trated against Urania. The torture of Román Fernández, for example, is
written without the aid of extended metaphors or symbolisms, as is charac-
teristic of Urania’s rape. His eyelids are simply sewn shut, and he is periodi-
cally electrocuted and even castrated in graphic detail: his testicles are
snipped off with a pair of scissors, and he is then made to swallow them.
The castration of the male subject in relation to the exertion of phallic
power by Ramfis, as in other new historical novels that probe the creation
and maintenance of the hegemonic homosocial, underscores the author’s
position of writing the dictator.
That being said, and though careful in deconstructing the sanitized and
erect figure of the dictator by mentioning his incontinence and impotence,
Vargas Llosa resists completely doing away with the hypermasculine
subject position within Dominican society, perhaps reflective, on the one
hand, of his own political assertion in his native Peru, and on the other, of
Judith Payne’s thesis of boom writers continuing to enshrine the tenets
of patriarchy in their exercises of representation (7). The violence ex-
erted against men by men, however, is central to the author’s Trujillato; it
is axiomatic of the diegesis, where paradoxically what is not tolerated is the
violence against women. Antonio Imbert, one of the conspirators in the plot
against the dictator, is visibly agitated by the famous murder of the Mira-
bal sisters, commenting, “¡Ahora también se asesinaba a mujeres inde-
fensas, sin que nadie hiciera nada!” and that “¡Ya no había huevos en este
país, coño!” (319). Having “huevos,” it seems, implies that one does not
kill women, yet testicles are primal to the definition of the male subject in
the text, which by definition suggests a subjugation of the feminine. By
creating this paradox, the text suggests that the female is peripheral to the
plot, and that what is really under consideration is the power structure
among men. The emphasis placed on this site, or locus, of the Masculine
reiterates the notion that sociostructural constructs of gender are necessar-
ily and semantically linked to the very real Latin American body.
Returning to the torture scenes of Román, he hears (since he has had
his eyelids shut) “risitas sobreexcitadas y comentarios obscenos, de unos
 Political Masculinities · 41

sujetos que eran sólo voces y olores picantes” (431). By being castrated,
Román loses subjectivity in the face of these mocking “sujetos,” effectively
losing position in the dialectic among males. Román is deconstructed by
the agents of the dictator’s successor, as Ramfis exercises a phallic mascu-
linity that intriguingly asserts its position by dephallicizing, in the organic
and testicular sense, its competitors. Men in La fiesta del Chivo are the
main players in the text, even though the diegesis is seemingly framed by
Urania’s trauma process and the need for reconciliatory catharsis.
By giving the fictional Trujillo a voice, however, the author narrativizes
the position of the Masculine agent, allowing, as is expected of the new
historical novel, a decentering of the normativity of gender. This practice,
as penned by a very hegemonic (extratextual) writer, is epitomized by the
virile, clean-cut, and nonperspiring dictator figure who engages in a pro-
cess that feminizes men “cuyos cuerpos no corresponden al estereotipo
de la masculinidad hegemónica. Hombres que expresan sus emociones,
artistas, de contextura debil, enfermizos, entre otros, tenderían a ser femi-
nizados” (Olavarría, “Hombres” 120). Trujillo survives in a culture and a
homosocial body of men who are complicit with his strategies of domina-
tion. Their complicity is marked by a silence that is omniscient, as one of
the conspirators notes, “en esos años, Antonio no se hubiera atrevido a
hablar mal de Trujillo” (111). When the younger Urania spies the dictator
visiting their neighbor’s house, her father chides her and stresses that she
did not see anything. Note here that the silence enforced by the dictatorship
is more than discursive, as Urania is not told to remain silent or to tell no
one about what she saw. This option would require a textual and sym-
bolic acknowledgement of the action observed. Her father, however, as a
complicit drone of the Masculine pushes for an erasure of the action in
itself, disenabling language as signifier of the violence and strategies of
the hegemonic order, favoring instead a gendered control of reality that
runs counter to the observed fact.
Following what I have highlighted in previous chapters, the true sig-
nifier of masculinity in this new historical text is the dismembered but
all-powerful scrotal sac, which houses the essence of manliness. It is not
surprising that an uncooperative penis and a urethral sphincter that has a
mind of its own precipitate Trujillo’s demise. Reflective of the importance
of the testicles within the homosocial, however, Trujillo never really
loses his apical position within the hierarchy of power in the novel. Only
Urania knows of his impotence, and only his trusted manservant knows
of his incontinence—both gendered subjects bound to the contract of
silence evoked by the Masculine order to control a malleable social
 42 · Chapter 3

structure. Even after being ambushed, the dictator does not lose his stat-
ure as the stereotype of masculinity, as General Fernández fears reprisals
and revenge if he were to take hold of the system. Trujillo loses only pres-
tige and dominance in the text, in the discursive interior of the subject
that Vargas Llosa pens. Only through Vargas Llosa’s imagination of the his-
torical Masculine (figure) can the text undermine its position, underscor-
ing my thesis of the author relocating the novel onto a broader context
that focuses on extra-Dominican structures of power, such as modern
Peru. To note in this hermeneutic and spatial displacement is the impor-
tance given to the male bodies and the testes as inscribed corporal sites;
we can thus contend that the economy of masculinities built around the
authoritarian Masculine position is ontoformative to the erotics and poetics
of a novel that both subscribes to a phallogocentric diegesis and circum-
scribes a phallocentric society.3 As such, the writing of gendered bodies
and systems in the new historical schema seems to suggest that Domini-
can (and implicitly Peruvian) society can viably examine the past in rela-
tion to the present through the optic of a masculine discursive space.
After having lost political elections to Alberto Fujimori and suffering a
phase of self-imposed disenchantment with his native Peru, Vargas Llosa’s
rewriting of the dictator figure is poignant in its extrapolation of national
(Dominican) politics to a transnational poetics of trauma. By structuring
the novel around Urania’s migration from the cosmopolitan city of the
United Nations to the island of her ancestors, the author suggests converse
relationships among the dictator’s masculinity, actions, and strategies of
power toward other social contexts. Vargas Llosa first demystifies the dicta-
tor only to later restrengthen the position of the hypermasculine by dephal-
licizing, in psychoanalytic and physical senses, challengers to Trujillo and
his offspring. This exercise, in turn, suggests that under an autocratic re-
gime of violence, history is bound to repeat itself, and those who suffer are
the silenced and raped subjects that enable the dictator. The author’s gen-
dered and masculine discursive space is reflective of his own position at
the moment of writing the novel, as an outcast politician seeking to rees-
tablish his own political agency against the machinations of his rival after
suffering political defeat in the year of the novel’s first edition. In a response
to a not-too-surprising line of questioning, Vargas Llosa addresses the con-
nections between the literary and the social, noting that “Fujimori was quite
different to Trujillo—a more mediocre tyrant” (Jaggi 31). The author’s posi-
tion within the commerce of literature is thus strengthened by the novel,
an exploration of masculinities vis-à-vis the transgression of the hegemonic,
which then surreptitiously introduces Vargas Llosa’s own personal position
within Peruvian politics.
 Political Masculinities · 43

The matrices of masculine positions in the novel are connected not only
to the political (as analogy of other spaces) but also to the economic, exem-
plifying the effects of current socioeconomic changes on the literary. Var-
gas Llosa’s diegesis is painstaking in its research and inclusion of national
economic policy, as the dictator is shown with his aides discussing the coun-
try’s state of affairs. Faced with low revenues, the fictive Trujillo refuses to
reduce his workforce or to cut costs because to do so would cause social
tumult and unemployment. One alternative suggested is to nationalize the
dictator’s industries, thereby shifting the weight of ledger books in the red
to the State, a move that Trujillo is stoutly against. Speaking to a group of
senators, he observes, “robarías cuanto pudieras si el trabajo que haces para
la familia Trujillo, lo hicieras para los Vicini, los Valdez o los Armentero.
Y todavía mucho más si las empresas fueran del Estado. Allí sí que te
llenarías los bolsillos” (157). Therein we see an implicit critique of non-
neoliberal systems; after all, Vargas Llosa presented himself as a right-wing
candidate (though Fujimori quickly outflanked him in that direction after
winning the elections). Favored over nationalization, then, is its opposite,
privatization, which we must remember is a fulcrum of the neoliberal non-
state. In a similar fashion, the dictator in the novel creates a market system
based on his own position as the dominator, where subordinate positions
are understood and commodified by “su conocimiento profundo de la
psicología dominicana” (169). This understanding constitutes “trabar
una relación de compadrazgo con un campesino, con un obrero, con un
artesano, con un comerciante,” which results in “la lealtad de ese pobre
hombre” (169) to then bring about policies that may otherwise run coun-
ter to the laymen’s well being.
In another example of the connection between the dictator’s body and
national policy, Trujillo’s virility and phallic masculinity are contrasted with
Venezuela’s democratically elected Rómulo Betancourt. In a broadcast of
the national Radio Caribe, the announcer “poniendo la voz que corre-
spondía para hablar de un maricón, afirmaba que, además de hambrear al
pueblo venezolano, el Presidente Rómulo Betancourt había traído la sal a
Venezuela” (35). We must remember that Betancourt not only nationalized
Venezuela’s oil industry, against the precepts of a free market capitalist sys-
tem, but also held a longstanding rift with Trujillo that resulted in assassi-
nation attempts against both rulers. As Trujillo reflects after taking a bath
and putting on talcum powder and deodorant, “el mariconazo ese no se
saldría con la suya. Consiguió que la OEA le impusiera las sanciones, pero
ganaba el que reía último” (35). The hinted homosexuality of Betancourt
and the stereotyped penetration that accompanies the condition are juxta-
posed with the clean, hygienic body of a man who promises to “ha[cer]
 44 · Chapter 3

chillar a una hembrita como hace veinte años,” when his “testículos entra-
ban en ebullición y su verga empezaba a enderezarse” (236). See here again
the play on the verb invertir, as one is suggested to be invertido whereas the
other pushes for more inversion.
The testicles first and then the penis lay at the heart of any structural
and semantic writing of the Masculine and therefore place the body as a
key discursive site in the dialogues between the present and the past. Re-
turning once more to the notion of a system, structure, and practice in flux
in the politico-economic climate of Latin America in the latter half of the
twentieth century, I suggest after the analysis of Ramírez, Rivera Garza,
and Vargas Llosa’s work that these fin- du-siècle caudillo novels engage in
a materialization of the male body that inverts the traditionally held view
that only the female is commoditized. I argue that the male body and its
manifestations are materialized as units of commerce that disassociate and,
at the same time, align male bodies from and with the Masculine. The
authors connect with social and political institutions through an engage-
ment with economic models, as they write masculinities into their narra-
tives to characterize, organize, and place their own authorial thought and
reflections of the past in relation to contemporary crises.
 chapter four

Queer(ing) Masculinities
as the Dictator Falls

In keeping with the matrix that interrelates gender, politics, and econom-
ics, Pedro Lemebel reimagines the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in
Chile through a characteristic narrative and authorial style. Tengo miedo
torero is not structured around a wayward prodigal son or a traumatized
victim; in its place, Lemebel probes a failed Communist plot to assassinate
the dictator in 1986. Instead of focusing the narrative on an intimate voice
within the rebels, that is, within the core challenge to the hegemon, he pens
a neighborhood transvestite, La Loca, who not only falls in love with Car-
los, a young revolutionary, but whose house becomes the functional center
for the group as they store their weapons and propaganda in camouflaged
boxes. Note that I call the protagonist a transvestite, and not a transgen-
dered person, as the character repeatedly disidentifies with women, suggest-
ing that he/she does not view him/herself as a body in transition.1 That
being said, my choice of transvestite is perhaps not even appropriate, as I
believe La Loca to elude any Anglo categorizations (Sifuentes-Jáuregui,
Avowal 201). As a caveat, then, I use “transvestite” as a working appella-
tion, though do not assign to it a holistic appropriation of the character’s
sexuality.
Lemebel’s novel fits into current trends in Chilean literature charac-
terized by a proliferation of the new historical novel by a diverse set of au-
thors from multiple movements and generations, from Alberto Blest
Gana’s nineteenth- century stories and twentieth- century authors such as
Carlos Droguett to the more recent Antonio Gil and Francisco Simón or
Fernando Jerez. Lemebel’s Tengo miedo torero sneaks into this trajectory of

45
 46 · Chapter 4

the genre by its inclusion of the events leading up to the assassination at-
tempt on Pinochet. But unlike previous Chilean writers, Lemebel is the
first to write the dictator from a queer perspective. Furthermore, unlike
Vargas Llosa’s politically charged extrapolation, Lemebel’s writing of the
dictator occurs at a time of relative political stability. The novel coincides
with the presidency of Ricardo Lagos Escobar, who oversees the demo-
cratization of the constitution and the elimination of Pinochet- era oligar-
chic cronyism. Lemebel’s Pinochet therefore lacks some of the metonymic
qualities of Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo, as Chile undergoes a process of social
liberalization in the early 2000s that is unlike the politics of Fujimori in
Peru. Conversely, Chile under Lagos Escobar does not suffer from the Fu-
jishock of the early 1990s, or from the delegitimizing effects of the Fujigolpe,
a self–coup d’état that destabilized national politics into an autocratic re-
gime very much like that Vargas Llosa opposes in La fiesta del Chivo.2
Chilean society in the early 2000s is instead punctuated by a series of social
advances, as the presidency enjoys historic approval ratings, which are re-
flected in the novel’s tongue-in-cheek depiction of a henpecked Pinochet.
In Tengo miedo torero, the band of Communist rebels represents a mas-
culinity that is not complicit with the dictator position but that appears to
suggest an alternative approximation to the Masculine. They are neither
high-ranking generals nor close aides to Pinochet. Lemebel’s rebels do
not adhere to the same strategies of political domination or economic
constructs forwarded by the hegemonic voice, but instead queer traditional
patriarchal systems of gender and identity, subscribing in some regards to
what Connell deems “subordinate” masculinities (Masculinities 78). In
modern Western society, the most visible case of this relationship is seen
in the dominance of heterosexual men and the subordination of homosex-
ual or queer men. As Connell notes, “this is much more than a cultural
stigmatization of homosexuality or gay identity” and that “gay men are sub-
ordinated to straight men by an array of quite material practices” (78).
They are, however, not entirely subordinate; they decenter the traditional
types that Connell identifies as being inherent in any patriarchy. They fall
outside or queer the system on two levels. First, they are more accepting of
the subordinate male par excellence in the plot—La Loca—even if they em-
body the traditional virilities attributed to fighters. After the assassination
plot fails, they transport La Loca to where Carlos is hiding, showing toler-
ance of alternative sexual practices and expressions. Second, their aim as a
group is to topple the patriarch and to establish a (theoretically) nonhierar-
chical social structure. Strategies of subverting and oppressing women and
other men would in theory not apply in this new society. As such, their
 Queer(ing) Masculinities as the Dictator Falls · 47

espousal of non-Masculine strategies places them outside the structures of

the Masculine, though they are not completely removed.
In the novel’s central romantic axis (which carries the narrative more so
than the political machinations of the rebels), La Loca del Frente’s Com-
munist lover Carlos is highly sensualized through the furtive and at times
explicit glances, comments, and touches of the queer figure. She throws
him a birthday party complete with cake, children, music, and a fine
tablecloth, and later offers him some liquor in an adult celebration once
the neighborhood children have left. Carlos is corporally inscribed as a body
of desire when La Loca informs the reader that he extends “sus labios en
una sonrisa perlada de licor” (101).3 His lips become a point of seduction
when she asks him to recount something important about his life, a secret,
though she does not want to know everything because he must remain an
enigma. He tells her about a close friend he had in his youth, growing
up poor in the country. Naked and by a reservoir, Carlos and the friend
had started rubbing their penises against the warm sand: overcome by an
uncontrollable urge, Carlos recounts how “de un salto lo monté” (103); Car-
los’s confession is a scene repeated in several Latin American films and
novels, where the currently heterosexual male recounts a past experimenta-
tion, often in a desolate nonurban setting. What follows is a standoff be-
tween the young Communist and his friend, with both boys stroking their
adolescent genitals and neither one willing to be the maricón. Reminis-
cent of a duel, the boys each charge the other to bend over, until Carlos’s
friend ejaculates without warning on his leg. The semen stain angers Car-
los and becomes a source of, until now, unspeakable shame. Note here
that the stain as written onto the body serves a similar function as seen in
the other new novels, as the writing of the unhygienic semantically offsets
and decenters the gendered body from the Masculine system. The image
of the sensual, virile Communist rebel is further sexualized when La Loca
returns from getting him a blanket to spend the night in her house. She
notes how “una de sus piernas se estiraba en el arqueo leve del reposo, y la
otra colgando del diván, ofrecía el epicentro abultado de su paquetón
tenso por el brillo del cierre eclair a medio abrir, a medio descorrer en ese
ojal ribeteado por los dientes de bronce del marrueco, donde se podía ver
la pretina elástica de un calzoncillo coronado por los rizos negros de la
pendejada varonil” (105).
The teeth of the zipper opening to his genitalia is the next step in the
queering of Carlos, following the description of his pearly lips: the decen-
tering process is oral and centered on the mouth, in both physiological and
textual terms. The author’s pen sensualizes the macho figure, and in a
 48 · Chapter 4

conscious moment of pause, contemplates the subverted, virile phallus.

La Loca “tuvo que sentarse ahogada por el éxtasis de la escena, tuvo que
tomar aire para no sucumbir al vacío del desmayo frente a esta estética
erotizada por la embriaguez” (105). Note here the descriptions centered on
the mouth and its movements; it is primal to her very survival. The novel’s
self-conscious usurpation of patriarchy is deliberate and focused, as though
not only La Loca but also the text and the reader need a moment of pause,
as reader/text/subject must stop over the gendered and drunk body to read,
evaluate, and position it as object in relation to others. What is highlighted
in this triple subjectivity is that though Carlos is allowed to be a macho
and to continue his anti-Pinochet activities, he cannot escape the queer pen
that sensualizes him.
The pen goes further than simply eroticizing the macho male through a
queer gaze; Carlos as subject undergoes a gender-morphing game of meta-
phorical transvestitism that will cement the novel’s focus on non-Masculine
positions. Sprawled on the couch with his crotch open to La Loca’s gaze,
he is first described as a “puta de puerto” with “tetillas quiltras” (106).
The feminized body then becomes “un dios indio . . . un guerrero soña-
dor” and finally “un macho etrusco” (106). Lemebel indicates not only how
gender is transitory, from female to male within the same gaze, but also
how it is culturally coded, suggesting that performativity does hold a criti-
cal and tangible place in writing and being gendered in Latin America,
even if critics (including me) are quick to dispel Anglo theory as falsely uni-
versalizing. The body as a surface or blank slate is written upon by the pen
and gaze of La(s) Loca(s) as Carlos comes into being as a sexual subject and
object, open and conducive to metahistorical reinterpretation.4
After fellating Carlos, La Loca notes how he lies unconscious to her oral
pleasuring in a pose “de Cristo desarticulado por el remolino etílico del
pisco” (109). Lemebel’s juxtaposition of the Communist to the religious fig-
ure demonstrates a deftly crafted deconstruction of the patriarchal voice,
showing how even the Communist can become a Christlike figure—after
being fellated by a transvestite, of course. Lemebel dephallicizes Carlos’s
mode, or relation to patriarchy (that is, as both challenger and subordinate),
not only by reaestheticizing the virile young body (as a paradox), but by also
allowing for a queering of Connell’s structures and suggesting an alterna-
tive (though untested).
The rebel’s virile and aesthetic approximation to the Masculine is then
called into being by the portrayal of a “guagua-boa, que al salir de la bolsa
se soltó como un látigo,” that exhibits “la robustez de un trofeo de guerra,
un grueso dedo sin uña que pedía a gritos una boca que anillara su
amoratado glande” (107).5 The mouth that the physical phallus begs for is
 Queer(ing) Masculinities as the Dictator Falls · 49

the corporal space or locus where the subject is queered in the novel. This
site of utterance and enunciation is also where the Lacanian phallus is ne-
gotiated, as the writing of the revolutionaries and their machinations
against the dictator occur from the epicenter of the Loca’s house and mouth.
In a textual sense, since the mouth is the origin of the utterance, song par-
takes in an oral inscription onto the sexualized male body, as the drunken
encounter is structured around the bolero “Tengo miedo torero,” which
lends its title to the novel. Lemebel sensuously weaves in the lyrics and emo-
tions evoked by the song to sexualize the archetypal Masculine “torero”
figure, just as the neighborhood transvestite needs the arms of the young
Carlos to satiate and protect her. Music as intertext is dialogic as a queer-
ing element, both of the Communist rebel and of the plot, a factor that
I analyze in greater detail in part 2.
Lemebel does not stop at simply queering the macho rebel, but also takes
his pen to the figure of the dictator, Augusto Pinochet. Unlike Vargas Llosa,
who resorts to the textual interiority of the dictator in relation to everyone
around him, Lemebel triangulates Pinochet with his wife and her effemi-
nate companion, Gonzalo, to thus relativize each character’s gender ex-
pression. Though the queer Gonzalo does not appear explicitly in the
novel, he provides a homosexual object and foil to Pinochet’s homophobia
and Masculine assertion. Gonzalo importantly does not have his own voice
but speaks by means of the dictator’s wife, which compounds the intimacy
afforded by historicizing the patriarch, suggesting that a homosexual voice
is often silenced and goes unwritten within an episteme of authoritarian-
ism. In a style that does not include the punctuated separation of voices in
the text, the wife’s criticisms of the dictator echo within and around the
interior space of the Masculine subject. Dressed in a bathrobe, she follows
him one morning as he leaves the house, yelling:

Tú no me crees, tú piensas que es puro teatro mi dolor de cabeza para

no acompañarte. Tú crees, como todos los hombres, que las mujeres
usamos la artimaña de los bochornos para no hacer ciertas cosas.
Imagínate cómo voy a preferir quedarme aburrida en esta casa tan
grande, mientras tú te rascas la panza frente al río, rodeado de árboles,
en esa preciosura de chalet que tenemos en el Cajón del Maipo. Porque
fue idea mía que se la compráramos tan barata, casi regalada, a esos
upelientos que mandaste al exilio. . . . Piensa tú, ¿que haríamos si no
tuviéramos todas estas propiedades para descansar? Tendríamos que
mezclarnos con la chusma que va al Club Militar a remojarse las patas
en la piscina. Qué asco, bañarse en la misma agua donde tus amigotes,
los generales vejestorios, se remojan las bolas. (135)
 50 · Chapter 4

In addition to disqualifying his thoughts on women, she also asserts her-

self as the decision maker of the household—the chalet they own, among
other properties the dictator amassed, are all thanks to her astuteness.
She does not shy away from deconstructing the façade of the military
man, calling him overweight and noting that the rest of the military is full
of “chusma” that goes to the Club Militar. She makes note of their testicles,
of what truly codes for power, and then swiftly demythifies them as vulgari-
ties soaking in water, almost like used teabags. The intimacy afforded by
Lemebel’s narrative queers the hegemonic position of the male within the
household, especially when compared with the relationship between the
dictator and his wife in Margarita, está linda la mar, where the interactions
between Somoza and Salvadorita are explored through the proxies of the
conspirator Cordelio and the unsuspecting sergeant Domitilo. With Bible
in hand, Cordelio wonders aloud why the boat they arrive in is named Sal-
vadorita. The increasingly annoyed Domitilo replies that the boat belongs
to the First Lady, and that “son sus negocios propios, distintos de los que
tiene el hombre” (82). The wife is separated from el hombre, as Ramírez’s
focus is not so much on demythifying the dictator as it is on finding a point
of contact between the caudillo masculinity and the masculinity of the poet
figure, with the end game of constructing a genealogy of the nation based
on the latter.
Returning to the years surrounding the publication of Tengo miedo to-
rero and La fiesta del Chivo, the Chilean “new” novel is not necessarily con-
strained by a poetics of allegory like that which shapes the work by Vargas
Llosa. This is reflected in the almost playful and uncensored depiction of
Pinochet as a harassed husband in opposition to the hypermasculine in cri-
sis that the Chivo enacts. In both novels, testicles continue to be an impor-
tant corporal metaphor of the Masculine neoliberal system, though unlike
La fiesta del Chivo, there is no deification of them being essential to writ-
ing or conceiving masculinities in Tengo miedo torero. Instead, Lemebel
decenters them from a position of power, depicting them as quotidian and
dirty: “huevos” here are not essential to man or necessary for patriarchal
position; rather, they seem to be the stain inscribed on the body. Testicles,
in fact, become sites of non-normativity in the novel, suggesting that a queer
gaze and pen can successfully and seductively resemanticize the male body.
Like the other novels discussed, though, the notion of corporal hygiene
as a signifier of socio-gendered positions is further developed in Tengo miedo
torero. As noted in chapter 3, the soiling of the Dominican dictator’s pants
was the first step in his eventual personal (and not political) castration.
Lemebel, however, queers the idea of soiling oneself as he dephallicizes
 Queer(ing) Masculinities as the Dictator Falls · 51

the act from a physical standpoint, because the penis is not the source of
the stain. Instead, the novel plays with the body and its sites, reinscribing
onto them a series of metaphors that allow for an evaluation of the organic
as a site of definition and defiance of the structural. As Pinochet rests in
his car after surviving the plot to dynamite his motorcade, his bodily func-
tions sever him from Masculine subjectivity.6 In the backseat, “el Dictador
temblaba como una hoja, no podía hablar, no atinaba a pronunciar palabra,
estático, sin moverse, sin poder acomodarse en el asiento” (174). We learn
immediately afterward that his paralysis is voluntary: “más bien no quería
moverse, sentado en la tibia plasta de su mierda que lentamente corría por
su pierna, dejando escapar el hedor putrefacto del miedo” (174).7 The patri-
arch is soiled, but it is not the penetrating phallus that castrates him from
hegemony. Instead, it is the uncontrollable anal sphincter—the quintessen-
tial site of being penetrated and of becoming and being a maricón—that
releases the fecal stain that condemns the dictator, who two years later
would concede political power to a newly formed democratic coalition. The
inversion of the staining tool from the penis to the anus hints at the politi-
cal position of the author, as Lemebel, unlike Vargas Llosa, is not engaged
in a dialectic of political phallic privation as represented through the
Dominican allegory.
Vargas Llosa suggests that Trujillo as the symbolic phallus is broken,
thereby emphasizing the writer’s own lack and subsequent envy. In opposi-
tion to the Peruvian writer, who writes the fall of Trujillo through castration
and impotence, Lemebel seems to dip his queer pen(is) in something other
than ink to inscribe the body of the failing patriarch. Pinochet faced a
controversial return to Chile in 2000 after facing extradition orders from
Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón; Tengo miedo torero coincides with a pe-
riod of reckoning for the ex- dictator, as he struggled with repeated in-
dictments related to the oppressive practices committed during his rule.
Lemebel’s exercise in releasing the character’s anal sphincter during a
tense moment in the novel hints at the author’s own judgment of the fate
and culpability of Pinochet. If the courts cannot serve justice, then it is up
to the pen to stain and rewrite the figure of the dictator and his legacy.
By relaxing the dictator’s anus, Lemebel emphasizes the organic
nature of the nation that he envisions in the essay “Censo y conquista.”
He writes:

De esta manera, las minorías hacen viable su tráfica existencia, burlando

la enumeración piadosa de las faltas. Los listados de necesidades que el
empadronamiento despliega a lo largo de Chile, como serpiente
 52 · Chapter 4

computacional que deglute los índices económicos de la población, para

procesarlos de acuerdo a los enjuagues políticos. Cifras y tantos por
ciento que llenarán la boca de los parlamentarios en números gastados
por el manoseo del debate partidista. Una radiografía al intestino flaco
chileno expuesta en su mejor perfil neoliberal como ortopedia de de-
sarrollo. Un boceto social que no se traduce en sus hilados más finos,
que traza rasante las líneas gruesas del cálculo sobre los bajos fondos
que las sustentan, de las imbricaciones clandestinas que van alterando
el proyecto determinante de la democracia. (n.p.)

Lemebel’s social critique does not stop with Pinochet but continues through
the democratic era, as the author is particularly critical of neoliberal eco-
nomic policies and their effects. His disenchantment with neoliberalism
calls to mind Sergio Ramírez’s own divorce from politics in Nicaragua amid
the liberalizing of the nation’s economy. Both authors situate their critiques
on the textual anus and the digestive tract. One of the conspirators in
Margarita, está linda la mar notes, for example, that Somoza “caga por la
barriga . . . por medio de una válvula de goma. Lo que pasa es que es un
secreto de estado” (37). The procedure is then described as a “supresión
del tracto rectal y formación del ano artificial por el método de Charles
Richter” (37), signaling Somoza’s artificial rule in Nicaragua, as he was
kept in power by and for U.S. interests. The connection between the anus
of the dictator and the nation is stressed at the end of the novel, as Somoza
lays on his deathbed after being stripped naked. An omniscient voice inter-
venes in the narrative and questions: “¿Para eso te hiciste falsificador de
moneda, mariscal de excusados? ¿Qué harías con diarrea?” (351). The idea
of uncontrolled bowel movements, evocative perhaps of the late capitalist
economies of production, is something that the dying dictator never had to
contend with, lending another question to the narrative’s interrogation.
Margarita, está linda la mar coincides with the contemporary right-wing
government of Arnoldo Alemán, who oversaw several neoliberal policies in
previously Sandinista Nicaragua. The final scatological question in the
novel hints at the problems faced by Alemán as he increased foreign in-
vestment in the country, which resulted in an economic boom. This boom,
as a result of short-term neoliberal tendencies, is the seeming diarrhea that
the novel alludes to. Such growth comes at other costs and tears away the
social fabric of contemporary Central American society. As such, the novel
is reflective of a growing corpus of writers, such as Horacio Castellanos
Moya, Fernando Contreras Castro, Maurice Echeverría, and Franz Galich,
that calls to attention the detritus and stagnation that corrupts and rules
Central America in the wake of neoliberal reforms.
 Queer(ing) Masculinities as the Dictator Falls · 53

Taking the anus as a corporal site of political discourse, much like the
usage of the testicles as a signifier for turn- of-the-century economic reali-
ties and paradigms of production, we can see how Lemebel queers mascu-
linities and the dictator in Tengo miedo torero. The releasing of the anal
sphincter in Lemebel’s novel results in not only a staining of the dictator
but also a staining of the nation as a site of neoliberal practices, because
the country must deal with the fecal remnants of not only Pinochet’s
political rule but also the liberalized policies he instituted toward the end
of his regime. Lemebel highlights this problematic in the essay “La esquina
es mi corazón,” where he writes:

Herencia neoliberal o futuro despegue capitalista en la economía de esta

“demos-gracia.” Un futuro inalcanzable para estos chicos, un chiste cruel
de la candidatura, la traición de la patria libre. Salvándose de la botas
para terminar charqueados en la misma carroña, en el mismo estropajo
que los vio nacer. Qué horizonte para este estrato juvenil que se jugó
sus mejores años. Por cierto irrecuperables, por cierto hacinados en el
lumperío crepuscular del modernismo. Distantes a años luz, de las men-
sualidades millonarias que le pagan los ricos a sus retoños en los institu-
tos privados. (n.p.)

The future under current neoliberal ideas, borne from the “herencia” of
the dictatorship, is sordid and dark according to Lemebel. The scatological
connection between the release of the sphincter and the subsequent “hedor
putrefacto del miedo,” with society’s primordial “carroña,” establishes a
connection between the assassination attempt in the novel and Lemebel’s
writing of contemporary Chilean society in the first decade of the twenty-
first century. In what has come to be known as “El manifiesto de Pedro
Lemebel,” written in 1986, the same year as the failed assassination plot,
the writer acknowledges: “Me apesta la injusticia / Y sospecho de esta cueca
democrática” (n.p.). He continues to lambast the status quo, affirming that
the present is “como la dictadura / Peor que la dictadura / Porque la dicta-
dura pasa / Y viene la democracia / Y detrasito el socialismo / ¿Y entonces?”
(n.p.). The fecal discharge in Tengo miedo torero, just as in Ramírez’s novel,
is the metonymic representation of instituted free market economic
policies, suggesting that any evaluation of growth and development must
pass the “sniff test,” that is, that microbodies and subjectivities must be
evaluated for the potential to survive in a climate of economic austerity
where the sovereign consumer is king.
Lemebel’s sustained assessment of neoliberal tendencies reflects a
populist social concern with the purported economic benefits of the free
 54 · Chapter 4

market system. The author’s political position is written into Tengo miedo
torero through and by means of the anus, which has its own placement
within the erotics of the author and paradigms of sexuality. The penetrated
orifice, which Ramírez hesitates to open yet questions, connects the eco-
nomic failings of the caudillo with contemporary neoliberal Latin Amer-
ica. Lemebel’s aversion of the anus from a strictly erotic perspective calls to
attention his stressing of the dictator’s anus and its aftereffects, as it is an
inverted penetration of the sphincter, not a penetration from outside the
body, that leads to the staining of Pinochet. This inversion, again, calls
to mind the economic definition of the term, stressing the conjunct be-
tween national economics and the anus as a discursive site.
The displacements of the male body in these new historical novels fall
under a larger concern with how and when the figure of the dictator is writ-
ten by contemporary Latin American writers. Sergio Ramírez underscores a
trend in commoditizing the male body in economic terms that deviates
from the traditional adoration of the phallus. Vargas Llosa builds on this
objectification of the male body and relies on a poetics of allegory to sug-
gest that contemporary Peruvian society is under the iron fist of its own hy-
permasculine dictator. In a recent interview, he affirms that “todas las
dictaduras son el mal absoluto” (Forgues 256), suggesting that the diegesis
in La fiesta del Chivo is representative of plural social contexts. In essence,
Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo becomes a subject within the demystification of he-
gemonic masculinity in the novel, though this position of power is never
fully challenged in the text. Conversely, Lemebel and Rivera Garza show
an interest in uncovering the aura of the hypervirile, hegemonic embodi-
ment of masculinity. On the one hand, Rivera Garza dislocates the politi-
cal dictator, instead focusing on the domestic and scientific patriarch and
how he was able to carve a period of economic growth in Mexico that can
be read in parallel to twentieth-century neoliberal moves. Lemebel, on the
other hand, seeks to “denounce the amnesia of the Chilean postdictator-
ship” (Palaversich 102), as he notes in an interview: “A country without
memory is like a blank slate on which one can write whatever one wants,
reinventing history in agreement with and at the discretion of the powers
currently in vogue” (Novoa 29). Though Lemebel successfully takes up the
pen to fill in the gaps in Chile’s lacunal amnesia, it cannot be ignored that
he writes, or “reinvents,” with a queer pen, effectively decentering all the
masculinities written into the text.
Though the figure of the caudillo has been studied ad nauseum, the new
historical novels studied in these pages suggest that the writing of his role
within the literary is pertinent to, and formulated by, the economic and
 Queer(ing) Masculinities as the Dictator Falls · 55

political climate of fin- du-siècle Latin America. Though the telos of the
continent, in political, literary, aesthetic, and cultural terms, has under-
taken a shift toward deterritorialization as a result of broader processes of
globalization (and in part, of the Global North reading the South), the
novels studied in this part evidence a turn from this thought, as they at-
tempt a territorialization of narratives and bodies by means of a historical
contextualization within a national imaginary. Resorting to the past al-
lows for a momentary escape from the transnational nonspaces and non-
identities that McOndo fiction and Latin America are built on, as the new
historical novel is by necessity a national manuscript.
Secondly, these authors resist the dematerialization of identity vis-à-vis
gendered performativity by explicitly locating their sites of discourse on the
male body. The testicles, the mouth, and the anus all operate as tableaux
of inscription, deviating from the physical phallus as signifier of power and
the malleability of performance as the apical practice of being and writing
gender. They function and dysfunction as metonymic representations of
greater and extratextual processes that can be sustained and encapsulated
only by the corporeality of the (male) body.
The four novels studied in this part share this common trait and praxis
as they challenge fiction’s ability and power in writing and negotiating the
Masculine. As such, they fabricate polydimensional matrices of textual mas-
culinities that explore contemporary themes of power, gender relations, and
national identities. As can be expected, these new masculine textualities
rely on the authority and flexibility of the word and discourse, resorting to
several and varied registers and systems of representation to codify gender.
One such semantic field is popular music, which Lemebel carefully and
studiously employs to recalibrate gendered approximations to the Mascu-
line in Tengo miedo torero. Let us next examine how music and musicality
are direct dialectic and dialogic systems and practices in the construct of
contemporary masculinities.
 part two

Lyrical Readings and

the Deterritorialization
of Masculinities

The new historical novels sampled in the previous section undertake a re-
writing of both the dictator figure in Latin America and the male body in
a traditional genre that exemplifies the phallic power of men. Though the
authors have been internationalized to some extent—through their relation-
ships with the theoretical Generation Alfaguara and subsequent involve-
ment in the triad of publisher-academic-writer—they territorialize their
narratives within a nationally historical framework, resisting the urge to
universalize or Orientalize their fictions (see the plethora of Latin Ameri-
can writers who now situate their texts in the Far East), just as contempo-
rary economies are being deterritorialized. These new historical novels,
furthermore, arise at a time when masculinity is in supposed crisis, or to be
more specific, at a time when masculinities are being renegotiated away
from the centric and apical position of the Latin macho, in part because of
the vast social and demographic changes brought about by neoliberalism.
The new novel’s reaction to this second crisis, however, establishes two
distinct characteristics: masculinities in these texts are not simply domi-
nated by the textualized depictions of the Masculine but are instead fluid
entities and dialogisms that circulate within the interstitial fluids of the
greater construct that is gender in Latin America. Furthermore, keeping
in mind an economic episteme, they circulate coding the body as a site of
reference, and are therefore ontologically varied and spatially elusive.
Such a trajectory is evidenced when studied alongside another literary
trend in Latin American fiction: the intertextual and paratextual use of mu-
sical registers and lyrics to expand on what the text can say and where,

57
 58 · Part II

within the cultural field, it can operate. Though the use of music in fic-
tion is nothing new, there is a studied focus in recent fiction on the poten-
tial for popular musical and lyrical genres to explore the importance of
culture and culturality as fields of gendered contact when identity seemingly
becomes deterritorialized onto the global space. In what has been called
“la narrativa de la música popular latinoamericana,” Enrique Plata Ramírez
comments that “a partir de la articulación entre la literatura y la música
popular, alterna y paradójicamente se sacralizaran y desacralizaran, tanto
la música como la literatura” (53). The critic further writes that the point
of connection between music and literature produces “más un encuentro
erótico, pulsional, que cultural” (53). Music is more than a textual leitmo-
tif in these works: it establishes parallel planes of discourse that elucidates
richer interpretations of the erotics of any given text, allowing for plural epis-
temologies and processes of reading. It functions as a Barthesian semic
code that triggers a receptive hermeneutic practice of intertextuality, which
is appropriated and reworked by these authors, who function as bricoleurs
that undertake a Lévi-Straussian enunciative practice, where the “signified
changes into the signifying and vice versa” (21), lending the text, instead,
to a process and a practice of simultaneous flights of reception, cognition,
and inscription. The inclusion of music as a mutually exclusive medium
to narrative establishes a system of multiple codes, where these codes are
not “added to one another, or juxtaposed in just any manner; they are
organized, articulated in terms of one another in accordance with a cer-
tain order, they contract unilateral hierarchies,” thus producing a “system
of intercodical relations . . . which is itself, in some sort, another code”
(Metz 242). This other semiotic code, a mixture of both narrative and lyri-
cal registers, houses a tangential cognitive system of meanings where the
musical and narrative signifiers are resemanticized, thus permitting a fruit-
ful perambulation into intercodical erotics. It is this other plane, where the
axes of narrative and lyric connect, that I am interested in.
This connection is privileged by the inclusion of music into the written
narrative text, which follows three poetic schemata, each with its own
distinct structures, constructs, and results. On one level, music serves as
a textual channel of sexual objectification. The subject of desire resides
in the diegetic singer who evokes the song and its lyrics. Popular song
characterizes the enunciator and structures his or her interactions. The
corporality of the subject is called into question as the mouth functions as
a bodily site of discursivity that is not limited to the actual text of the
music, instead becoming a position by which gender is written onto the
literary bodies extant in the text. This is evident, for instance, in Tengo
 Lyrical Readings and Deterritorialization of Masculinities · 59

miedo torero, when the neighborhood transvestite’s mouth represents the

diegetic locus of popular music and the physical pen that inscribes gender
onto her lover’s (unconscious) body.
Yet popular music as an intertext does not always benefit from an intra-
textual subjectification. It appears at times as a passing song overheard
on the radio, or as a recurring memory that is evoked and formed around a
par ticular tune. On this second level, Music as a textuality is evocative
of Mikhail Bakhtin’s thesis on language in the novel: as a dialogic ele-
ment, it partakes in what the Russian thinker terms polyphony and hetero-
glossia. The latter circumscribes the collision of multiple languages and
registers within the text, whereas the former points toward the many voices
inherent in an utterance and within a text, as “each word tastes of the con-
text and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life; all words
and forms are populated by intentions” (Dialogic 293). A provocative ex-
ample of this schema can be found in Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Baile
con serpientes (2002), where the radio playing in the background of the old
yellow Chevrolet fills out the interstitial semantics of the exploration of
Central American masculinities in the wake of peace accords and dimin-
ishing economic opportunity, that is, as textual gendered bodies that are
stained by the diarrhea of neoliberalism. Diegetic music, in this schema,
functions as a secondary stream of discourse that is directly related to and
builds on the primary plot line. It is not necessarily a parallel plane of dis-
course, but it has a parasitic relationship with the text, existing only as an
example or illustration of the narrative.
The third poetic schema, when music is present as a dialogic element,
is that it may be extracted from the corporal and diegetic body and become
a body of its own—as an intertextual referent that allows a candid reading
into the matrices of power, gender, and race that are extant in contempo-
rary fiction. I am thinking particularly of Enrique Serna’s use of song in
Fruta verde (2006), or Mayra Montero’s La última noche que pasé contigo,
where music at times appears as a side note, chapter heading, or epilogue
to the main plot. As a result, readers are forced to stop in their tracks, take
an inferential walk away from the printed page, and pause, process, and
digest the musical and lyrical referent as a parallel plane that may or may
not intersect directly with the diegesis. As Wolfgang Iser emphasizes, music
exists as a literary and social repertoire (69), though each set of verses
forms a schema, which elucidates the reader’s involvement, as “the text mo-
bilizes the subjective knowledge present in all kinds of readers and directs
it to one particular end. . . . It is as if the schema were a hollow form into
which the reader is invited to pour his own store of knowledge” (143), to
 60 · Part II

read together and separately as another plane that the author appropriates
as tangential to the primary text.
The narrative text is, therefore, dialogic with the musical referent and
its lyrics, genre, interpreters, and receptors. The use of particular musical
genres territorializes this fiction within a sociocultural context, just as the
device of the historical novel roots the works of Cristina Rivera Garza,
Pedro Lemebel, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Sergio Ramírez within a topo-
graphic and imaginary boundary. Musical texts and rhythms appear both
as intertexts and paratexts in this third model, cajoling the reader forward
to unwrap the visible elements of textuality and to undertake a heuristic
reading that juxtaposes the affective intensity of the lyrical with the tactile
sensuality of the erotic.
 chapter five

Defining the Literary OST

The use of music in Tengo miedo torero is unsurprising if we take into ac-
count that Lemebel is not only an accomplished writer but also a contro-
versial visual artist who experimented with various video and photography
art projects, performance pieces, and plastic sculptures. Those familiar with
his multifaceted work—especially given his recent death—know that
Lemebel is notorious for kissing men in theater pieces and has publicly dis-
played a television set with pornographic images over his genitals. This
explicit exploration of the scandalous and the taboo as epistemologies of
challenge and resistance to the Masculine explain in part his use of music
in Tengo miedo torero as a semantic queering device. Working on the place
of language and orality in Latin America, Sonia Montecino notes that
“la oralidad es la forma en que el ethos latinoamericano ha trasmitido su
historia y su resistencia frente a la expansión del texto. La oralidad es también
el lenguaje que . . . desencadena un habla que se resiste a cierta economía
porque sus tiempos no son los de la producción en serie” (164). Lemebel, as
we have seen previously, restructures the erotics of the male revolutionary
through a contextualized understanding of Montecino’s latter observa-
tion. His text is polyphonic in the Bakhtinian sense, leading Berta López
Morales to characterize Tengo miedo torero as an expression of multiple ven-
triloquist voices.1 The critic notes that the text substitutes for the real body
and permits a reading that allows a penetration of the body from various
angles: “Por un lado, la fruición del lenguaje, gustado y degustado por la
lengua que al tocar el paladar repite la fricción, el contacto de los fluidos
corporales; por otra, el placer voyeurista, el ojo voraz que mira aquello dicho,

61
 62 · Chapter 5

susurrado, murmurado por la voz otra, voz ventrílocua, contradictoria y

contrahecha que oculta, se sobrepone y borra la Voz oficial” (121).
She further argues that the protagonist’s register and diction are a re-
flection of her own physical body, commenting that “cuplés, baladas, bole-
ros, tangos, música del recuerdo, del ayer, le prestan su registro y hacen de
su voz un collage, un pastiche de sonidos donde el sentido se fuga, haci-
endo de la voz de la Loca del Frente una voz travesti, excedida en la mod-
ulación de lo femenino” (127).2 Music indeed frames the figure of the Loca
in the novel, but I argue that it goes further than being a mere novelistic
recourse of characterization; it holds a structural function in La Loca’s
interactions with Carlos and lends itself as a textual soundtrack to the plot.
The text, in this par ticular reading, evokes music as an analogous fi lmic
recourse, much like the songs sung by actors of the celluloid space, and
much like the extradiegetic tunes that were made popular in Hollywood
cinema, especially with the advent of original soundtrack compilations
sold to satiate film aficionados.
Cinema as a narrative medium serving as an aesthetic referent to these
Generation Alfaguara novels comes as no surprise considering that film’s
poietic past is structured around adaptations of popular narratives.3 Pop cin-
ema today is, from a marketing standpoint, arguably as much about its
actors and off- screen stories as its musical scores and soundtracks. The
use and popularity of music in cinema creates a tangential trajectory of
meaning, as “increasingly, it seems, we think in soundtracks” (Knight and
Wojcik 1). This is perhaps a result of a shift in the industry in the 1950s, when
Hollywood began to market compilation albums labeled as “original motion
picture soundtrack,” which was later contracted to “original soundtrack,” or
OST.4 Contemporary OST recordings include a mix of diegetic popular
songs, nondiegetic lyrical and acoustic compositions, and cast-sung num-
bers, which are often versions of well-known songs, inscribing the filmic
image with a sociocultural and historical context for the viewer/listener who
identifies with the affective and haptic traits of the musical-lyrical register.
What occurs, then, in this dialectic between composition and watching/
listening is that “as a result of adhering to classical conventions, this kind
of scoring works hard to encourage the audience to surrender to the film
and fully engage with the emotional worlds and action depicted on the
screen” (Davison 3). Music, therefore, peels away the visual skin of the mov-
ing image or printed text and encourages an affective process and reaction
in viewers/readers, who must disentangle their own sociocultural relations
to the interlaced lyrical text. As such, the musical moves us from the realm
of the semantic to the field of the affective, thus positioning the reader at a
phenomenological point of entry into Masculine systems.
 Defining the Literary OST · 63

Adding to the theorization of an affective intertextuality between sound/

song and the narrated plot (whether visual or textual), music enters the
novel just as it does the cinema, through a variety of mediums and textual
strategies, including the nondiegetic score, character performance, radio
and sound devices, and diegetic singing, indicative of the plurality of com-
position in cinematic OST albums and representative of the three-schema
model I propose in the introduction to this part.5
The original soundtrack to Tengo miedo torero begins with the title
song, when the protagonist is first introduced and sings, “Tengo miedo to-
rero, tengo miedo que en la tarde tu risa flote” (10). The novel’s OST album
(which, I predict, Generation Alfaguara will soon sell as MP3 downloads
accompanying their novels or as embedded hyperlinks in e-book editions)
begins with a diegetically sung piece, which would be referenced as a cast-
sung number. Critics have mistakenly pegged this tune as that of the pop-
ular Spanish singer Sara Montiel, but Lemebel clarifies that the title of the
book comes from a meeting with an old transvestite friend, who told him
of her performances as Montiel and how she sang “El último cuplé” and
“Tengo miedo torero.” A laughing Lemebel asks her what follows, to which
she replies, “tengo miedo que tu risa, a la tarde, flote,” which is repeated
by the Loca singing in the novel. The author then unveils that the song
does not exist and that “la travesti mintió” (Interview).6 Inadvertently,
Lemebel’s appropriation of the transvestite’s lie comes to form the struc-
tural, literary, and lyrical axis mundi to the novel. From a structural stand-
point, the song establishes a positionality of power, with the singer, the
torero, and some unseen danger forming a triangulation of potential erotic
dynamics in the novel. This triangulation, in essence, situates bodies and
positions in reference to the Masculine, where the off-screen danger can
be read as the hygienic and oppressive position of hegemonic masculinity.
The off-screen position thus situates the torero in relation to or in complic-
ity with the ideal: saving the singer will only add to his relative cache.
Though the author’s appropriation of the song is ontological to both the
poiesis and the reception of the text, it does create a literary side effect,
for by using a fictive song, the text escapes the sociocultural sphere of read-
ing that comes with positing a musical register. The novel, then, asks the
reader to reference a register that is not really there, lending a tone of uncer-
tainty to the narrative, suggesting that not everything is as it seems (or as it
is historically represented). This is evident in the broader evaluation of the
text, as a new historical novel that deviates heavily from the traditional
dictates of genre by queering its tone, tenor, and to an extent, use of musi-
cality by emphasizing the disconnect between the diegesis and its real-
world historical and lyrical referents.
 64 · Chapter 5

Immediately after the purported title piece, the narrative segues into
Consuelo Velázquez’s “Bésame mucho,” which is the only song explicitly
mentioned by title but never sung by La Loca, heard on the radio, or
included as transcriptive lyrics. Instead it is mentioned in passing, as La
Loca is described as “tosiendo el ‘Bésame mucho’ en las nubes de polvo y
cachureos que arrumbaba en la cuneta” (10). “Bésame mucho” is never
uttered, never located in the enunciative mouth (as a discursive site), and
therefore evades a positioning vis-à-vis the desire, identity, and gender of
La Loca; instead it posits a heuristic process in the reader, who may or may
not identify with its cultural significance. This caveat hints at the connec-
tion between the title of the song and the titular “Tengo miedo torero,”
suggesting that Velázquez’s song functions as the real secondary level of
discourse that music brings to the text. A closer examination of the lyrics
of both songs shows how “Tengo miedo torero” borrows heavily from the
final lines and tropic places of the first and last stanza of “Bésame mucho,”
as what is expressed is the fear of losing love and the loved one. La Loca’s
interpretation of the song, however, subjugates her voice to a domineering,
macho, and penetrating matador, when compared to Velázquez’s gender-
neutral lyrics. This genderizing of the title results in a queering of the
subject’s speech, which goes beyond the rouge and lipstick to physically
contrast La Loca to the normative virile masculinities of the military dic-
tator and the rebel. Music, therefore, creates a secondary level of gender(ed)
discourse that is only made possible by being enunciated from the mouth
of the toothless Loca when she appropriates the song under the mis-
labeled title.
Song in Tengo miedo torero is queered as a result of the dialectic between
“Tengo miedo torero” and “Bésame mucho,” which results in gender-neutral
pieces such as “Tú querías que te dejara de querer,” the popular Juan Ga-
briel tune that is sung by La Loca as she ponders her one-sided relation-
ship with Carlos, being tinged by the homoerotics established between the
initial dyad of lyrical texts and the subsequent modifications that the reader
must make to the musical register.7 The song laments the loss of affection
in a relationship as one lover leaves the other, who still yearns for physical
intimacy. Not having had relations with Carlos, La Loca’s singing of “Tú
querías que te dejara de querer” implicates gender structures on a societal
level as the plight of the homosexual in Chilean society is put into ques-
tion. The line between homo- and heterosexuality is not always clear in a
context where the depictions of the virile masculine abound. Citing
works by Roger Lancaster and Richard Parker (and channeling Robert
McKee Irwin and Guillermo Núñez Noriega among others), Oscar Misael
 Defining the Literary OST · 65

Hernández argues that dichotomies of hegemonic versus nonhegemonic

masculinities do not always function in Latin America, as it is normal for
married men, who self-identify as heterosexuals, to engage in homosex-
ual sex with various partners (70). The lyrics sung by La Loca thus sum-
mon the homoerotics of a system that subordinates the homosexual, yet at
the same time uses him to satiate its own desires as an object of outlet for
homosociality.
The mouth in Tengo miedo torero is the locus of a politically queering
discourse that engages the structures of masculinities through song (and,
of course, fellatio), but only La Loca’s mouth enjoys this privilege; when
Carlos attempts to sing, “Contigo en la distancia,” his voice “se quebró en
un gallo lírico que lo hizo toser y toser, llenándosele los ojos de lágrimas
por el ahogo y la risa” (83). His failed attempt at singing, transcribed as the
impotency of his mouth, is contrasted with La Loca’s oral orifice, where
her “lengua marucha se obstinara en nombrarlo, llamándolo, lamiéndolo,
saboreando esas sílabas, mascando ese nombre, llenándose toda con ese
Carlos tan profundo” (13). Lemebel’s text is not only musical in the sense
that it engages a literary OST, but also evocative of a symphonics that inter-
weaves the written word, the dressed-up Loca, the listened song, and the
hypermasculine virile body of the rebel into an intricate arrangement of
enunciations and actions that challenge heteronormative systems and lan-
guages. Carlos is called into being through the mouth, as the transvestite
pronounces that his name is so strong: “Para quedarse toda suspiro, arro-
pada entre la C y la A de ese C-arlos que iluminaba con su presencia toda
la c- asa” (13). La Loca’s reflection on his name involves a climax and a
decline into silence, which is punctuated by a sigh that is eroticized by her
tongue, which calls, licks, and tastes the syllables of his name (and him?).
Her mouth is thus the new site of gendered power—displacing the penis or
any of its phallic incarnations, capitalized as a site of sexual becoming and
of coming into being
The mouth of La Loca comes into play again in a sexual encounter be-
tween the two characters. After hosting a Cuban-style birthday party, La
Loca surprises Carlos with a bottle of pisco and some music. Lemebel in-
corporates the lyrics of his phantom song into this scene, as both charac-
ters listen to a vinyl recording. Musicality functions here as a cinematic
framing register that imposes the erotics of the title track onto the diegetic
interplay between bodies (under construction). The transvestite laments the
inability for them to have a relationship, and the rebel subsequently con-
soles her: “pero no por eso vamos a dejar de tomar, reina . . . poniéndole
la corona al extender sus labios en una sonrisa perlada” (94). This is the
 66 · Chapter 5

first reference that the reader has to Carlos’s mouth, which immediately
precedes his confession of a (queering) staining secret to the transvestite.
Here he references the homoerotic secret held since his youth, of being
asked for only “la pura puntita” (95) by a peer. By bringing Carlos’s mouth
into being, that is, as a site of enunciation that occupies the archetypal
place of the torero within the erotics of the song, Lemebel opens a dialogue
into the queering of the masculine figure through the allusion of the pun-
tita as the quintessential act of penetration that is linguistically disqualified
from its erotic core. The puntita is symbolically never really intercourse,
sodomy, or the loss of virginity, though in practice it phenomenologically
breaks the sanctity of separation, conjoining two bodies in the sexual act.
By signaling this epistemological disconnect between signifier and signi-
fied, the novel effectively relocates Carlos away from the realm of the
Masculine or its approximation as his secret displaces him from hetero-
normativity and from playing the protector to the weak/feminine singing
voice in the song.
It is Carlos’s words that queer him, especially after he confides, “no sé
por qué yo no me moví cuando le saltó el chorro de moco que me mojó la
pierna” (96). This staining of the subject, which I explicate earlier, causes
both a sense of shame and an unpleasant feeling of pleasure- disgust in
Carlos, so much so that “a los dos nos quedó una cosa sucia que nos hacía
bajar la vista cuando nos cruzábamos en el patio del liceo” (96). The source
of shame in this encounter is the staining of the semen on his leg and not
the desire he felt for sodomizing his friend, of simply introducing la pun-
tita, as this is explained as simply being “cosas de cabros chicos” (96). More
so than homoerotic desire, the violation of the Masculine’s adherence to
symbolic cleanliness and hygiene in his body succeeds in shifting the rev-
olutionary masculine from a position in dialogue with hegemony. Note here
that this displacement is written not as a result of desire that breaches the
heteronormative contract but through the physical, organic, and corporal
staining of the subject through the viscosity of the bodily fluid, a staining
only made possible through the subject’s telling of the story in the fore-
ground of the title song. Staining and its subsequent desubjectification
within the market of masculinities is thus also a haptic phenomenon, as
the text evokes the sticky, humid, and “unclean” textures of homoeroticism
to sublate the male body, building too on the affective circulations gener-
ated by the lyrical register.
After this confession La Loca leaves to find Carlos a blanket, only to
discover him asleep and snoring “por los fuelles ventoleros de su boca abi-
erta” (97). His open mouth foreshadows La Loca’s subsequent actions, as
 Defining the Literary OST · 67

she undresses him and fellates his erect member. The narrative, partly due
to the ubiquitous soundtrack being played through diegetic and extradi-
egetic speakers, now encourages a scopophilic textual experience, as the
reader is guided to gaze at La Loca’s real and erotically undressed mouth
as it approaches the sedate penis. If bodies do matter, then the ontologi-
cally masculine protrusion of the male body enters a site of reckoning as it
is placed in the discursive and queering locus of the mouth. The protago-
nist, furthermore, is referred to as “la boca-loca” (100), suggesting that the
mouth is ontological to the queer subject, and that only in and through it
can the negotiation of a queer(ing) identity take place.8
In the “concavidad húmeda” (99) of La Loca (note again the haptic as a
characteristic of this lyrical corporal space), Lemebel evokes music, musi-
cality, and song as he observes that “las locas elaboran un bordado cantante
en la sinfonía de su mamar . . . La Loca solo degusta y luego trina su cata-
dura lírica por el micrófono carnal que expande su radiofónica libación”
(100). The detoothed transvestite further comments that fellatio “es como
cantar . . . interpretarle a Carlos un himno de amor directo al corazón”
(100), reflective of the interconnectedness of varying planes of semantic and
tactile inscription that come together in the literary OST.9 The climax to
this interplay of gendered bodies and positions is lyrically written and al-
most poetic—a symbiotic duet between the mouth and the penis that
culminates in acts and body movements that renegotiate previously static
positions, as “el mono solidario le brindó una gran lágrima de vidrio
para lubricar el canto reseco de su incomprendida soledad” (100). Lemebel
immediately follows with the lyrics to “Ansiedad,” by J. E. Sarabia Rodrí-
guez, which evokes imagery and sentiments that are congruent with the
narrated events:

Ansiedad de tenerte en mis brazos,

musitando palabras de amor,

Ansiedad de tener tus encantos

y en la boca volverte a besar. (101)

Readers, importantly, do not know if this song belongs to the diegetic vinyl
record that is played at the beginning of their encounter, or if it can be
found in the cinematic soundtrack that floats over the narrative, setting
the mood of the scene and creating a secondary plane of meaning that
runs parallel to the signifiers in the text. Connecting the two narratives
 68 · Chapter 5

together, that is, the scene in the novel with the lyrical register as intertext,
we can see that Sarabia Rodríguez’s lyrics reveal La Loca’s love for Carlos
as being rooted in more than physical desire. We can also observe in the
song that the evocation of the mouth as a site of desire and of utterance is
queered when associated with the character of La Loca, who fellates the
young revolutionary, thereby calling into question his positioning within
the matrices of masculinity; the anxiety referenced is not solely one of
missing the desired body, but also one of dealing with the repercussions
of the libidinous event. This process emphasizes the structural erotics
that Lemebel undertakes by appropriating and queering the traditional
heteronormative bolero.
Though Lemebel’s novel is titled with an imagined song, the explora-
tion of the role of popular music as an intertext in writing masculinities is
salient and cannot be ignored. The OST of Tengo miedo torero is replete
with solos, extradiegetic tunes, and diegetic pieces that reflect or tangen-
tially build on the narrative trajectory of La Loca and Carlos; music in
the novel is not only a representational practice of desire, but is also argu-
ably desire itself, as it provides a way of knowing gender through the writ-
ten body. But not all literary soundtracks enjoy the collaboration of the
leading lady/man/transvestite. How are masculinities negotiated when
the narrative stops short of, or actively resists a representation of, desire?
 chapter six

Lyrical Epistemologies
and Masculine Desire

Mayra Montero’s La última noche que pasé contigo is a classic erotic Ca-
ribbean text, which inculcates both the notion of geography as being cen-
tral to the eroticization of its people and cultures and the use of the bolero
as a literary intertext, following in the school of other novels, such as La
importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos (1988) by Luis Rafael Sánchez, El
entierro de Cortijo (1983) and Una noche con Iris Chacón (1986) by Ed-
gardo Rodríguez Juliá, and El libro de Apolonia, o, de las islas (1993) by Iris
Zavala. The use of popular music by these authors comes as a result of ear-
lier shifts in the telos of Puerto Rican literature, which began to veer from
the works and styles of canonical authors and their texts as a means of rep-
resenting the social and political shifts within the national imaginary, es-
pecially in the wake of ever-working globalizing forces and the experience
of mass media culture. From a cultural standpoint, the sociopolitical
crises of the 1970s and afterward threw traditional family and sexual struc-
tures into flux, and then unearthed private and public concerns with gen-
der roles (on the micro and macro level). Emblematic of this turn is La
guaracha del Macho Camacho (1976), by Luis Rafael Sánchez. The use of
music in these texts is symptomatic of a broader feeling of change and cri-
sis, and a study of its tunes permits an unearthing of its many problems by
means of a hermeneutic tearing at the fabric of the canonical and high cul-
ture. These narratives put forth a lyrical epistemology of change as they
explore the quotidian, personal happenings of peoples and situations that
open up tectonic crack lines of power and identity in dialogue with non-
national processes. As Enrique Plata Ramírez observes:

69
 70 · Chapter 6

La narrativa caribeña se apropia del discurso musical, para dar cuenta

del caribeño en cuanto ser pluricultural, de su cultura, su identidad y su
perifericidad. Estas apropiaciones discursivas musicales permiten sos-
tener el encuentro de lo heterogéneo y la transgresión de una alta cul-
tura que dará paso a la cultura popular. Esta tradición narrativa es ya
larga e intensa y no parece tener punto final en lo inmediato. (61)

In such a light, the sequence of novels I mention as coming from this shift
in the 1970s was just another round of the literary channeling and reflecting
communal anxieties.
Perhaps most obvious to the reader of this corpus is the presence of the
bolero over any other genre. Its use as a narratological fulcrum to explore
plural and varied discourses is a result of its own historical development;
the bolero is a register that delineates a local (within a global) ethical and
philosophical problematic played out over everyday practice (Fleites 2).1
Practice here is further constituted by practices of gender and sexuality,
where the bolero allows for a symbolic and nontextual exploration of desire
and libidinal behavior. Bolero music is a highly erotic genre of musical
expression, as it proposes “una actitud ante el amor, pero más: organiza
a nivel simbólico las distintas situaciones que puede enfrentar el enamo-
rado” (Fleites 8). The inclusion of its lyrics and melodies in the narratives
of writers across the subregion and the continent stresses its viability in the
exploration and negotiation of identity, because it has become, to an ex-
tent, a register for and a repository of many of the questions and polemics
that plague identitarian politics in Latin America.
This intersection between the bolero and discourses or representations
of identity is explored in Montero’s La última noche que pasé contigo, a
novel that inserts the reader into the marriage and personal musings of a
pair of empty nesters (Celia and Fernando), who go on a cruise after the
marriage of their only child (Elena).2 Located in the nonterritorial spatial
coordinates of the ocean—a queering space in recent Latin American cin-
ema, such as El niño pez (2009) and XXY (2007) by Lucía Puenzo and Con-
tracorriente (2009) by Javier Fuentes-León, and a ripe tropic site of erotic
interrogation—the couple enters a period of libidinal awakening and marked
sexual activity with each other and with others. Celia reminisces about an
extramarital affair she had with her sick father’s caretaker, Agustín Conejo,
and subsequently has another affair during a stopover on their cruise with
a (necessarily) nameless Afro-Caribbean man. Fernando, on the other hand,
rehashes the feelings and passions he felt during Celia’s first infidelity and
has his own trysts with the enigmatic Julieta, a mature woman who meets
 Lyrical Epistemologies and Masculine Desire · 71

the couple aboard the cruise. Arranging an erotic dynamism that weaves
tales and encounters of passion, mistrust, and animalistic sex, Montero
places all the cards on the table when at the end of the novel, the reader
discovers that Julieta is Conejo’s ex-wife, thereby tying up all the loose ends
in an act of erotic serendipity. In addition to separating the novel into eight
distinct chapters headed by bolero titles, Montero intersperses amidst the
voices of Fernando and Celia a collection of nine letters that appear spo-
radically in the novel. Written between Abel (a pseudonym for a woman,
Mariana) and Ángela, these letters we find connect Fernando to Celia in
their respective childhoods. The letters also reveal that Mariana leaves
Ángela for a younger woman, Julieta, who becomes Fernando’s lover while
on the cruise.
Structurally, popular bolero music quite obviously composes the OST
of La última noche que pasé contigo, as Montero organizes her chapters
around the genre, triggering Enrique Plata Ramírez to argue that “la letra
de los boleros [son] el recurso ficcional que permit[e] instaurar el discurso
narrativo, aproximarse hacia el erotismo, la sensualidad y las historias para-
lelas de los sujetos periféricos que se sienten al borde de sus vidas” (60).
Others who have studied the role of song in Montero’s pages unsurprisingly
follow the critic’s observation, arguing that the main female character’s re-
lationship with the bolero changes as the novel progresses, with the final
chapter showcasing her rejection of patriarchy and phallogocentrism, which
is almost intrinsic to the erotics of the bolero.3 The focus on feminine sex-
uality is echoed in the assertion that “La última noche se suma así a un
corpus de ficción hispanoamericano que trata el discurso erótico como otro
medio para mellar los códigos sociales rígidos que impiden la autonomía
sexual de las mujeres” (López 134). The inclusion of this novel in this chap-
ter, however, follows my interest in teasing out the masculinities in seem-
ingly critically exhausted works (see the reading of La fiesta del Chivo in
part 1). How are masculinities and the Masculine framed and constructed
in a text (and its accompanying criticism) that seemingly focuses only on
the writing of femininities? Here I build on the idea that popular music
functions as a phenomenological textual resource to write, represent, and
discuss masculinities in fiction while inculcating a cognitive awareness of
space and spatial tropes, because music as an affective exercise engenders
a sense of being and knowing, all within sites of reception (where we listen
to and feel the musical/lyrical) or spaces of contact (social, historical, and
cultural zones that inherently evoke a topologic reference system).
Curiously, the only critical texts dealing with masculinity in the novel
focus on the “lesbianizing” of the male protagonist. Keeping with a practice
 72 · Chapter 6

of gender studies that traditionally analyzes masculinity through othered

optics, particular readings argue the latent homosexual desire in Fernando
and his sexual fixation on orality to characterize the male as being lesbian-
ized. Masculinity, when it is acknowledged, is approached through the psy-
choanalytic prism that places a premium on decentering practices away
from a male identity; that is, there is an implicit notion and politics of queer-
ness. The problem with such a strategy to tackling gender and sexuality in
the novel is that masculinities are thus often relegated to a single ontologi-
cal category, which is rendered inert by well-meaning criticism, especially
in a text rich in its portrayal of hierarchical masculinities in the Caribbean.
Changing our critical lens, we can see that from the onset, the matrices
of masculinity are unearthed through the male protagonist, Fernando, as
his narrative opens Montero’s foray into empty-nester sexuality. Aside from
commenting on the redundancy of coitus with his wife, Fernando reveals
his friend Bermúdez as a representative of male homosociality, as it is
through him that he learns lessons about marriage and about the cruise
they are on. The relationship between Bermúdez and Fernando does not
reveal per se a dialoguing with the Masculine, in the political or Grams-
cian sense, but instead reflects on Christine Beasley’s reclassification of what
hegemony actually means in masculinity studies. The homosocial group
in La última noche que pasé contigo reflects the usage of the term only if
and when it applies to an “empirical reference specifically to actual groups
of men” (“Re-thinking” 171). We can infer from this point that the Mascu-
line as an umbrella term in its cultural and political incarnation is implicitly
constructed by and through real groups of men, such as the “butcher” ho-
mosocial that Bermúdez represents in Montero’s novel.
Bermúdez takes on the role of educator to Fernando by teaching him
how the homosocial considers life, love, and adventure, akin in a sense to
the dynamics of approval between men seen in Rivera Garza’s novel. He is
a figure full of theories and explanations for the intricacies of gender rela-
tions. In one example, he hypothesizes that the open ocean will make Celia
into a tigress in the bedroom, because the hot waters of the Caribbean
smell of rotten seafood. The novel knowingly seizes popular discourses of
“bodies in heat,” as though the tropics and their peoples are more likely to
be animalized or engage in animal sex, closer to the visceral barbarity of
the nonhuman and necessarily separated from the civility of the (northern)
urban. Bermúdez argues that “el marisco pasado, ya tú sabes, es olor de
mujer” (14). Whether consciously or simply through a process of dialogic
osmosis, Fernando assimilates this line of thinking as he discloses that Celia
touches his “labios con la punta de su dedo perverso, su dedo sátiro que
 Lyrical Epistemologies and Masculine Desire · 73

olía a marisco antiguo, a tierra remojada, a puro mar de las Antillas” (23),
reflecting the power of the real and discrete homosocial in discursively shap-
ing approximations to the Masculine. Importantly, the Masculine is not
universal or axiomatic, but is constructed through everyday practice, dis-
course, and tactics.
The homosocial group that influences the male protagonist sets up his
relationship with his own and other sexualities, a homosocial that views the
sex act as a motion of predation. Reflective of this violent perspective, his
language reveals a subtle discomfort with the practice of heterosexual vag-
inal sex, as he describes it as being “la carnicería” (15). It is an act where
the male must penetrate, consume, and ultimately desubjectify the pene-
trated body, which is then resignified as a defining body to the penetrator;
in other words, I am who I am based on whom I penetrate. Fernando’s
hesitance to enter the “carnicería” reveals a deeply intense anxiety about
performing adequately for the Masculine gaze, which is focused not only (if
at all) on the gushing and pleased female as sign of masculine prowess but
also, convexly, on the virile, sensuous, and violently dominating male. In
his relationship with Bermúdez, Fernando constructs his expression of gen-
der around an oral dialectic with other men that is rooted in the narration
of sexual practices and desires, which are described as violent and bloody.
This narrative subjectifies the male as the butcher entering his domain with
a phallic knife and anonymizes the woman as a simple piece of meat in
the carnicería. This epistemology of the sex act and sexuality is ontological
to the homosocial bond that is shared by Fernando, Bermúdez, and oth-
ers, and is founded on a corporal and discursive phallic, unredeeming vio-
lence. This is noted in “las atrocidades” (107) that Fernando shares with
Celia in bed at night, which include an anecdote about the fishermen of
Mombasa—African men that “subían a bordo los cuerpos moribundos de
los dugongos, unas vacas marinas con pechos de matrona, y fornicaban
con ellos hasta que las pobres bestias dejaban de existir. Era un sencillo
coito anal . . . con el raro aliciente de que el animal, durante el acto, lanzaba
unos gritos angustiosos que parecían sollozos de mujer” (107–8). Sex within
this group, a discrete and real homosocial experience that the narrative
argues to be formative and primordial to masculinity, is limited to the vio-
lence exerted by the self over a possessed and violated animal other. It does
not take much work for the reader to deduce that the object of libidinal
desire among the butcher homosocial is also viewed, albeit tacitly, as an
animal.
Returning to Fernando’s real expression of sexuality (versus the ideal-
ized paradigm of butcher homosociality), we can see that he does not fully
 74 · Chapter 6

satiate the Masculine gaze and its expectations in his relationships with
women. Instead, Montero portrays him as a vulnerable, complex, and hu-
manized representation of male sexuality. His fragile, nonphallocentric, and
conflictive nature is evidenced when he eats another man’s semen from the
cinnamon- garnished vagina of a prostitute, and when he kisses Julieta,
whose mouth is coated with the ejaculate of an Afro- Caribbean, brutish
taxi driver. These incidences, which are intimately linked to the mouth as
a (queering) site of sexual expression, are seemingly contradicted when
Fernando describes how Celia mounts his mouth after every visit she
makes to her father’s house to take care of him. The protagonist’s oral enjoy-
ment is truncated when “con más firmeza, la empujaba hacia atrás, la obli-
gaba a retroceder, la ensartaba furiosamente en su verdadero trono” (18).4
Evoking a complex and conflictive sense of self in relation to the female, the
male finds a need to emphasize his phallic corporality, to act out what the
butcher requires in its approximating to the Masculine, and to deny his own
oral impulses, though in later scenes of the novel, he shows an animalistic
consumption drive, wanting to devour his lover Julieta and drink her urine.
The textual descriptions of cunnilingus between Celia and Fernando
subtly, yet quite perversely, react to the lyrics of the bolero that titles the
first chapter, “Burbujas de amor.” The song narrates the yearning desire of
a subject for his/her lover, who wants to “Pasar la noche en vela / Mojado
en ti.” The reasons for placing the song at the beginning of the novel are
elementary; Montero has chosen a nondiegetic referent that explicates the
underlying tensions and desires in the narrative. The bachata as a sensual
body-clinging art, after all, is meant to be accompanied by “todas esas co-
sas salvajes y calientes” (88) that constitute human desire. It is notable that
the only character actively described as being “mojado” is Fernando, as he
has a “rostro empapado” (18) after Celia spends a good fifteen minutes
“remando absorta” on top of his face (18). The contrasts between this ini-
tial performance and the subsequent “placing on the throne” are high-
lighted when Fernando dephallicizes his body by analogizing his face with
the dead calm of the sea. He is not the virile male who massacres the fe-
male body but is instead composed of a dysmorphic and desubjectified ori-
fice that sexually pleasures Celia. His corporal body is disarticulated into
an anonymous shape-shifting mass like the ocean as Celia rows on top of
him, effectively breaking, albeit for only fifteen minutes, the power of the
Masculine over his gender expression and coital preference.
Though Fernando strives to shift himself away from the butcher men-
tality of the homosocial (through the resignifying of key corporal sites of
desire), it is plain to see that the break is not as acute as criticism would
 Lyrical Epistemologies and Masculine Desire · 75

lead one to believe. In those many encounters with his wife where he
haphazardly reassumes his role as king (of the carnicería) by placing Celia
on her throne, he finds a mark near her breast that confirms his suspicions
of her having an affair with Marianito, her father’s cousin. Reinforcing his
interdependence on the homosocial, Fernando conjures a narrative of how
Celia and Marianito engage in a repeated set of trysts that can only be in-
tertextually inspired by the sordid yet serendipitous tales of sexual conquest
shared among groups of men or in commercial erotica. Even when pos-
sessing, or acting out, the scopophilic Masculine’s ideal of the butcher sa-
tiating the victimized female, Fernando repeatedly reaffirms the structural
binds of masculinities in keeping with Sedgwick’s homosocial triangles.
This focus on orality is strengthened by Celia’s diegetic singing of the
titular bolero in the chapter. La última noche que pasé contigo follows the
intertextual model of the literary OST, though it is a two-sided album, with
the boleros that title each chapter as side A, and the characters who pro-
nounce the lyrics within the narrative as a sort of side B.5 The effect of this
categorization of the musical within and in reference to the novel sets up
dual planes that semantically address the plot. Celia repeats the line “mojada
en ti” several times, finishing with a languid “oooooh, mojada en ti” (27)
that is described by Fernando as being uncouth and off-key. He attempts
a reversal of roles by situating Celia within the aquarium that houses the
lonesome subject in the lyrics of the bolero, making her the fish that repeat-
edly exclaims “mojada en ti.” The opposite, however, is not simply dissimi-
lated by his narrative but is put into tension by the recurring routine prac-
tice of her mounting him. Keeping this in mind, Celia’s diegetic singing
of the bolero succeeds in decentering, or at least subverting, the butcher
masculinity that is subscribed to by Fernando (at times) and his homoso-
cial group. The lyrical referent assumes an explicitly mocking tone be-
cause it is the male character that is wetted by the female, either through
her coital mounting of his mouth or by her wetting of his lips with her fin-
ger, which tastes of “marisco antiguo” (23). There is a succinct and subtle
negotiation of the protagonist’s masculine identity, as the lyrics of the ac-
companying songs and their diegetic representations signal for a complica-
tion of the male’s position in regard to heteronormative gender structures.
The bolero Celia sings seems to deliver the initial blow in defacing the
façade that is Fernando’s carnal brand of masculinity. He is further decon-
structed when he recounts his encounter with a prostitute who mixes
cinnamon powder with talcum to freshen her intimate regions prior to
servicing clients. The lady asks him to leave as she attends to another cus-
tomer, a man who spurs envy and violence in the awaiting Fernando
 76 · Chapter 6

when he brushes the cinnamon-laced powder from his clothing after com-
pleting his business with the prostitute. The male protagonist, unhinged
by the narrative of another man penetrating his object of desire, barges
in on the prostitute and saturates her genitals with the cinnamon powder
before tasting her. It is unclear as to what motivates him to do so, though
the fact that he uses his mouth instead of his penis to probe the previously
butchered terrain signals a possible queer reading of his desire. Quite iron-
ically, the violence he feels toward the other gentleman is vicariously first
expressed through the use of the mouth and not through the phallic,
violent thrusts of the homosocial butcher entering the carnicería. As
such, Fernando situates himself outside the subjective position of butcher
homosociality, planting another masculinity in the same space and epis-
temology, as, after all, his principal drive is to consume the prostitute, al-
beit through his mouth.
The dialectic between belonging to and deviating from the homosocial’s
narrative is not a simple issue of black and white; it is complicated by Fer-
nando’s description of the prostitute’s taste: “Adentro sabía amargo, sabía
de cerca a concha triturada, y sabía lejanamente, cada vez más lejanamente,
a la canela” (30). What can first be considered the essence of the female for
the homosocial—Bermúdez’s symbologies of the sea and the feminine—is
decentered by the prostitute revealing that he had swallowed “la leche de
otro hombre” (31). We return here to the haptic nature of queering mascu-
linities, evocative of Lemebel’s sticky, humid stain on the body of the
young rebel. It is through this scene that Montero sets in motion a series of
transgressions that elucidate a reading that moves beyond visible and ob-
tuse binaries of gender, as the reader is reminded of the topographic ocean
as a site of constant symbolic and symbiotic restructuralizations of gender,
permitted and carried out, in part, by the inviting and heuristic lyrical texts
as titles and as sung intertexts. This act of transgression takes on a nostal-
gic, uncanny tone when Fernando describes his ambiguous relationship
with cinnamon: “me repugnaba algunas veces, y había veces en que
amanecía con un deseo brutal de saborearla” (31). Where then is Fernando
situated in relation to the butcher?
The character’s belonging to the homosocial, which is to say, not the
group that is “mojado” in the song, is further complicated when he meets
the mature Julieta. She notices his hands rubbing suntan lotion on her
body, and he makes a direct effort to “hacerlas parecer más fuertes y labo-
riosas, más hábiles y despiadadas, es decir, más temibles” (34). Though the
diegetically enunciated lyrical intertext characterizes a queering of the
male body, it shows signs of fighting this process, of somehow reaffirming
 Lyrical Epistemologies and Masculine Desire · 77

the body’s penetrating, knifelike agency. What we see in this engagement

between the male body and the lyrical intertext is an exploration and
experimentation of nonheteronormative practices and identities, which are
seemingly accessed, or allowed to be accessed, only through the noncon-
forming and relative register of the musical.
Popular song as part of a diegetically sung OST decenters the homo-
socially dependent Carlos in Pedro Lemebel’s Tengo miedo torero, though
Lemebel’s narrative lacks the male countervoice to the queering erotics of
the song. The one exception, however, occurs when, imbued with a poetics
of inebriation, the rebel Carlos takes over the narrative as his ventrilo-
quist voice explains a long-kept secret of homoerotic frolicking at the
banks of a river with another youth, who ejaculates onto his leg. Tengo
miedo torero manages to queer and decenter virile masculinity through
song, but only through an exchange in the control of the narrative voice,
in this case brought about by copious amounts of pisco, does Lemebel
succeed in exposing heteronormative masculinity as a construct depen-
dent on its ties to the homosocial, which are in turn woven by a reliance
on oral narratives.
The converse, the sexual reliance on orality, has an opposite effect within
the homosocial in La última noche. The process of sexualized eating
queers the male’s belonging to the group when the couple and Julieta eat
sushi at a local restaurant on one of the cruise stops. Celia assumes the
active, violent role that she occupies when mounting Fernando by cajoling
the gastronomically conservative Julieta to try the Japanese delicacy. Mon-
tero creates an ephemeral yet tangible triangle of desire between the two
women and Fernando when he joins in the sushi “no tanto por el apetito
como por la necesidad de unirme al culto” (39). His mouth becomes a site
of seduction as he physically assimilates the raw mollusks (evocative of the
vagina, at least according to Bermúdez) in a slow and sensual fashion that
incites Julieta to caress his ankles with her feet. Fernando’s oral fixation
alludes to the incident with the cinnamon powder and to his subjugation
by the rowing Celia over his face, both incidences that disassociate him
from the butcher expression. The text as narrated by Fernando, however,
shows an awareness of this deviation, as it reverts to the homosocial’s
animalization of the female body through the transmutation of genitalia
with each piece of sushi offered to him, as the aoyagi becomes a “vulva
sonrosada, la cresta del clítoris sobresaliendo de su cojín de arroz, palpi-
tando intensamente bajo unos polvos misteriosos” (39–40), and the torigai
“otra vulva cercenada especialmente para mi exclusivo festín, otro clítoris
latiente, esta vez pardo y resbaloso” (40). The nonhuman is not simply
 78 · Chapter 6

reimagined as genitalia but is brought to life as a pulsating organ of female

sexuality that is prey for the Masculine gaze and appetite.
The role of the bolero in the process of constructing a gender identity
in Fernando is addressed further in the third chapter, when he sings a few
lines of “Negra consentida” to Celia as he reminisces about his adventures
from the night of the restaurant. The song conjures exotic visions of the
Afro- Caribbean as a source of unrestrained, animalistic sexual possibility
that is underscored by the mythically large African penis. Fernando wonders
if Julieta wishes to “convertirse en una negra procaz, maquinadora, per-
vertida; una negra devoradora de ardientes negros insaciables” (81). The
novel obviously seizes cultural sexual stereotypes as a means to engage in
a broader debate of identity politics, returning to the popularity of low-
culture registers within the literary at a time of crisis.
The image of animal males devouring the female evokes the carnicería
and reverts the reader to the idea that sex is violence. The description of
Julieta as a carnivorous sexual subject when she pushes Fernando to per-
form oral sex on her—that is, Julieta as akin to the “insatiable Negro”—is
juxtaposed with the events of the night before, of him eating the sushi. Like
Celia, Julieta shifts the emphasis placed on phallic penetration in their
relations and subjugates him to the objectified role of giving her pleasure
through his mouth, analogous to the pieces of meat/sushi that are consumed
in the homosocial’s metaphorical butchering. The movement between epis-
temological corporal sites returns us to the writing of masculinities in the
new historical novel, though the use of the musical intertext seemingly
places more value on the mouth than on the testes. Julieta desubjectifies
Fernando within the erotics of cunnilingus by reversing the narrated ac-
tions of the restaurant—she is now devouring him instead of the reverse,
her vagina now as mouth eating the feminized male. She appropriates the
erotics suggested by the bolero sung by Fernando and impregnates sushi/
female genitalia with the butcher’s sexual power, responsible now for de-
vouring and carving out the relegated male body.
The use of popular music in La última noche que pasé contigo is not
limited to the negotiation of masculinities in Fernando; it is also developed
as a narratological strategy by Celia when she describes how she would mas-
turbate during her engagement to Fernando, listening to Lucho Gatica’s
rendition of “Amor, qué malo eres.” Montero problematizes female desire
through Celia’s description of the masturbatory act: “No era exactamente
que me masturbara, no era así, tan burdo, la expresión exacta era ‘recon-
ocerme’ ” (103). The bolero is used as a parallel yet tangential schema to
engender a hybrid trajectory that runs counter to heteronormative models
 Lyrical Epistemologies and Masculine Desire · 79

of sexuality. As Jorge Rosario-Vélez judges, “Celia polemiza la apropiación

del bolero como medio de enunciación de estos deseos porque los sujetos
carecen de la capacidad lingüística apropiada para articular lo ‘salvaje y lo
caliente’ ” (68). By juxtaposing her masturbation with the song, the text em-
phasizes the negative connotations placed on female sexual satiation and
desire as inscribed by the male gaze that relegates the feminine body to
being just a piece of meat to be butchered. Song, therefore, also allows for
a coding of feminine erotics in a tangential plane to the demands and ex-
pectations of heteronormativity, even within the act of “reconocimiento,”
which implies a refashioning of the terrain, or at least seeing firsthand what
is there and not being solely guided by the homosocial’s perspective.
The use of popular bolero music as an OST to La última noche que pasé
contigo promulgates a literary tradition in the Caribbean that began with
authors attempting to subvert dominant writings and writers. In keeping
with this movement, Montero creates an epistemology of desire and sexu-
ality emanating from the bolero that cannot be found within the linguistic
constraints of narrative fiction. She situates a separate register that includes
the sociocultural value of each song in addition to the semantic dialogisms
they create when sung in tandem with the erotics of the plot. The writer’s
resourcefulness echoes Judith Butler’s thesis that “desire is manufactured
and forbidden as a ritual symbolic gesture whereby the juridical model ex-
ercises and consolidates its own power” (76). The idea of a juridical model,
however, confines the analysis of power to what is prohibited and held as
taboo within the system, without necessarily unmasking the actual op-
erations of power. Without delving into a political critique of Butler’s
assertion, however, we can still appreciate her putting into a dynamic the
source and perpetuator of desire. The legislative branch, so to speak, of this
model is language as it is socialized and permissive of certain desires and
not others. The use of popular song—semantics outside the constraints of
power systems of objective language and high culture—can be considered
a strategy of subversion, demonstrating how narrative fiction can engage
(through multiple layerings and nonstated actions) in a representation of all
that is taboo, unsaid, and secret, unveiling our own sexualities to be vulner-
able, social, and phantasmic constructs.
 chapter seven

Homosocial Dynamics
and the Spatiality
of Seduction

Alfredo Bryce Echenique’s El huerto de mi amada is emblematic of the ver-

satility of a writer often and controversially linked to the commercially vi-
able umbrella term of the Latin American Boom.1 Focusing on the class
struggles in Peru and Latin America as a whole, Bryce Echenique has at-
tempted through fiction to expose the machinations of gender, power, and
race in an increasingly unequal context. In an attempt to emphasize this
point, César Ferreira observes, “Bryce es uno de los grandes cronistas de la
burguesía peruana . . . todas las novelas de Bryce examinan la psicología
del sujeto desclasado, antiheroico y solitario” (75). Bryce Echenique, like
many authors discussed in part 1 of this volume, works in the tradition of
Peruvian contemporaries who assign to the past an aura of privilege, lend-
ing a melancholic tone to their narratives (Ortega 237) within a treatment
of extant crises and problems. As such, the present is seen in multiple rela-
tions to the past, never completely severed as an epistemological other.
El huerto de mi amada is the story of an upper-class Peruvian youth, Car-
los Alegre, who falls in love with the much older and much fawned- over
Natalia de Larrea. The two escape his bourgeois house in Lima to hide
from his family in her country estate, where they are harassed by his father
and by the men who want to bed Natalia. The novel recounts Carlitos’s love
for her, his adventures with the social-ladder-climbing Céspedes twins, and
his final and expected reintegration into Limeñan society when he leaves
Natalia and marries Melanie (an “approved” partner) after becoming a
world-renowned doctor. Julio Ortega observes that El huerto de mi amada
“es la novela más novelesca de Bryce” (242), given that the author eludes

80
 Homosocial Dynamics and the Spatiality of Seduction · 81

including himself within its pages, and that its plot is purely novelistic. The
critic goes on to comment that the novel “ha adelgazado sus referentes a
unos cuantos tópicos suficientes . . . que se acompaña de pocos personajes,
perfilados por la comedia social esperpéntica y vodivilesca” (242). The novel
conforms to Ortega’s labeling of a social comedy, because there is no room
for tragedy within the diegesis, and the amorous comedy ends with mar-
riage, though Bryce Echenique’s pairs are distinctly alternate conjurations
of what is permitted under the social code of power.
The novel begins with an epigraph by Felipe Pinglo (1899–1936), the
father of Peruvian música criolla and a proponent of the vals criollo. Pinglo’s
music has continued to be popular as Los Panchos, Julio Jaramillo, Pe-
dro Infante, and Julio Iglesias, among others, have continued to interpret
his music. Included in the epigraph are quotes from the French politician
Antoine Barnave, the Duchess of Angoulême, the German philosopher Im-
manuel Kant, the English playwright William Shakespeare, and the
French writer Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle). This gathering of eclectic
thinkers and writers immediately following Pinglo’s lyrics suggests a re-
drawing of the social and temporal concerns of the novel, as what initially
seems a local novel about class renegotiation is really a textual exploration
of more universal themes. Here we see an evolution of the author away from
the local and territorial to the universal and deterritorial, as the plot and its
characters can be dislocated from Lima and replaced by any variation of
cultural and spatial referents. The novel, then, can be considered within a
trajectory of contemporary fiction that moves towards the deterritorial, even
if the diegesis takes place within defined geo-parameters.
Bryce Echenique’s reference to Kant is not fortuitous: Stendhal quotes
the same passage in the epigraph to the second part of his 1830 naturalist
novel Le rouge et le noir, which chronicles the life of a young man, Julien
Sorel, who attempts to rise beyond his low-class social upbringing yet ulti-
mately fails at the hands of his own passions. The placement of both quotes
in the epigraph to El huerto de mi amada emphasizes the intertextuality of
Bryce Echenique’s novel, as his tale of 1950s Limeñan society recycles
the social travails of a nineteenth- century French youth. Bryce Echenique
also creates a physical point of union between Stendhal and El huerto de
mi amada in the Kantian quote, but this is a point of contact that is only
privy to an active reader willing to trace connections that are seemingly at
first not there, akin to the hermeneutics of music within the literary (and
filmic).
The first layer of intertextuality, which is to say the connection between
the greater works of these snippets in the epigraph and the novel itself, is
 82 · Chapter 7

territorialized in the spatial praxis of Pinglo’s song. Though the novel

attempts a movement away from national boundaries (Peru) and across
temporal frameworks, it paradoxically situates the narrative alongside the
parallel text of Pinglo’s music, which begins innocently with the lyrical
enunciator directing the listener toward the orchard of his lover, where “un
florestal que pone tonos primaverales / en la quietud amable que los arbus-
tos dan.” There is a “here” and a “there” not necessarily situated within a
national space but intrinsic to the characterization of the lover and the
beloved, as though space—both physical and semantic—is ontological to
the subject. At the very beginning of the novel, through the musical refer-
ent, we can begin to underline how song as a narrative device traces a
spatial topology that resonates in personal identity markers, such as gender
in this particular case.
The second stanza begins with the subject lamenting, “allá dónde he
dejado lo mejor de mi vida / ahí mis juramentos vagando han de flotar /
porque ese ha sido el nido de amargos sufrimientos / y allí la infame supo
de mi amor renegar.” The suffering of the subject in the song is illustrated
at the beginning of Carlitos’s affair with Natalia: immediately after their
dance, the other men attending the party scuffle with Carlitos, leaving him
to flee with his mature lover to her abode outside the (typical) spatially de-
marcated Masculine space of the urban. The rest of Pinglo’s song contin-
ues with the theme of love lost and the lover spurned, which breaks with
the paradisiacal tone set in the first stanza and in the first few pages of the
novel. The second stanza to Pinglo’s tune succeeds in mapping out a tex-
tual terrain that establishes a spatial referent to the self, because far from
the subject—in the huerto—does his happiness reside, creating a before and
an after (in temporal terms and spatial movements).
The congruency evidenced between the lyrical and the narrated text is
akin to the use of music in Mayra Montero’s La última noche que pasé con-
tigo, where the artifice of music functions as a cinematic soundtrack that
creates plural levels of reception and interpretation. But music also plays a
direct diegetic role in Bryce Echenique’s piece, as it is through Stanley
Black’s “Siboney,” and with a pinch of magical realism, that the sultry
Natalia enchants Carlitos.2 With the first notes of the song, “Carlitos había
sentido algo sumamente extraño y conmovedor, explosivo y agradabilísimo,
la sensación católica de un misterio gozoso” (19). We revert here to the
familiar magical realist plot point where a character experiences a life-
altering realization triggered by a mysterious and unexplained event. The
song ends as Carlitos leaves his room to find the source of the music in the
garden, though he continues to feel the song in his ears and head,
 Homosocial Dynamics and the Spatiality of Seduction · 83

suggesting that though Black’s version of the song has ended, a further
intertextual relationship is still taking place, both with the song and with
magical narratives. The reader, through the lyrical register, is harkened to
the generic mode and must read the protagonist’s coming actions in the
vein of its literary antecedents.
The aesthetic mode foreshadows Carlitos’s entrance to a party hosted
by his father in the garden, while we expect, and even almost request, a
life-altering event to occur. The homosocial mass of doctors at the func-
tion is characterized by societal position and faith in science, which is
placed in an apical position related to other masculinities in the text. These
men are cultured, foreign (in the case of the Argentine cardiologist Dante
Salieri), and well-spoken, evocative of Marcos Burgos as the Masculine
domestic dictator in Rivera Garza. As the divorcée Natalia and Carlitos
get swept away by their passions, the cardiologist destroys the “Siboney”
record in anger, suggesting that the song and its romantic affects (as pro-
duced by the magical narrative mode) are incongruent with the homoso-
cial body that rules Lima. Who is this young gallant and what right
does he have to sweep away the female object of many passions present
at the party? The name of the chief antagonist is not fortuitous, as Bryce
Echenique sustains the musical interlude by alluding to Mozart’s prime
enemy, Antonio Salieri.
The breaking of the record, furthermore, establishes the market of mas-
culinities within the microcosmic space of the garden. The protagonist,
for example, is distinguished from the Masculine when Natalia calls him a
“negro bandido . . . negro atrevido, pero negro ricotón, sí, eso sí” (24), erot-
icizing and, in a way, desubjectifying the protagonist by comparing him to
the animalized African male, as is the case in Montero’s La última noche
que pasé contigo. This textual coding of the male body within the socio-
structural market of Masculinity is highlighted when, in a drunken rage,
Salieri attacks Carlitos, exclaiming that Natalia belongs to him. This
challenge is mounted in juxtaposition to the dance between Carlitos and
Natalia, a product of a kinetic interchange that unbalances the stasis of
Masculine gender control; Salieri’s challenge, then, is a reassertion of
the hierarchy salient in the spatial and interpersonal binds that maintain
patriarchal systems. The dance and the song—key elements of musicality
in the text—create a spatial and diegetic exclusion of the subordinate
masculinity from the scientific, modernizing homosocial. After a series of
skirmishes, Natalia and Carlitos manage to escape, with the latter success-
fully fending off his four attackers (the Argentine cardiologist, the doctors
Alejandro Palacios and Jacinto Antúnez, and Senator Fortunato Quiroga).
 84 · Chapter 7

These men of science occupy and perpetuate a discursive space and au-
thority that promulgate notions of hygiene and modernity, situating an
imagined national as an extension of Western modernity. Such a political
ideology is tangible in several contexts of the Global South, but perhaps
more so in Peru, where public intellectuals such as Vargas Llosa have openly
questioned the role of native cultures within the modernization process;
the latter, of course, is defined along precepts set by the Global North. The
last member of the novel’s homosocial group is described in more detail
than the doctors, as he is a “solterón de oro, senador ilustre, y primer
contribuyente de la república” (27). The text here playfully suggests that
even within the Masculine, there may be elements of subterfuge, as the
“solterón” implies a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of the character’s
nonheteronormative subjectivity: solteróness is a euphemism for homo-
sexuality, though the character maintains a position within the dominant
group through the euphemism and an adherence to the other qualities of
the homosocial. Quiroga, for example, follows Salieri’s naming of Natalia
as “la puta” (35), negating her as a (named) person yet reaffirming her
commodification as an economic entity that is for sale and that can be
bartered between the members of the homosocial.
After Natalia and Carlitos’s escape to the diegetic and lyrical space of
the huerto, Natalia seeks medical help for Carlitos because he suffers sev-
eral wounds from the skirmish with the doctors and the senator. Readers
pause as the spatial referent activates schemata that interrelate Pinglo’s vals
to the text, and we remember that the huerto is the other space that char-
acterizes a narrative of division, a before and after within the plot. The
young doctor who attends to the protagonist’s wounds belongs to the homo-
social group of Salieri and the others, and he partakes in the objectifica-
tion of and assumed ownership of nonheteronormative women, as he de-
scribes how he saw Natalia “escandalosamente desnuda” (56). She is not
really naked but discursively disrobed by the member of the Masculine who
cannot bear for a female body to challenge its normative beliefs, practices,
and laws. The doctor explicates how her voice spurs arousal, “porque entre
una cosa y otra como si se fuera quitando prenda tras prenda y hasta con
música de ambiente” (56). Note here the inclusion of music as a key com-
ponent of the erotics of the female. He concludes his description of Nata-
lia by swearing, “por lo más sagrado que se le pone a uno la verga al palo
con solo verla y escucharla” (57). Also note here the emphasis on the penis
as signifier of the Masculine, as its rigidity in traditional terms defines the
orthodox homosocial that is really resistant to change. Her body as com-
modity is thus erected around the corporality of the Masculine, crafted and
 Homosocial Dynamics and the Spatiality of Seduction · 85

sensualized through the musical register to produce an almost haptic qual-

ity to her nudity. The effect of music here is to create a tactile relationship
between the reader and her flesh, to allow us access to her sinews and curves
through the sonic mapping of the musical.
The doctor belongs to an educated, urban group and gains Masculine
authority “de la vida política y económica del país y la autoridad dentro de
la familia” (Fuller 56). The text effectively centers itself on this market of
competing masculinities, as the protagonist, in contrast, is described to be
effeminate, naïve, and infantile. This dynamic of masculinities, akin to the
system of gendered bodies and positions put into play in Nadie me verá llorar,
implicates society and the nation within the inscription of micro-metonymic
bodies.3 The political institution is explicitly involved in El huerto de mi
amada as Fortunato Quiroga becomes the country’s president. His office
is composed of “[una] elegancia suprema. Muebles franceses. Mucho oro
y mucha plata por todas partes. Lámparas maravillosas con las bombillas
más poderosas del mundo” (64). A tracing of the lines of power that ema-
nate from Quiroga connect him unequivocally with the homosocial and
its respective market of bodies. After sitting at his presidential desk for the
first time, he announces that he will not work until Lucas, his henchman,
kills “la parejita esa” (64). From this we can surmise two things: first, that
the Masculine homosocial as embodied by this specific historical group
must acknowledge and eliminate challengers as a means to perpetuate its
hegemony; and second, that the paralysis to function faced by Masculine
character suggests that the challenger, Carlitos, in this situation is more
than a simple oppositional entity.
Sedgwick, basing her ideas on earlier work by René Girard, argues that
the expression of desire within the homosocial group is often through the
use of violence (176), which seemingly corroborates Quiroga’s hiring of a
hitman to kill Natalia and Carlitos. The statesman instructs his hench-
men to “[meter]le todos los plomazos que pueda, en [su] nombre. A ella,
en cambio, un solo balazo, y en el corazón” (64). The use of violence as a
mediating language among the members of the homosocial (and its chal-
lengers) is necessary because the bonds that unite men, that is, the latent
threads of homosexual desire, cannot be specified or acknowledged. Vio-
lence, therefore, becomes the de facto language of a group that cannot
verbalize their own transgressive desires and drives, though in the case of
Quiroga, it is telling that he hires a proxy to do so. More telling are the
instructions he gives, as perhaps the drive to destroy Carlitos identifies
him as the true object of the president’s passions and not the woman, to
whom he piously designates a single bullet. Perhaps his own violence
 86 · Chapter 7

would reveal something to the group that would then remove him from
hegemony?
This group of men in El huerto de mi amada is importantly situated in,
and ontological to, the urban center (away from Pinglo’s huerto) that seems
to diffuse into every voice of the narrative. The urban is foundational to
the homosocial, so much so that immediately after Natalia and Carlitos
make their escape, Salieri repeatedly calls her a whore: “como si empezara
a despertar de la peor pesadilla de su vida y estuviese completamente solo
y muy adolorido en medio de un hermoso jardín” (35).4 The noncity (the
garden) to the Masculine is a hellish proposition, because it is away from
the purported civility of the city that the barbaric and nonheteronormative
gain credibility. The urban is left behind in the plot, as in their escape to
the huerto, Natalia observes:

Atrás habían ido quedando barrios enteros, distritos como San Isidro,
Miraflores, Barranco, ahora que ya estaban llegando a Chorrillos y torcían
nuevamente, en dirección a Surco. Ahí se acababa la ciudad de Lima y
empezaban las haciendas y la carretera al sur . . . La idea le encantaba,
le parecía simbólica: los distritos y barrios residenciales en los que vivía
toda aquella gente, todo aquel mundo en el que había pasado los peores
años de su vida, siempre juzgada, criticada, envidiada, tan solo por ser
quien era y poseer lo que poseía, y por ser Hermosa, también, para qué
negarlo, si es parte de la realidad y del problema, parte muy impor-
tante, además; esos malditos San Isidros y Miraflores, y qué sé yo, iban
quedando atrás. (39)

The spatial trajectory in the narrative toward the noncity is preceded by a

discussion of music, as Carlitos casually calls Natalia’s home “el huerto
de mi amada” (39). She informs him that the song is an old vals criollo
(the same song that appears in the novel’s epigraph). Carlitos also wants
to listen to “Siboney” when they get to the house, calling it “nuestra can-
ción” (39); more importantly, it is a lyrical testament and vestige of their
usurpation of the homosocial. It is by reference to Pinglo’s song that Natalia
comes to ponder the power structures extant in the city, as she juxtaposes
the rurality of the huerto with the phallogocentricity of the urban space.
By resorting to music as a narrative trigger, the author arranges a neces-
sary pondering of the title to Pinglo’s song and the novel: as they approach
the country house, Natalia asks Carlitos if he knows what the idiomatic “llev-
arse a alguien al huerto” means. She goes on to explain that “llevarse a
alguien al huerto quiere decir engañar a alguien. Y, actualmente, mucha
 Homosocial Dynamics and the Spatiality of Seduction · 87

gente usa la expresión solo con el sentido de llevarse a alguien a la cama

con engaños” (40). Carlitos’s response is unsurprising given his naïveté,
as he exalts her to “[darle] el huerto. . . . Todo el huerto que pued[a]” (40).
If we were to read between the lines, the change that is noted between the
first stanza and the subsequent verses in Pinglo’s song comes into play in
this scene, as Natalia suggests that the huerto is not as idyllic as it may first
seem. The thematic spatial separation between stanzas is furthered in this
scene when Natalia hopes that “Lima nos olvide” (41), distancing the events
and characters of the huerto from the Masculine cityscape. Paradoxically,
however, the two characters later engage in a romantic and carnal relation-
ship that has them erotically recolonizing the city with their kisses and
trysts as they return several times to Lima. It is, ironically, also in the city
during one of these exercises of spatial redefinition that Carlitos meets his
future wife, Melanie. The spatiality of gender that the text evokes through
the musical intertext is poignant, as through his return to Lima, away from
the huerto, the protagonist slowly reintegrates into the behaviors and ex-
pectations of the Masculine (he begins to study medicine, for example).
Space, after all, is gendered and genderizing; the subject comes into being
in a specific space that is an agglomeration of multiple discursive lines that
code for specific relations and nodes of power. The subject inadvertently
enters in and subscribes to a spatial contract of gender, wherein actions,
expressions, and belongings are intrinsically linked to specific coded
topologies.
The gendered nature to space and the city is addressed in the political
developments surrounding Quiroga. The old locus of gendered power
within the cityscape is challenged by a new participant in the market, Ru-
decindo Quispe Zapata, a man with indigenous roots from the province,
whose pedigree is unclear: “nadie sabía muy bien de dónde había salido . . .
[ni] si terminó su secundaria, si realizó algún estudio superior . . . no era
miembro del Club Nacional . . . tampoco había viajado a Europa en el
Reina del Pacífico” (230).5 More importantly, he does not have real or sym-
bolic ties to the spaces of the Masculine, such as Europe or specific social
clubs. Keeping in mind the new political tone of the capital, we observe
how Carlitos’s once subordinate and rejected masculinity has now become
a competing strain within the metropolis that has accepted Quispe Zapata
within its milieu. The protagonist cannot assume the apical position of his
father’s generation, though, especially not through the control of public in-
stitutions, because his stay in Lima is truncated by the rise of Quispe Za-
pata, who metonymically represents the political, economic, and social
changes produced in Peru at the end of the 1960s. Quispe Zapata is a new
 88 · Chapter 7

political player in the textual Lima and understandably scorned by the

members of the old guard. His rise to fame and power leaves the scientific
homosocial incredulous, as he neither belongs to the old aristocracy nor is
educated. The plot point coincides with the democratic rule of Fernando
Belaúnde Terry and with the military coup by General Juan Velasco
Alvarado in 1968. The former represents in many ways the elite, Euro-
pean, and educated class that the Alegre family belongs to, as he was re-
sponsible for establishing the Banco de la Nación and for developing key
infrastructure—a tangible symbol of centralized progress—during his
tenure as president.6
The 1960s in Peru, following a larger trend seen on the continent, were
also characterized by the rise of Marxist revolutionary guerrillas, such as
the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, which later splintered into
the Partido Socialista Revolucionario and the Movimiento Revoluciona-
rio Túpac Amaru. These groups were responsible for the proliferation of
guerrilla-style protests and violence in the country, which would serve as a
harbinger for the Partido Comunista del Perú, more popularly known as
Sendero Luminoso, which I treat in more detail in the chapter 11 discus-
sion of Jaime Bayly’s El cojo y el loco (including how Bayly writes a local
masculinity to confront transnational positions). Their missions and
manifestos advocated for greater democracy and transparency, and for an
equitable redistribution of national resources that would facilitate the
reintegration of indigenous and lower classes into society. Though
Velasco Alvarado’s government was an illegal one (brought in under a
coup), it did foster a spirit of social and economic redistribution commonly
known as Peruanismo, restructuring the centralized model of progress.
The figure of Rudecindo Quispe Zapata as coming from a poor, non-
European heritage and challenging the power- gendered status quo can
be read, then, as a fictive pastiche of Velasco Alvarado.
The old guard is estranged from Lima by these changes—Carlitos’s
father closes his practice and moves the family to San Francisco in the
United States, the natural metonymic space for nonleftist policies. Carlitos
and Natalia are also displaced as they live the next seven years in Paris,
where Carlitos becomes an award-winning researcher and doctor. The shift
away from the metropolis resonates in Carlitos’s masculinity, as he is not a
power-wielding social phallus like his father or Salieri in Lima before him;
instead he is described as an absentminded scientist, decidedly unauthor-
itarian in demeanor. But this personal characterization reflects a larger
change in the position of power and authority held by the European man
of science and letters that is metonymized by the homosocial group of
 Homosocial Dynamics and the Spatiality of Seduction · 89

Alegre, Salieri, Quiroga, and the rest. This group loses its power as a result
of a “democratización de los valores” (Fuller 56) and changes in the politi-
cal climate, suggesting that the Masculine is evolutionary and defined by
contained sociocultural and historical factors.
The relationship between Carlitos and Natalia is also affected by time
as she begins to feel inadequate and too old to be with him. If “Siboney”
triggered their love, then its replacement cements the end of their relation-
ship. While attending a conference in Baltimore, Carlitos, now known as
Carlos Alegre (a naming reference to his maturity and stability in a mascu-
line position), is arrested for leaving the premises with a radio belonging
to the dormitory in which he is staying. The young Carlitos, who had
been entranced by the maracas of “Siboney,” is now enthralled by Ludwig
van Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, a piece known for its usage of an
Austrian hymn and for its rhythmic balance. We learn after he’s arrested
and then cleared by the police that he has similarly taken radios in Mu-
nich and Zurich, as though his person is lost without an accompanying
classical soundtrack. The OST, after all, accompanied all transgressive
actions in his youth, and its loss signals a yearning for a previous life or posi-
tion within the hierarchies of power.
The character’s fall from sanity and nonheteronormativity is triggered
by the displacement of the vals and “Siboney” from his diegetic soundtrack:
“Natalia de Larrea hace el amor frenéticamente con un muchacho casi
treinta años menor que ella” (279). Their affair comes to a crescendo when
Natalia throws him out of the house and away from the spatial referents
created by the musical register, away from the metaphoric huerto that once
guided him to happiness. Recovering in the hospital, Carlos is reunited with
the young Melanie Vélez Sarsfield, a girl he tutored while in medical school
and who is more appropriate for his social stature. She is the polar opposite
of Natalia and completes the protagonist’s reterritorialization into the spa-
tial center of power in Lima. Natalia, however, comments, “yo siempre dije
que Carlitos terminaría casándose con un hombre” (286), suggesting that
Carlos’s true return is a regression into the homosocial and not as a com-
peting masculinity in the local gender market, as she slyly hints at the ho-
moerotics of belonging to the group. The protagonist’s masculine journey
is a circular one, guided by and in tune with the text’s particular OST.
Perhaps the most important factor to take away from the reading of mas-
culinities in the novel is the studied spatiality of the city and specific ter-
ritories in the writing of gendered bodies. Space is both gendered and
genderizing, as the Masculine city and nationscape are, in tandem with
the musical intertext, fundamental in understanding the homosocial.
 90 · Chapter 7

This spatial movement away from the polis and the power structures of
hegemonic masculinity permits a realignment and maturity of the pro-
tagonist’s gender identity, especially in the face of changing socioeco-
nomics. If anything, then, the novel can be read as an exemplar of how
masculinities evolve and are sensitive to key crises; after all, Carlos and not
Carlitos now occupies the place of hegemony that he once challenged.
 chapter eight

Franz Galich’s Managua,

Rock City

From a schematic standpoint—and as traditional Latin American music

roots the pages within a national imaginary—the use of music in Bryce
Echenique’s El huerto de mi amada creates a topology of masculinities that
enables the author to explore further relevant questions of identity and
history. The other novels studied in this part also represent historical and
deterritorialized diegeses and as such employ music within an imperme-
able textual space that houses an examination of the many matrices of
power, gender, and race from a relativist perspective, historicized by the
moment narrated in the plot. But what happens when this constraint is
removed and the narrative is rooted in the present and within a tangible
social reality? What becomes of this narratological strategy when the text
reacts to an increasingly globalized world where jumping borders is an
everyday reality and necessity? How does music compensate for the writ-
ing of these glocal masculinities, especially when the familiar terrains of
(urban) civilization and (rural) barbarism are blurred by polynodal cityspaces
and nonbound urbanities?
The importance of music in constructing a Central American regional
ethos is well known and chronicled in a twentieth century rife with crisis
after crisis. Beatriz Cortez argues that “durante la segunda mitad del siglo
veinte y a medida que se fueron desarrollando los procesos revolucionarios
en Centroamérica, la música pasó a desempeñar un papel importante en
la resistencia a los procesos colonizadores de la música popular norteam-
ericana, así como también en el reto a la construcción de la identidad na-
cional.” Though it was important in the dissemination of revolutionary

91
 92 · Chapter 8

movements (really as a substitute for the printed text, given the logistics of
distribution in guerrilla terrains, and to compensate for illiteracy among
many rural populations), its presence is perhaps most poignant when read
as a reaction to homogenizing processes. In Nicaragua, for example, music
is formulated in concordance with broader changes that are centralized in
the political and literary landscapes that are “no solamente . . . efectos de
la guerra, sino que también de las políticas neoliberales que han reforzado
la exclusión social y la marginación de las personas . . . han establecido el
predominio de la economía financiera y comercial sobre la productiva que
ha generado una cultura de consumo” (Ugarte).
From this tumultuous period of political ennui and social malaise, a
border-hopping (deterritorialized) author took up the task of understanding
and representing Central American society within the ashes of the sociopo-
litical revolutions of the 1970s. Born in Guatemala, Franz Galich spent
the greater part of his life living and working in neighboring Nicaragua.
His first novel, Huracán corazón del cielo (1995), deals with the 1976 earth-
quake that wreaked geological and social havoc in Guatemala as it laid bare
the many fissures between social groups and hierarchies in the country. His
latter work, including Managua, Salsa City (¡Devórame otra vez!) (2000)
and Y te diré quién eres (Mariposa traicionera) (2006), was the beginning of
an incomplete tetralogy of novels portraying a Nicaraguan society that is
bullet and poverty ridden by civil and economic wars.1 In the series is the
posthumous Tikal Futura: Memorias para un futuro incierto (2012), which
builds on the narrative worlds constructed in the two previous novels. There
is a marked move toward the outside, as the borders of the national and
the regional are contested in Managua and Mariposa, which culminates
in Tikal taking place in a dystopic future in a hard-to-identify place, vaguely
Guatemala, though one could argue that it takes place in any of the Cen-
tral American capitals. The author describes his work as not bound by phys-
ical borders, opining that “de alguna forma ya me he integrado al proceso
productivo nicaragüense pero prefiero hablar en términos generales de un
proyecto centroamericano, es decir de una literatura centroamericana”
(Martínez Sánchez). Part of this transspatial belonging (or perhaps more
accurately, unbelonging) can be seen symbolically in the author’s oeuvre
when characters and plot lines move between the boundaries of the given
text, existing polytemporally in multiple narrative diegeses. Characters in
one novel, whether principal or secondary, can reappear without warning
in another text, moving laterally and without restraint. We can thus col-
locate Galich among a group of peers, such as Horacio Castellanos
Moya, Rafael Menjívar Ochoa, and Rodrigo Rey Rosa, who propagate and
 Franz Galich’s Managua, Rock City · 93

perpetuate particular narrative universes that trespass the literary bounds

of their individual texts, deterritorializing, in a way, the traditional novel
from the printed page.
Galich (like his peers, though this list is by no means exhaustive) places
his narrative universe within “tiempos de la cólera neoliberal” (“Tanda”),
and in his writing, keeps in mind the migratory nature of literature and cul-
ture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.2 Y te diré quién
eres (Mariposa traicionera) differs from the other works studied and men-
tioned in this chapter in that it incorporates contemporary, globalized
popular music and not traditional tunes. The novel is the immediate
sequel to Managua, Salsa City, which recounts the meeting of the prosti-
tute La Guajira with the lower- class ex-Sandinista Pancho Rana. An anal-
ysis of Y te diré quién eres can only be contextualized by an initial probe
into the role of music and gender in Managua, Salsa City, as the later
text builds on the gendered constructions and interactions of Rana and La
Guajira and how they partake in a particular market and commodifica-
tion of masculinities.
The earlier text sets in motion an inquiry into the relationship between
the neoliberal episteme and masculinities, as it weaves a spider’s web of
male characters, factions, and political interests, with La Guajira sitting
in the middle as the black widow spider that ominously controls the fate of
the many men circling the plot. She is a common prostitute and the head
of a band of con men—former Contras—that operate out of a taxi. Her prey/
client, Pancho Rana, is the chauffeur of a rich family that has left their
house in the care of their employee as they travel to Miami on vacation;
note the common extraterritorial space of the United States as both a
symbol of a particular economic ideology and as a characterizational
space of particular social groups within the local (gendered) hierarchy. La
Guajira and Rana meet at La Piñata, a popular nightspot in Managua
where, hiding their true identities, the two become enveloped in a pas-
sionate game of seduction, dance, and music that leads them to Rana’s
house. Once within the affluent compound, a shoot- out ensues between
him, the con men, and two other opportunistic male assailants with de-
signs of robbing the house. The plot, though simple, is evocative of the
everyday social violence present in Central America, including the unex-
plained element (the two men) as a real danger in any politics of social and
urban security for the region.
Managua, Salsa City plays out through the desires felt by the two
protagonists as they trade control of their libidinous urges and the text’s
narrative voice. Galich employs a “popular, oral style—reminiscent of
 94 · Chapter 8

testimonio—in which both the narrator and the characters express them-
selves” (Kokotovic 20). (Like several novels by Castellanos Moya, the
oral style lends the reader towards a tacit critique of testimonio, though I
do not engage in any sustained thesis here.) The novel is set in a dark and
somber Managua that is written through what María del Carmen Caña
Jiménez calls an aesthetics of disgust (“El asco” 220), detritus, and decom-
position.3 Galich’s capital is intimately connected to sex: its heat is described
as emanating from a collection of multiple unseen vaginas, decentering
the traditionally Masculine urban city-text. The dark city evokes disillu-
sionment with the politics of the last quarter of the twentieth century. We
can, in fact, read Galich’s Managua as a spatial and affective critique of
neoliberalism and its collateral damage, evocative of the diarrheal meta-
phor and stain seen in Lemebel and Ramírez. The neoliberal episteme is
microinscribed onto local bodies, as narrow individual interests govern the
gendered subjects in Galich’s text. Money and its gain drive the characters
within the market as they jockey for social and sexual position, even
though they can never really escape belonging to an impoverished scav-
enger class that is maintained as the substrate for the rich bosses vacation-
ing in Miami. Most important in this market, the financial impulse of
gain is superior to the libidinal impulse of penetration, as one of La Gua-
jira’s henchmen notes: “Era más importante la alianza económica” (45)
than any sexual prowess or conquering.
This consumerist culture is further reflected in the textual depictions
of the body, as the novel succeeds in both animalizing and commoditiz-
ing male and female specimens. The examples of the animalized male
abound: La Guajira’s henchmen display the pack mentality of wolves,
Pancho’s last name is Rana, the lone male assailant who survives the final
shoot- out is described as being rat faced, and so on. A male gaze similarly
objectifies the female body as Rana and others deconstruct the curves
and mounds of the female form according to their own personal desires,
emphasizing each corporal site not as part of a whole but as individual
semantic erogenous zones primed for the consumption of the butcher
homosocial.
Music is intrinsic to the mapping of these matrices of bodies, economies,
and gender, as popular salsa music provides the OST to the exposition of
masculine desire through a detailed and almost ceremonial courtship that
passes between Pancho and La Guajira.4 This courtship involves a lyrical
dynamism (created by Galich’s strong regionalist diction) and a dancing
ritual that is theatric in its performance and reliance on a set of preestab-
lished gender cues, where the male seemingly negotiates the female’s body
 Franz Galich’s Managua, Rock City · 95

to the tune of salsa in an attempt to cajole and capture her in his libidinal
trap, though in reality, La Guajira is the one who is really laying a trap for
Pancho in the form of her awaiting henchmen.
Their dance and the act of seduction are choreographed to the di-
egetic playing of the salsa tune “Devórame otra vez.” The lyrics to the
song suggest an experiential and haptic approximation to sex that is sen-
sual in its failure to establish a strict ontological base for desire as the
bodies within the song are systematically devoured. In a sense, sex and
penetration revert to the objectification of the corporal under the butcher
homosocial:

Devórame otra vez, ven devórame otra vez,

Ven castígame con tus deseos más

Que mi amor lo guardé para ti

Ay ven devórame otra vez,

Ven devórame otra vez

Que la boca me sabe a tu cuerpo

Desesperan mis ganas por ti.

The first verses of the song introduce the courtship between Rana and La
Guajira, and Galich’s transcription of the extradiegetic lyrics, that is, the
nonfictive song, are inaccurate, suggesting that the words printed are in-
dicative of a diegetic register and not an overlying OST track that provides
ambience to the narrative. Perhaps what is written of the song is what the
characters erroneously identify as the lyrics? The narrative meshes Pancho
Rana’s thoughts with the song lyrics, creating a tangible association be-
tween the erotics of both the novel and the lyrics. By alternating the sing-
ing of the song between the interior musings of both principal characters,
the association reconfigures the strata of power that previously held the
female to a position of subservience and consumption by the homosocial;
the song, after all, eludes gender identifiers so that the enunciator may be
male or female. It is as if only through the lyrical intertext and subregister
can competing masculinities and femininities challenge the rules of the
Masculine market. The desecration of the body is not a one-way process
in the song, for the subject is also guilty of consuming the other, as his/her
mouth tastes of the lover. Note the emphasis on the mouth as a corporal site
 96 · Chapter 8

of enunciation and subjectification, repeating itself as a locus of challenge

and resistance. Its dialogic and symbolic position is strengthened when
La Guajira refers to her own orifices as “mis tres bocas” (37), thereby rede-
fining the vagina and the anus along a lyrical understanding and inscription
of the body, as they too can now sing or locate the musical intertext—they
too can now consume, actively, the male other.
Masculinities in the novel are written through several stereotypically
virile devices and prostheses, such as the automobile and the assault weapon.
Owning, displaying, and using these objects is a simple strategy for creat-
ing masculine identities. Rana and the group of bandits are thus crafted
along a singular axis that makes them interchangeable entities. That being
said, they are contrasted with the two assailants who join the onslaught
on Rana’s residence. These two delinquents (who do not have any role in
the plot to rob Rana) are representative of a hybridized Spanglish-
speaking masculinity that has lived in the United States and has now re-
turned to the area, products of the civil and economic warscapes that
have preyed on the region. Their linguistic traits are noticeably juxta-
posed to the very localized diction and idiom of the other men, as they
mix with English gestures toward the predatory Global North; they are,
effectively, masculine symptoms of the neoliberal episteme, predatory
and opportunistic in their attack. The two assailants are furthermore re-
moved from the aesthetics of virility that Galich highlights in writing
competing local masculinities, as they are described to be rodent-like
criminals who lack ties to the homosocial bonds that are vestiges of the
guerrilla wars.
On a symbolic level, the novel ends with the seemingly fatalistic recon-
ciliation between the competing political (and local) masculinities, in
bloodshed and mayhem as La Guajira’s gang is decimated and Pancho is
taken for dead. There is, however, a separate sphere of masculinities that
Galich constructs in this ending, as one of the Spanglish speakers kidnaps
La Guajira and removes her from the economy previously structured around
the ex-guerrillas. The sun begins to rise over Managua as the prostitute and
the rat-faced assailant leave on a motorcycle. An extrapolation of the sexu-
alized couple onto the imagining of the nation is not out of place in these
pages; Galich suggests a bleak future for the region, as the prized feminine
commodity is unattainable for local masculinities, captured instead by the
neoliberal position.5 What the novel suggests, furthermore, is that local
markets of gender are no longer enough to set the stage for the dialectics of
the Masculine and that a transnational and transterritorial theater of mas-
culinities is instead needed.
 Franz Galich’s Managua, Rock City · 97

I am drawing a separation here between the market and the theater of

masculinity. This theater, in contrast to the market, is dominated by sub-
national actors who perform and practice macrosocial/economic/political
processes that, in turn, inscribe on them subjective positionalities that im-
plicate a global(izing) discourse. The former—that is, the market—situates
specific local relations and power struggles (as in Nadie me verá llorar or
Tengo miedo torero), whereas the latter is a symbolic and real move into the
global, where masculine bodies lose territorial links, are ephemeral and un-
anchored in movement, and represent the very process of deterritorial-
ization. In the theater of masculinity, subnational bodies perform larger
processes as part of their performance of individual gender, cementing
onto the body an image of the communal body in flux. The rat-faced villain
can be seen as representing or performing the Global North in enforcing
an episteme of neoliberalism, as the foreign body that seizes local com-
modities (and bodies).
Written as a sequel, but perhaps also as a response to Managua, Salsa
City, Y te diré quién eres (Mariposa traicionera) picks up the aftermath of
the shoot- out and the escape of La Guajira with El Cara de Ratón. Implau-
sibly, Pancho Rana is found, close to death, by the police, who try to make
sense of the attack. The novel develops Rana’s search for La Guajira across
the region—that is, not solely in Managua—and now involves several
homosocial groups, such as the police, headed by Captain Anastasio Cerna,
and the equally homosocial press, led by Parménides Aguilar. Note the re-
currence of the sociopolitical bodies of the Masculine that Ramírez
demythifies in Margarita as Galich now enters into a broader critique of
gendered power systems (as opposed to simply creating a market of com-
peting bodies, as in Managua).
Mariposa revisits the scatological topographies of neoliberalism as it pres-
ents a city where “el calor sube hasta el delirio y la gente camina como si
acabaran de llegar al Infierno” (7). Galich quickly summarizes the events
from the previous book with quick cuts between scenes and the use of an
occasional flashback or two to get the reader on pace with the plot, mark-
ing a stark departure from the lyrical, baroque style of Salsa City. The
sequel instead carves out and emphasizes the author’s unique narrative
universe. The author opens the novel aware of this process and with a note
of caution: “Cómplice lector, esta novela se puede leer de varias formas,
huelga decirlo: como documento histórico o sociológico. Pero la mejor
forma es como si se tratara de una película made in Hollywood” (6). By
hinting at the possibility of a written text being read as a sequence of cel-
luloid film, the note emphasizes the role of the OST as a titular and
 98 · Chapter 8

epistemological referent in shaping and reading the erotics of its gendered

bodies.
The note does not stop there, however, but cajoles the reader to not “es-
tablecer relaciones, semejanzas o comparaciones con países de América
Latina, Asia, África” (6). I would suggest that the warning in this second
part serves an opposite purpose in that the author actually wants us to move
beyond Central America and to understand and read the diegesis as repre-
sentative of any other context in the territories stained by the neoliberal
sphincter. We can thus see this warning to the reader as a linkage to the
neoliberal episteme: first, by asking us to view the cultural product through
the optic and aesthetics of a homogenizing Hollywood; and second, by su-
turing the plot and its bodies to a Global South, entrenched in implicit
economic warfare with the haves of the North. That being said, though,
Galich does not pretend to write a non– Central American work but rather
argues that the narrative can easily be relocated to similar sites of neolib-
eral carnage. The first sentence of chapter 1 sets the stage: “En Managua,
a las doce meridiano en punto, el calor sube hasta el delirio y la gente camina
como si acabaran de llegar al Infierno” (7).
The opening note and the subsequent first lines of the novel stress the
need for an active, involved reader who goes beyond the narrated plot,
diegetic elements, and seemingly closed set of spaces in the text. Such a
relationship between author, text, and reader is evident in the title of
the novel, which begins with the response to the idiomatic expression
“dime con quién andas, y te diré quién eres.” Of note here is the author’s
choice to use the second clause of the expression instead of the first,
thereby requiring the reader to reverse-engineer the phrase and not simply
complete it. Such a hermeneutics is active and complex and (like the link-
age between OST and narrative) forces the reader to move laterally across
semantic fields. This play on words is picked up in a discussion on corrup-
tion among the police forces in various Central American countries, with
a journalist beginning the expression but not finishing it, forcing an in-
volved reading of the text that contradicts the author’s note not to extrapo-
late fiction to reality. Readers are practically forced to finish the text’s
sentences, just as they are forced to look for tangible connections be-
tween the fictive geographies and real referents to the topography of
neoliberalism.
The reference in the introductory note to the North American media
goliath—in addition to the title’s use of “Mariposa traicionera”—brings
to our attention the importance of cultural imperialism as a by-product
of  neoliberal policy.6 The systems of popular music production and
 Franz Galich’s Managua, Rock City · 99

distribution are, after all, exemplars of cultural imperialism practices and

open market movements. Commenting on the operations of the North
American music industry, Ian Biddle and Vanessa Knights observe, “This
infrastructure is at once concerned to address itself to a maximum num-
ber of addresses within its ‘own’ territory and, at the same time, concerned
also to export that process of address maximization to territories ‘outside’
the West, until such a time (projecting itself into an infinitely occidental
future) as the distinction between being ‘inside’ and being ‘outside’ that
infrastructure will become ever more difficult to recognize” (7). The re-
flection being made here accentuates the role of identity and music within
the politics of location, stressing that current trends in the study of popular
culture have tended to sideline the “national (of nationalisms, nation-
states, national mythologizing narratives and other manifestations of
national or nationalist ideologies)” (1) in favor of a nonanchored infra-
structure, which itself is paradoxical because its structures are based in
the West.
Keeping in mind Slavoj Zizek’s and Fredric Jameson’s variations of the
Hegelian “vanishing mediator,” Biddle and Knights argue that the national
can be said to occupy the position of this term in relation to the syllo-
gism, thereby opening up “new critical trajectories for popular music
studies” (12).7 The idea of the national in Galich, however, is based on
the Pan- Americanism that the author advocates in his own writings on
identity and the role of literary and cultural criticism, and it opens to the
reader a critical, albeit tangential, interrogative of the relationship between
the lyrical and subjectivity.
What I am getting to here is that though the music of Maná does not
strictly adhere to what can be thought of as a national essence in Nicara-
gua, it does play out Galich’s musings on the idea of a Central American
identity that is born from the politico-economic disasters of the 1990s.8 This
is a tactical and fragile point of entry into the positioning of music as a cul-
tural referent in identity politics, as “the designation of ‘national essence’
to particular music is more problematic within modern nation states where
tensions between homogenous and heterogenous are often lived out”
(O’Flynn 22). In this era of cultural, political, and economic reconfigurations
of spatial and symbolic spheres and fields, the use of a popular Mexican band
by a Guatemalan/Nicaraguan writer in Y te diré quién eres (Mariposa
traicionera) does not seem so strange, since both cultural spaces are rele-
gated to the South.9 The novel does not solely reference one specific band
or genre, however; it includes diegetic references to Chente Fernández
(Mexico, ranchero), Daddy Yankee (Puerto Rico, reggaeton), Shakira
 100 · Chapter 8

(Colombia, pop), José Feliciano (Puerto Rico, rock), Carlos Santana (Mex-
ico, rock), La Suprema Corte (Colombia, salsa), and Julio Jaramillo (Ecua-
dor, pasillo), stressing that what is at hand is a relationing of the Latin South
versus the West.
The lyrical intertext is not simple adornment or a subtle reference to
paratextual erotics that cannot be linguistically expressed by narrative:
Galich makes explicit an intratextual association between the listened song
and the events of his textual movie. Upon listening to the lyrics “Ay mujer,
cómo haces daño, pasan los minutos cual si fuesen años . . . Mariposa
Traicionera” (51), Rana exclaims “¡no, no, mi Tamara no es mariposa
traicionera!” (51).10 The song is vigorously stirred and mixed into the nar-
rative’s centrifuge, and not allowed to simply linger over diegetic ears as an
alternative emotive plane of expression, as seen, for example, in Lemebel.
By connecting the song to La Guajira, Rana establishes a schema of inter-
relations between the lyrics and the narrative plot and its characters. The
reader, urged again to complete the unfinished refrain, must invariably
ask: if La Guajira is not the mariposa traicionera, then who is?
The novel renews the narrative spotlight on the detritus left by decades
of war and negative economic policy, focusing on the Central American
male bodies that are socially unadapted and lacking in direction. This lack
on the part of previously hegemonic aesthetics and bodies in Galich’s two
novels reflects José Toro-Alfonso’s assertion that hegemonic masculinity as
an organizational referent is no longer a viable discursive and experiential
position at the beginning of the twenty-first century in Latin America, and
that “si existe diversidad en la representación social de lo masculino enton-
ces es necesario explorar esas formas particulares en que muchos hombres
construyen y reconstruyen su hombría” (15). Toro-Alfonso, of course, works
with a neoliberal episteme, very much like that which lies behind the po-
etics of the two novels.
The linkage between the titular song and the plot is evoked prior to its
enunciation within the diegetic OST, when La Guajira seduces Cara de
Ratón in a motel room where she is being held hostage. She does so after
realizing that her body as a sexual commodity gives her the upper hand,
calling him a “Ratoncito” (22), making reference here to the verses “Yo soy
ratón de tu ratonera, trampa que no mata pero no libera, vivo muriendo
prisionero” in the song. The neoliberal male—a conjugation of Toro-
Alfonso’s new masculinities—is resemanticized as the prisoner and as the
subject of the song. At first glance, then, the lyrical subject is the male,
the “ratón” in the Guajira’s trap, set for prey in the first novel. But this
genderizing of subjects is flipped after the final shoot- out and the victory
 Franz Galich’s Managua, Rock City · 101

of the neoliberal male—his victory redistributes the axes of power, so much

so that the female is now the ratón being held. The narrative initially, then,
concretizes the genderizing of the mariposa as a feminine body by holding
the male (Cara de Ratón) as the now prisoner to La Guajira’s charms. This
shift seemingly contradicts Maná’s song, which is already genderized, as the
mariposa is explicated to be a woman: “Ay, mujer como haces daño. . . .
Ay, mujer que fácil eres.” The inclusion of the neoliberal Ratón then
breaks the semantic associations of the song with the diegesis, forcing
the reader to actively recalibrate systems of power that are left as pieces
of the puzzle waiting to be put together, akin to the parceling of the
idiom in the title. This association is strengthened by Rana refusing to
accept his lover as a traitor who has left him to die after the events of the
first novel. This subsequent refusal sets the tone for the writing of a theater
of competing positions, as the text (and by necessity, the reader) must do
the detective work to find the true identity of the traitorous butterfly.
The inversion of the association between woman and mariposa is em-
phasized when La Guajira takes Cara de Ratón’s virginity. She is not the
fluttering insect that is “fácil y ligera de quien te provoca” but is instead
the predatory aggressor that violently kisses and then mounts the “indefenso
Roedor” (53). Following this process of inversion or corporal resignification,
the gender of the lyrical butterfly becomes paramount in a reading that is
intimately related to the descriptive modifier traicionera and its lexeme
traicionar. The lyrical metaphor, at first glance, evokes a promiscuous lover,
though the neoliberal episteme posits that the root of Galich’s writing of
betrayal and treachery lies elsewhere and not within the intimate bound-
aries of the amorous. Perhaps betrayal—just like gender, music, and self in
the two novels—is also deterritorialized from the intimate to the public,
from the anchored to the free flowing. The aggressiveness of La Guajira
and her coding of the male as a victim of prey, in addition to Rana’s fervent
honoring of her reputation, disqualifies her from being the butterfly alluded
to in the song. If the prostitute in Y te diré quién eres is not the lyrical sub-
ject, then who is?
Aside from Rana’s exclamation upon first listening to the song, the text
reveals a narrative mise en abyme when the male protagonist ponders the
results of the Sandinista Revolution. Rana reflects that “lo que se comenzó
en el setenta no se ha concluido, esta chochada quedó incompleta, fue
traicionada, unos más otros menos, pero en fin, traidores” (61). He is of
course referring to the revolutionary government that soon fell into cor-
ruption and scandal, replicating (albeit with a social consciousness) the
injustices of the right-wing dictatorships that had preceded it. The
 102 · Chapter 8

Sandinistas and their failure to uphold the ideals of the revolution are seen
as an axis of the current discontent with the Left in Central America and
with the rise of the neoliberal state, because through their ineptitudes,
measures of austerity and privatization are voted in. What is of interest
here is Rana’s usage of the lexeme traicionar, as it begins to hint at a gen-
dered identity to the lyrically juxtaposed mariposa. The use of the verb is
not accidental, as there is a blossoming connection being made between
the historic past, the politico-economic present, and the gendered mascu-
line body as a locus of inscription for these processes and epistemes.
We quickly discover, in fact, that men are the only traitors in Galich’s
tale. Given that the novel plays a game of lyrical inversion to explore the
constructs of neoliberal identity in Central America, it comes as no sur-
prise that the author fashions groups of homosocial masculinities, such as
the police, the press, and the group of conniving politicians who are blamed
for ransacking the country, in a transnational theater of composite actors,
evocative of similar microstrategies seen in the new historical novels.
They are all traitors, though the reader is not at first privy to whom they
are betraying. Examples of this characterization abound: in an attempt to
recover La Guajira, Rana attacks a political gathering with improvised ex-
plosive devices, leading one politician to scream “¡traición! ¡traición!” (94).
The reader can ask here to whom the politician is referring, as Galich is
astutely vague. Are the traitors the ex- guerrillas now waging urban eco-
nomic warfare? Perhaps the text is referring to the political class that has
allowed these societies to be ransacked by foreign interests? Or maybe even
it is in reference to the corrupt forces of order that are unable to maintain
basic civility?
In a knowing wink toward the role of music as an intertext, the only
figures left standing, nonchalantly gathering their instruments after the
bombing, are a group of hired musicians that don’t stop playing their
instruments during the Hollywoodesque action sequence. We see here
further proof of the authorial play on words and the requirement of a
detective reader, as the musicians and music are directly linked to the title
of the novel and to the author’s note, as well as to the homosocial actor scream-
ing bloody treason, returning us to the question of who the (gendered) mari-
posas really are.
None of the male characters are exempt from the parameters of betrayal:
Pancho Rana is associated with the trope of the traitorous military male
when he suggests that he might be viewed as a turncoat for escaping with
jewels entrusted to him by a transnational mafioso known as El Jefe. Such
an association is jarring to a reader accustomed to identifying with the
 Franz Galich’s Managua, Rock City · 103

protagonist-as-hero schema, a schema thrown into flux in contemporary

Central American noir-type fiction that does not operate with ethical poles.
If the virile and seemingly righteous (in his pursuit to rescue La Guajira)
Rana is also characterized as a traitor, how does the relationship between
the verb traicionar and the mariposa develop?
The latter term is initially used to refer to prostitutes whom Rana consults
when looking for La Guajira. The lyrics of the rock song are evocative of
the furtive and flirtatious sex workers, though the reference is glossed over
when the “mariposas nocturnas” (63) are immediately after described as a
group of “abejitas” (63). The author swiftly capsizes the culturally attuned
idea of the gender-female butterfly in favor of a descriptor that better labels
them as economic bodies that actively commodify and barter with their
own bodies.
Such a renaming invariably returns the reader to the author’s repeated
usage of the verb traicionar with the different groups of men that perform
in the gendered theater. They, and not the prostitutes who “float” from car
to car, become associated with the lyrical imagery of the floating butterfly
that actively goes from lover to lover, and who passively opens her “alitas,
muslos de colores.” The syntactic association is played out in the case of
Cara de Ratón, who is arguably the greatest social and moral traitor when
he surprises La Guajira in the motel room where she is held hostage by
appearing in her clothing. The author cross- dresses the already feminized
male “con su calzoncito bikini, el brasier y sus zapatos de plataforma, y las
joyas” (70). Not only is he emasculated by his association with betrayal, but
he is further removed from the tenets of the Masculine through his dress-
ing as a female, an anthropomorphic conjugation of the “alitas de colores”
that characterize the furtive butterfly.
The playful and ever-changing construction and deconstruction of mas-
culinities in the novel work through the cultural reservoir of gender that
the Maná song mints, as Galich skillfully interrelates real gender positions
with symbolic gender representations. The implied plurality of mascu-
linities is, furthermore, mentioned in the earlier scene between Pancho
Rana and one of the “abejitas,” La Chobi-Xaquira, who is described by
the protagonist as having an attractive body, though she is a transvestite
prostitute. She coyly asks Rana what kind of a man he is: “¿Macho-menos
o macho-más, macho probado o macho-macho?” (64). This cataloging of
contemporary Central American masculinities is reinforced when Alexa, a
prostitute who is gifted to Pancho by the homosocial, shares with him her
knowledge of men: “Hay quienes les gusta que la mujer los masturbe oral-
mente, les gusta la eyaculación bucal. Otros, en cambio, les gusta hacer el
 104 · Chapter 8

beso negro; pero eso es babosada . . . hay otros que les gusta que les besen
la roseta, pero hay otros que les gusta que les metan el dedo. . . . Ya no diga-
mos los hombres que les gusta dar y que les den y los que les gusta con dos
y tres y hasta cuatro mujeres. O todos contra todos, como en la lucha li-
bre” (144).
The smorgasbord of male sexuality seemingly contradicts anthropologi-
cal work done on the region that isolates cochón culture as a specific ex-
ample of the traditional aim versus object-of-desire paradigm that is reserved
for discussions about Latin American erotics. El Guapo, for example, a busi-
nessman with illicit businesses who agrees to sell the stolen jewels, illus-
trates the idea of a macho-menos. His feminine physicality is contrasted with
his sexual tastes, as he has affairs with both La Guajira and Xaquira. El
Guapo eludes the cochón label, by both penetrating and being penetrated,
and instead queers a male sexuality that is traditionally viewed as compat-
ible with Western heteronormative practices. The agent of sublation is the
transvestite who reveals that El Guapo likes to be both the sodomizer and
the sodomized. The final queering of the businessman is added when Xa-
quira calls him a “traidor degenerado” (164), thereby morphing his physi-
cal and practical semantics with the lyrical and ontological gender schema
captured in Maná’s song. El Guapo becomes one of many mariposas that
Galich gathers in his neoliberal universe, lacking agency and any semblance
of a physical or psychological phallus. He becomes a seductive butterfly that
goes from flower to flower, “seduciendo a los pistilos,” representative, per-
haps, of the market dynamics of liberalism. The novel thus suggests that
all who partake in the neoliberal system are themselves traitors who can
be identified as mariposas, subverting the writing of neoliberal masculinity
to a traditionally non-Masculine position.
This verse of the song—so important to the characterization of economic
and amorous promiscuity (or perhaps more accurately, of an economics of
promiscuity)—reveals a misidentified genderizing of the lyrical butterfly,
as the botanical pistil houses the female and not the male genitalia of the
flower. The female- gendered butterfly therefore seduces and goes from
female-sexualized flower to flower, suggesting that there is an underlying
queer facet to the song, which Galich exploits in his intertext, or that
perhaps the mariposas in the song have all along been males. Such con-
jectures, however, only manage to reinforce the underlying queering of gen-
der positions as fluid and nonanchored sites, decentering any attempt to
reconstitute the Masculine in a deterritorialized space.
Following this line of thinking, the reader can note how Pancho
Rana  is sublated from a position of virile masculinity—the norm in
 Franz Galich’s Managua, Rock City · 105

Managua—to a subordinate position that is brought about by the queering

transvestite. In one scene, the protagonist reminisces about Xaquira’s “lin-
das piernas y un culo mejor que el de muchas mujeres” (151). Though
Rana never really engages in explicit sexual relations with Xaquira, it is
alluded to that he participates in a night of debauchery that includes “bi-
chas” and “bichos” (179), insinuating that even his (previously) hypervirile
and competing masculinity (in Salsa City) is now queered by its participa-
tion in the transnational neoliberal economies and politics of Mariposa
traicionera. Like the undifferentiated butterfly of the song, the reader is
left to guess whether Rana is the penetrated or the penetrator.
The figure of the transvestite further implicitly queers Rana and the
other men through the many lexical borrowings he displays as the scenes
progress. Xaquira and a homosexual makeup artist are known for their
usage of pejorative, homophobic language such as “maricón” and “de-
generado.” Their first line of defense against would-be attackers and cheat-
ing lovers is to appropriate the lexicon of heteronormative discourse; to
name the other or to stain them with the labels of the abject counterintui-
tively gives them power. Rana reappropriates and mimics Xaquira’s adoption
of homophobic discourse as he escapes capture from a group of men who
hunt him, calling them “¡jueputas maricones!” (157). His enunciation is a
repetition of the diction and discourse of the nonnormative body, though
Rana fails to fully articulate his own positionality versus the homosocial;
by using the same rhetoric pattern as the transvestite, the reader, through
deduction, may surmise that the protagonist also adopts a subaltern gen-
der position.
The parallelism between Maná’s “Mariposa traicionera” and Y te diré
quién eres succeeds in queering the ex-military masculinity of Rana, though
the text resists a full-blown recategorization of the character, suggesting that
the ties between the poetics of the text and the social erotics of Galich’s
post-Sandinista Central America are not firm. After all, the half-written
title of the novel evokes the incomplete nature of the connection between
language and sexual desire and practice, putting forward an aesthetics of
(symbolic, politico-economic, gender) incompletion as a model for repre-
senting turn- of-the-century Central America. This is illustrated in a con-
versation between Rana and an associate who is attracted to Xaquira, when
Rana asks, “¿Y por qué si tanto te Gus . . . tavo no te la Jala . . . pa para el
Mo . . . motombo?” (184). Though initially linguistically decentered by the
mimicry of the transvestite’s verbal defense mechanism (that seemingly re-
inforces heteronormativity), Rana remains an ambivalently heterosexual
man who cannot fully express his desire toward Xaquira, as seen by the
 106 · Chapter 8

ellipses and quick renegotiations of the spoken word. The play on words,
the theater of syllables uttered and absent, suggests to the reader the inher-
ent difficulty in quantifying and qualifying the masculine position in a
society experiencing multiple systems in flux.
Following this observation, it is evident that the other masculinities in
Y te diré quién eres are similarly precluded from any real approximation to
the Masculine, effectively transposing them away from a real competing
market and onto a theater space of incomplete performativity. This alter-
nate plane of gender inscription is a theater, as it is merely symbolic of
macroprocesses and not really a metonymization of real (albeit textual)
competing homosocials or masculine positions in the text. The press, for
example, does not support Connell’s theory of science and objectivity as a
necessary strategy for achieving hegemony but is instead a haphazard group
of misfits that exaggerate and speculate on the news, repeatedly blaming
the Islamic terrorist group Al- Qaeda for the bombing engineered by Rana,
evocative of the same disorganized and gender dysmorphic homosocial in
Castellanos Moya’s Baile con serpientes.11 The forces of order, represented
by the womanizing Anastasio Cerna, are initially characterized as patriotic,
masculine, and in control of strategies that promote a patriarchal control
of society. Cerna singing “Palomita Guasiruca,” a song made popular by
the Sandinista Carlos Mejía Godoy, a nationalistic and progressive singer/
politician, lyricizes this yet is disqualified from a position of hegemony
when he fails to achieve an erection while having an affair with his assis-
tant, Vilma. The police captain’s final coup de grâce, however, is saved
for Xaquira, who seduces him with her “bello tronco asentadero que
tanto le apasionaba” (192), effectively writing him, too, as a mariposa.
Following Xaquira’s association with the queering of Rana—based on
the syntactic relationship between the mariposa and “to betray”—it comes
as no surprise that Cerna, representing the law, is the biggest traitor in the
novel. The dying protagonist recognizes the head of the Policía Nacional
as an ex-Sandinista who betrayed his group to the Contras, only to betray
this other group by reverting to the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Na-
cional (FSLN). Cerna betrays the power entrusted to him as a member of
law enforcement by allowing drug lords to operate and by taking part in a
“red de corrupción que involucraba a personas del gobierno, la policía, y
particulares” (200). He then executes Rana as one of the many who “se opo-
nen al progreso de la patria” (201, my emphasis). If Galich is ambiguous in
his characterization of Rana, he leaves no room for doubt in the elimina-
tion of Cerna as a symbol of the law within the theater of masculinity, as
this position is unable to promote any sense of progress in a system and law
already corrupted by the transnational and deterritoriality of neoliberalism.
 Franz Galich’s Managua, Rock City · 107

Cerna’s and Rana’s deaths ensure that no political extrapolations can be

made at the end of Y te diré quién eres, as is partially the case in Salsa City.
As Rana slips into unconsciousness, he leaves the reader with a new model
of masculinity that emerges from the chaos left by decades of misanthropic
politics and top-serving economics, composed of “hombres dispuestos a cu-
alquier cosa con tal de conseguir siquiera un tuco de lo que ellos [los ricos
políticos y poderosos] consiguen sin verguiarse en las calles bajo el nica sol
de encendidos lolos” (210). Taking this model, then, as a point of entry into
a larger thesis on a postconflict, destroyed-by-neoliberalism Central Amer-
ica, we can note two arguments. First, gender as a socioliterary trope is made
malleable and negotiable by the disarticulation of a traditional hegemonic
model of masculinity. The novel is noticeably lacking in metaphysical and
homosocial Masculinity and instead presents a series of theatrical mascu-
linities that are ontologically impotent when it comes to establishing a func-
tioning strategy of patriarchy. Second, by substituting in a group of men
who are mariposas due to their betraying and being betrayed, the author
establishes a hermeneutic erotics that is based on popular culture, a cul-
tural infrastructure that is itself a product of globalizing and deterritorial-
ized factors.12 With that being said, the central axis of Galich’s text is the
intertextual referent of Maná’s transnational yet essentially Latin Ameri-
can brand of rock music, which reminds the reader that any questions of a
literary and cultural identity (in an Alfaguara age) can only be systemically
interrogated through transnational registers and referents.13
The use of popular music as an intertext in the writing of masculinities
in relation to societies during and in the wake of the neoliberal tsunami
evidences a renewed connection between these texts and their ideas of the
national. In these societies, popular music is deified: as Vicente Francisco
Torres notes, “la canción popular es una religión; el altar es el aparato de
sonido y los sacerdotes los ídolos” (21). The religiosity of song is imbued by
authors who are “intermediarios, como los santos u orishas que conectan a
los fieles—los lectores—con sus deidades populares” (Plata Ramírez 53).
The product of this sacred textuality is a narrative that is rich in cultural
referents and by nature polysemantic, which additionally serves as a site of
enunciation for political, economic, social, and erotic discourses. The nov-
els examined compound the literary veneration of song, as the lyrics, mel-
odies, and dance of musics open up new hermeneutic entry points into an
understanding of desire, and of the role of gender within the representa-
tion of the social changes occurring outside the novelscape.
The fixation on borders in the face of cultural imperialism in Y te diré
quién eres (Mariposa traicionera) is sensitive to the novelistic role of topo-
graphic space. What is it about Managua, Lima, or the open waters of the
 108 · Chapter 8

Caribbean that triggers a discussion of masculinity and power? Is this a re-

naissance of the age- old binary of center/periphery that structures so much
earlier Latin American political and literary thought? The presentation of
new masculinities that are central to the recovery of the national in the face
of the encroaching and assimilating forces of globalization is contingent
on a spatial demarcation of identity. Galich’s new model, after all, becomes
a possibility only through the textual mariposas within the delimitations
of the infernal setting of Managua, Rock City. The presentation of a post-
war, anti-neoliberal model suggests that alternative masculinities that do
not necessarily engage with the Masculine are written and alive in the sym-
bolic space of the theater. This writing, furthermore, underlines the pos-
sibility of writing types or tropes of the male body and the masculine iden-
tity position as real literary metaphors, akin to the mariposa. We see, in
essence, as a result of spaces and topographies of being both genderized
and genderizing, the formation of organic masculinities that rise from the
continent in the face of cultural and economic imperialism.
 part three

Novel and Transnational

Masculinities

In this section I look at current trends in the writing of masculinities,

focusing specifically on works that question the corporality and position of
previously structured gendered orders in relation to Latin America. Just as
politico-economic systems foster a shift in the telos and how we conceive
of culture and place, recent Latin American fiction has posited a trajectory
that escapes any sense of the (national or regional) essential. Works by Bo-
laño, Bellatin, Paz Soldán, Clavel, and Roncagliolo, among others, can be
placed in this genealogy (all members, of course, of Generation Alfaguara).
I am interested in these fictions that stretch conceptions of Latin Ameri-
canness, which in turn suggests an inevitable stretching of the cultural
ideologies of gender that are so often attributed to essentialized systems.
This shift in writing coincides with, or perhaps more accurately triggers,
a shift in reception, as criticism has opened new points of entry into the
gender debate, including ecocriticism and cybercriticism, among other
fields. There has furthermore been a surge in inquiry related to the effects
on and representations of gender in popular culture, such as comics and
film (and music, as examined previously). These critiques question the ef-
fects of the influence and infrastructures of the North over the economic
industries of culture in the South and the resultant ideals and tropes that
this brand of imperialism engenders. Keeping in mind the notion of influ-
ence and causality, critics (such as David William Foster, Ben Sifuentes-
Jáuregui, and José Quiroga) and authors (such as Ana Clavel and Pedro
Lemebel) have reflected on the validity and viability of including Latin
American gender studies within debates raging in the North, noting the

109
 110 · Part III

emphasis placed on the body over performance, on the blurred spaces of

identity that escape categorizations so popularly and casually thrown around
in North American schools of thought. With that being said, however, the
points of cultural contact, assimilation, and hybridity cannot be ignored,
even if a local, independent notion of gender is to be cultivated. In this sec-
tion I build on the postulates, theorems, and analyses put forth in earlier
pages to examine how masculinities can be rewritten moving forward in
the neoliberal age (as is the case of Galich’s mariposas). I am not so much
interested in a textual analysis of each work per se, but instead arrange these
texts in a tableau that inculcates broader questions and extrapolations that
stretch the boundaries of gender and Latin American fiction. This is not to
suggest that each work be included in a canonical array of the state of mas-
culinity in Latin America today. Instead, I propose that each text, in its
own right, provides a juicy caveat into what to expect from an increasing
corpus that is more and more preoccupied with and reactive to the state of
(Latin American) masculinity and men.
The ontological disappearance of referential semantic topographies is
rolled over into my study of Hernán Rodríguez Matte’s Barrio Alto (2004),
which is followed in a series by others, such as Alberto Fuguet (Mala
onda, 1991; Por favor, rebobinar, 1998), Jaime Bayly (No se lo digas a nadie,
1994; La mujer de mi hermano, 2002), and Xavier Velasco (Diablo guardián,
2003), that portray a consumerist youth enslaved in the tenets of late eco-
nomic and cultural capitalism. Though originally included in Fuguet’s
ambitious anthology Cuentos con walkman (1993), Rodríguez Matte has
developed a relatively recluse literary career that is punctuated by short
stories and regular essays in journals and newspapers. Unlike his country-
man Fuguet, Rodríguez Matte’s forays into the world of cinema and art-
house shorts have garnered more attention than his one novel. In what can
be considered a fast-forward of Mala onda (much of the structure, the-
matics, and tropes are evolutions of the earlier novel), Rodríguez Matte’s
Barrio Alto highlights questions of class, globalization, and ennui in con-
temporary Santiago. But what differentiates this piece from Fuguet’s gen-
erationally defining work are the seeds and referents to the protagonist’s
existential crisis. In my analysis of Barrio Alto, I call attention to the disar-
ticulation of space in relation to hegemonic masculinity in an increasingly
agglomerative urban space. This initial observation is then combined with
a discussion of the use of North American comic book superheroes as cul-
tural axes that structure the performance of masculinity in upper-class
Chile. The study of nonnational cultural tropes in defining localized gen-
der positions allows for the writing of a global masculine order in Enrique
 Novel and Transnational Masculinities · 111

Serna’s La sangre erguida, and I argue that any new writings of Latin
American masculinity must be dialogued with transnational gendered
subjectivities and practices. The process of this, however, is contradicted
in my analysis of Bayly’s El cojo y el loco, where I suggest that any efforts of
the academy to differentiate between variants of hegemony are futile, as
the real effects and affects of the Masculine remain sociohistorically
unchanged.
 chapter nine

Glocalized Masculinities
of the Barrio Alto

Connell’s hypothesis of transnational business masculinity as a pole of he-

gemony on an increasingly globalized gender stage sets the platform for
evaluating contemporary writings of Latin American masculinities on a
global spatial and literary scale. This theorized gender expression is “led
by a hegemonic North Atlantic order” (“Masculinities” 9) currently at the
apex of gender relations, controlling definitions and models of patriarchy
and, in turn, establishing a system of domination wherein local and regional
gender expressions, including masculinities, are subjugated to the norma-
tive figure of the male businessman.
The fictionalization of Connell’s latest brand of theorized masculinity
has been included in texts from the Southern Cone to Mexico, represent-
ing on the gender-theater stage a symbol and consecration of the sovereign
individual consumer. What is of interest to us, however, is both how this
globalized masculinity has been portrayed in fiction and what measures
are taken to affront or question its authority over the landscape.
In real spatial terms, the neoliberal turn is accompanied by a project of
urban diversification and sprawl, depicted in detail in Rodríguez Matte’s
Barrio Alto, a 2004 reincarnation of Mala onda that shares similar ideolo-
gies and stylistics.1 Like Fuguet, Rodríguez Matte frames his text around a
pop culture epigraph that embodies the cultural and existential ennui faced
by the first person narrator. Adhering to an aesthetics of cocaine and alco-
hol, the plot develops the same disdain for all things Chilean that Fuguet’s
protagonist, Matías Vicuña, demonstrates when he identifies himself as “un
pendejo de un país que nadie conoce y que a nadie interesa. Un país que

112
 Glocalized Masculinities of the Barrio Alto · 113

se cree lo mejor, como yo aquí” (Mala onda 14). The similarities between
Barrio Alto and Mala onda are structural, as the former’s chapters are also
positioned around specific dates, though it is decidedly apolitical, unlike
Fuguet’s direct reference to Pinochet’s plebiscite. Yet Rodríguez Matte’s
novel, set in 1999, holds economic and modernist implications as the
author questions if and how things will change as Chile enters the new
millennium.
The plot is centered on a personal crisis that is triggered by a nonbe-
longing to a defined social context, which then offsets the stability enjoyed
by the protagonist, Benja, as a wealthy youth. We can first note Benja’s dis-
dain for the local and an identification with global identities when he em-
phatically affirms that “esos sofisticados grupos [musicales] les importará
un carajo lo que sucede aquí en Sudamérica, en el culo del mundo” (44).
He, like Matías, is also critical of a consumerist culture that mimics the
Global North, creating local versions of products and brands that, in their
emulation, lack the authentic air of modernity. Unlike Matías, though, he
is really critical of the capitalist model: as a university student majoring in
marketing, Benja states that “más de la mitad del mundo occidentalizado
se había dejado seducir por la idea de comprar sin saber que eso no servirá
de nada. La televisión, los avisos publicitarios, y la idea de acumular nue-
vas cosas nos estaba rodeando al punto de dejarnos insensibles y asfixiados”
(166). Such a critique provides an existential substrate for the protagonist’s
negotiation of his own subjectivity in relation to global and local positions.
The idea of manliness and belonging to the urban homosocial has fur-
ther evolved from the temporal space of Mala onda in that the economic
power to buy drugs and cigarettes, and not carnal prowess in the brothel,
defines the act of “hacerse hombre” (Rodríguez Matte 13). The protago-
nist is unapologetic in his criticism of neoliberal policies in Chile, which
he contends have defined the nation and its people as a vague simulacrum
of the United States. The confrontation with foreign influences over a na-
tional self takes on a mass cultural angle when Benja observes, “Podía verme
a mí mismo tratando de imitar lo que había aprendido toda mi vida en los
programas de televisión, en las películas, en la ropa y en la música que es-
cuchaba, en la comida y los artefactos eléctricos, los modismos, los peina-
dos y hasta la manera de quedarme callado, todo había sido aprendido de
algún estúpido actor medio drogadicto y medio amanerado de Estados
Unidos” (67). Taking as a point of departure the explicit challenge to U.S.
cultural imperialism that was lacking in Mala onda, Rodríguez Matte
shifts the debate over global-local subjectivities onto the space of the city,
that tangible and semantic metonym of the neoliberal age. This process
 114 · Chapter 9

can be contrasted with Galich’s writing of Managua, though in the latter,

the city is characterized as a putrid stage, stained by the diarrhea of neolib-
eralism. The Santiago in the Chilean text, however, is crafted through a
different aesthetic response to the practices of neoliberalism, as the author
chooses instead to explore how unmitigated growth results in a desubjecti-
fied and transient space.
The disintegration of the spaces of the Masculine (which were central
in establishing a mapping of gender in El huerto de mi amada, for example)
calls to attention the role of the ruling homosocial of the Club de la Unión,
a physical meeting point of political, economic, and social strains of hege-
monic masculinity. This space is metonymized in the figure of Roberto,
an overachieving friend of the protagonist, who comes from a storied
line of politicians and businessmen that own the privatized power company,
which sustains literal and symbolic shifts toward a notion of progress. The
critique of this powerful homosocial is carried out through an unremit-
ting desubjectification of Roberto, who, like others of his generation, is
described as having been “tragado por el efecto sedante del sistema corpo-
rativo” (70). Similarly, these men who occupy and define the traditional
pockets of power within the Barrio Alto are described as “robots esclaviza-
dos por la idea de acumular y ganar más dinero” (70). The similarities
to Connell’s idea of transnational business masculinity are powerful, as
Rodríguez Matte contrapositions the libertine protagonist with the mind-
less dressed-in-gray-suits male bodies that function as minions of the neo-
liberal cancer slowly infecting the planet. Benja challenges the traditional
cartographies of control by refusing to be like Roberto and his countless
classmates, who now dress in imported suits and drive expensive cars to
brain-draining jobs that can only guarantee economic amassing. His refusal
is grounded in the parallel disintegration of the Barrio Alto—the traditional
space of the homosocial prior to the deterritorialization of the group dur-
ing the neoliberal episteme (though one can argue that the new strain of
transnational masculinity will only find its own spatial axes, perhaps in first-
class airport lounges, chic restaurants, and new gated communities)—as a
result of archipelagic urban growth and the rise of the middle class, which
dislocate the traditional referents of money and privilege from the mapped-
out spaces of the wealthy.
The textual construction of transnational business masculinity is
compounded by its collocation with traditionally hegemonic masculinities.
Seeing a group of patrolling police officers, the protagonist notes: “no
hacían otra cosa que deambular como sanguijuelas buscando una manera
de sacarle provecho a su poder. No podía razonar con ellos. Había algo
 Glocalized Masculinities of the Barrio Alto · 115

demasiado equivocado en la gente que usaba uniformes” (155). He further

includes the military and the clergy in this observation, as “débiles detrás
de los uniformes” (155). There is an implied comparison of the enslaved
robots (transnational business masculinity) like Roberto within this group,
arguing that “los ejecutivos y políticos vestidos iguales, llevando coléricas
corbatas como si fuese la única prenda con la que pueden tomarse cier-
tas libertades. Se esconden detrás de la institución” (155). Note the rela-
tionship between the sartorial aesthetics of individual bodies within a
group and the institutions of power they code for. Also note that, in this
comparison, the businessman seems to be just the latest iteration of the
hegemonic.
The dematerialization of the traditional homosocial of institutionalized
progress (see Bryce Echenique’s writing of masculinities) results in a reor-
ganized or disorganized cartographic theater for the subject who cannot
help but assert, “no estoy ni en el centro ni en el exterior. Quizás no estoy
en ninguna parte” (24), calling to mind what Fredric Jameson calls a crisis
of boundaries, where the borders and categories of space are blurred (86).
The conclusion to Rodríguez Matte’s bildungsroman is not afforded the
sanctity of the Barrio Alto to emerge as a mature adult, akin to Carlos
Alegre’s return to Lima, as Benja must instead negotiate a masculine iden-
tity that is constructed as a product of contact with transnational business
masculinity.
The realization that the homosocial has been modified by globalizing
and tensile forces, and that the Barrio Alto has ceased to exist as a real and
an imagined space triggers a survivalist strategy in Benja. The past is left
behind and “se vislum[bra] una oportunidad para reorganizar [su] vida
como un computador que se reinicia y logra reordenar todos sus archivos
desde el principio” (199). Rodríguez Matte draws our attention to the con-
struction of the male body and its subjectivity, focusing on how and with
what metaphors the corporal site so prevalent (and organically scripted) in
the new historical novel may be rearticulated.
The author’s reimagination of the corporality of masculinity is first
gleaned through a dialectic construction of the female in relation to nature.
Such a textuality invariably invites the ecocritical angle to our analysis; by
giving nature and the natural a voice, we force ourselves into the position
of the Other through language, allowing for an understanding of the
effects of phallocentrism and andro- domination over the planet as an ex-
tension of the same in society. The problem with this line of inquiry, how-
ever, lies in its objectives, as they are often obtuse and mythopoetic, seek-
ing to find some long-lost Edenic paradise that holds no real value or
 116 · Chapter 9

constructive framework, recurring instead to a sort of academic masturba-

tory practice that stresses the arrogance of the literary critic as potentiating
real and discursive challenges to patriarchy. Ecocriticism becomes at times
a repetitive process without end, simply pointing out the cultural equiva-
lencies of the feminine to the natural.
Though vague aims and methodologies are intrinsically problematic and
often only idealistic in their application, a closer look at ecofeminist mod-
els, a subset of the ecocritical, poses a point of entry into the aesthetics of
patriarchy in spatial fictions. Working diachronically, Gloria da Cunha-
Giabbai observes that the genderizing of the natural occupies a central
role in characterization of the feminine natural as a monstrous barbarie (53),
which is portrayed in opposition to the masculine civilization in nineteenth-
century texts. The recurrence to the natural as feminine is problematized
by Gretchen Legler when she asserts that “the constructions of nature as
female (as mother/virgin) are essential to the maintenance of . . . hierarchi-
cal ways of thinking that justify the oppression of the various ‘others’ in
patriarchal culture by ranking them ‘closer to nature’ ” (228). This can be
applied to how Ana Clavel portrays female genitalia as a flower that must
be perforated and inseminated in Cuerpo náufrago (2005), or to how
Galich assigns to the traitorous a nature metaphor.
Rodríguez Matte recurs to this strategy to thus include the spatial urban
(as symptoms of the neoliberal) in the intimate construction of the protago-
nist’s self. Benja refers to the natural as a gendered tool to characterize his
own masculinity when he contrasts himself with a love interest, Amelia,
described as “una delicada mariposa entre el pastizal, libre y despreocu-
pada y yo en cambio me siento como una mosca sucia y oportunista, vo-
lando entre el alambrado de púas y una bosta de caballo” (24). Unlike the
butterflies in Y te diré that copulate with the human singing voice, Benja is
also viewed as a natural metaphor in relation to the feminine. There is an
attempt to resemanticize him along the lines of the natural, but this fails
as the protagonist then equates the natural with the power of the multina-
tionals over Chilean society as they create and feed the mindless disease of
capitalism. Disdainful of the new middle class and the robotic automatons
of transnational business masculinity, Benja realizes that conceiving him-
self through nature only makes him “otro pájaro sin cerebro” (44), unable
to script an affront to transnationalism. The failure of nature as a referent
for the protagonist’s nascent masculinity is put to rest when he affirms that
“a veces trato de hablar con mi naturaleza, pero ella no quiere hablar con-
migo” (60). Therein the reader witnesses the first attempt in the novel to
resemanticize the male-in- crisis: by adopting an ecofeminist perspective
 Glocalized Masculinities of the Barrio Alto · 117

and by aligning the masculine with the natural, the novel explores the
(failed) possibilities of emerging as a whole and constitutive subject in the
face of overarching neoliberal gender structures.
A second attempt at resemanticizing or reorganizing (if we are to follow
the computer metaphor) Benja’s masculinity occurs as a direct by-product
of the author’s incursions into the realm of the natural as the protagonist
visits the house of a famed architect during a party. The owner of the house
is described as an ecologically conscious designer whose “construcciones
se adaptan a la naturaleza y no dañan el ecosistema” (49). The architect’s
abode is described in great detail by Simone, a Dutch woman who befriends
the protagonist in one of his many drug-fueled romps through the bars and
discotheques for the privileged of Santiago. She comments that the house
“estaba inspirado en el refugio de Lex Lutor” (49), making reference to the
comic book hero Superman and his nemesis.2 The connection between
nature and Lex is strategic in that the author juxtaposes the natural as a
villainous agent in contrast to the neoliberal apotheosis of cultural and
gendered masculinity (in the shape of the virile and benevolent Superman
who filled Benja’s childhood).3
We see in this juxtaposition the creation of a viable alternative plane of
masculine construction in the face of multinational masculinity, though
it comes ironically as a by-product of the latter’s spreading southward in the
guise of cultural imperialism. The comic as a medium and its larger-than-
life gendered archetypes represent how “graphic narratives such as comics
have constituted one of the important media in [the] connection between
socio-economic modernization, cultural matrices, and mass-mediatization”
(Fernández L’Hoeste and Poblete 3).4
What is important to keep in mind when talking about the influence of
comics in the region is the understanding that the graphic drawing market
is not controlled by a single group but is composed of interdependent
spheres and genres. We can discern the sphere of the North American su-
perhero comic; the ironic social commentary of Condorito; the Japanese-
style manga comics; and some more adult- oriented offerings.5 The super-
hero, however, is particularly useful when discussing masculinity in
Rodríguez Matte’s novel, as the protagonist declares that when younger he
wanted to be Superman or the Green Lantern. The schizophrenic man of
steel from another planet (or equally the United States?) posits an ideologi-
cal quandary for Benja, because he is a tangible product of the consumer-
driven culture that he despises. How can he confront a symbolic norm and
archetype that is already assimilated into his own cultural DNA? Therein
we see a problem of constructing a gendered challenge to transnational
 118 · Chapter 9

business masculinity, as it is not necessarily foreign in totality but exists

within current glocal societies, enmeshed in the infrastructures of the
self-community.
Returning to the architect’s house, Benja engages in a struggle toward
masculine subjectivity as he ponders the figure of the superhero as a viable
alternative to a potential ecomasculinity. He disassociates himself from the
natural as he links himself to Superman and the anti-natural but is unable
to live up to the superhuman expectations that come with wearing a red
cape. At the party he encounters Montserrat, the older sister of Max (a
classmate and another representation of transnational masculinity), and
is seduced by her bad-girl airs as they lock themselves in a bathroom and
frantically begin to remove their clothing. Benja’s sexual prowess, how-
ever, leaves much to be desired in the shadow of the man from Krypton as
Montserrat takes control of the situation, domineering him into satisfying
her fantasy: she fellates him to her own rhythm (and seemingly not to lead
him to orgasm, though he does ejaculate) and ignores his pleas for inter-
course. The protagonist is further desubjectified when Montserrat asks
him to introduce a Grolsch beer bottle instead of his penis into her vagina,
spurning the potential for a super-masculine identification. The choice of
beer is not a coincidence, as the brewery is owned by a multinational bever-
age company and was at the center of price-fixing scandals with other
companies, such as Heineken and Bavaria, between 1996 and 1999. The
Grolsch bottle represents in an extra-corporal way the economic interests
of Connell’s transnational business masculinity as it replaces Benja’s flac-
cid phallus in impaling the woman. From an anthropomorphic stand-
point, the elongated neck and corked spout of the Grolsch bottle repli-
cates the coronal sulcus and glans of the male penis. It easily takes the
place of the organ, and in doing so emphasizes the loss, so to speak, of the
body in the shift toward a new gendered order aestheticized by homo-
genous suits. Its presence, furthermore, emphasizes the absence of Benja’s
(non-neoliberal) body in coitus, as the body, in fact, is replaced by capital.
After his encounter with Montserrat, Benja’s life spirals out of control as
he increases his alcohol and drug intake and is unable to maintain any
relationship with his female or male peers. His isolation and disassociation
from the social milieu of Santiago is punctuated by an overnight stay in
jail and the death of Olaf, another member of the small group of friends.
This death and the protagonist’s acceptance of being the father of Olaf’s
baby and assuming a relationship with the pregnant Javiera only underscore
his physical and societal impotence in asserting a phallocentric or patriar-
chal position.
 Glocalized Masculinities of the Barrio Alto · 119

At first glance the future is dismal and dark for Latin American mascu-
linities that must negotiate alternative positions or challenge neoliberal mas-
culinity. The tropic devices of the natural or the superhero fail, in part
because of internal paradoxes of power, patriarchy, and control, as the dis-
enfranchised male is unable to appropriate that which has so successfully
subjugated others. By planting the problematic of finding an alternative to
transnational masculinities in contemporary Latin American society,
Barrio Alto succeeds in updating the cultural ennui and impending crises
experienced by Fuguet, Bayly, and others in the 1990s; this time, how-
ever, the crisis is extant, and the protagonist has no choice but to find new
aesthetic and semantic tactics of self-reconstruction.
The writing of masculinity in Rodríguez Matte’s novel does, however,
substantiate an alternative formation of the male body that demonstrates
some, albeit premature, potential for challenge. The body in several scenes
and metaphors is coded and imagined as a technological assemblage that
is separated from the biological determinism of gendered bodies. The
protagonist and his friends ruminate on the symbolic analogies between
personal computers and human beings, arguing that some people are like
traditional hard drives in that they can store a lot of memory, whereas oth-
ers resemble random access memory (RAM) chips, which temporary hold
information while the central processing unit (CPU) calculates and per-
forms operative functions. It is not surprising that the protagonist imag-
ines himself as a computer, half man and half technology, that is unable
to “hablar con [su] naturaleza” (60).
The metaphor is extended in Benja’s critique of transnational business
masculinity as he insists that his tie-wearing, nine-to-five-working peers all
have a “preocupación por ganar y competir. Para eso nos habían entrenado.
Para eso habíamos sido programados. Aunque, claro, a todos nos entró un
virus en el camino” (99). The inclusion of the virus advances the technical
metaphor of the male body and importantly places it within a larger hyper-
text markup language universe, where subjectivity and location are never
set or defined, leading Benja to comment that “no estoy ni en el centro ni
en el exterior. Quizás no estoy en ninguna parte” (24). The body is virtu-
alized in Barrio Alto beyond the simple textual transmogrification into a
bundle of wires, silicon chips, and blinking LED lights; it is a figment as-
sembled in a deterritorialized cloud space of computing that gains local
presence when pulled up at a fixed (territorial) terminal. Such a reconfigu-
ration, though escapist in essence, bodes for a claiming of the technologi-
cal as a space of contention away from the traditional warscapes of the
cityspace.
 120 · Chapter 9

The protagonist recurs to a technological idea of self at the end of the

novel, after the death of Olaf and the dissolution of the Barrio Alto, in a
novelistic stroke evocative of Fuguet’s disenchanted character reassimilat-
ing into the homosocial. But unlike Matías, Benja is not hesitant or vaguely
pessimistic. He instead accepts the role he must take as “se vislumbraba
una oportunidad para reorganizar mi vida como un computador que se
reinicia y logra reordenar todos sus archivos desde el principio” (199). The
subtle optimism in being able to press the “reset” button evidences a thesis
that perhaps a new language or coda of representation must and can be
evolved to successfully articulate a challenge to globalizing gender po-
sitions, which threaten to subordinate nonconforming bodies that lay
extraneous to the neoliberal project. Though the subject has lost his
position in society and the city has shape-shifted into an unrecognizable
constellation, the male body still houses the potential to discursively re-
imagine a future, to reimage a hard drive littered with faulty clusters and
virus-infected files, to reformat the societal implications of the “robots
esclavizados” that infect the arterial veins of the national (wherever and
whatever that may be).
 chapter ten

Materializing the Penis

Though the previous chapter suggests that the only viable strategy for chal-
lenging masculinities in the neoliberal age must come through rearticula-
tions of the organic body, a separate line of inquiry is posited by writers who
aim to renegotiate the extant and literal body to accommodate changing
gender(ed) norms; that is, this line of flight resists metaphorical pathways
out of the masculine crisis and favors instead a thorough examination of
how men and masculinities can systematically evolve to reject the Mascu-
line as an oppressive position. A writer at the forefront of this shift is the
Mexican Enrique Serna, whose La sangre erguida (2010) portrays the psy-
chological and physiological intricacies of manhood through the intricate
telling of the lives of three Hispanic men irreversibly connected by the
atomic bonds of C22H30N6O4S.
Continuing with an examination of not-so-comfortable topics along his
narrative biography, Serna pens the lives of three men living in (a symboli-
cally transnational) Barcelona, all connected by the omnipotent dictator-
ship of the penis and the impending fear and reality of its flaccid fall. In
what can be considered a biography, or “viagrafía” (306), of a Mexican, a
Catalan, and an Argentine man, La sangre erguida interrelates the stories of
a man subjugated by a voluptuous Dominican lounge singer (Bulmaro), a
businessman who suffers from anxiety-related impotence (Ferrán), and
a porn star who can control his penis at will (Juan Luis).1 These three
characters are, importantly, types for the traditional macho, the transna-
tional businessman, and the exemplar of the butcher homosocial. These
types, however, are separated from the symbolic theater of neoliberal

121
 122 · Chapter 10

masculinities that Galich negotiates and are instead substrated in a theater

of micromasculinities that problematize the real travails of the mascu-
line subject in the face of erectile dysfunction. Note here that the penis
is emphasized as the site of masculinity, moving away from the neolib-
eral bodies I cite previously that favor either other corporal sites (testes,
anus, mouth) or other semantic metaphors (technology, nature) for writing
masculinities.
Told through alternating chapters with a liberal use of intertexts, mem-
oirs, and prison documentation, the novel chronicles the lives of three
different yet very similar men in a globalized tableau onto which their nar-
rative routes are plotted amid the hustle and bustle of multinational corpo-
rations, local chino stores, and the many ethnic neighborhoods that color
the cityscape. The city that functions as the textual referent for the subjects’
gender is not Latin American per se, but is a displaced city that effectively
asks to be forgotten. Barcelona is not the focal point of the narrative or even
of a character (as tends to be the case in recent urban fiction), as Serna’s
plot points could really occur in any global city.
This is important, because by doing away with the spatial referent, the
novel replicates the topologic regime of the neoliberal, reflective again of
the Generation Alfaguara. That isn’t to say, however, that the novel does
not capitalize on the traditional spaces of becoming men; the brothel, for
example, is evoked as a space of becoming, as Ferrán repeatedly finds him-
self in a brothel where prostitutes bring him to orgasm only through non-
coital stimulation, highlighting his impotence, though he metonymizes
Connell’s business Masculine. There is a suggestion made here that per-
haps the new hegemon is really not all that powerful.
The Argentine Juan Luis has an opposite relationship with his penis, as
he is able to control its blood-filled vesicles with the power of his mind. After
experiencing an involuntary erection as a child when his mother was tak-
ing his temperature, he vows to never be betrayed again and attains the
quasi-magical ability to raise his penis on command, leading to his even-
tual success as an actor in the porn industry. His career is intimately sabo-
taged, however, by an uncooperative penis that will only rise to the touch
of Laia, a woman he serendipitously meets and falls in love with. This par-
ticular storyline is reminiscent of the premium placed on the homosocial
and its narrative in La última noche, where what is most important in
defining masculinities is the ability to penetrate and possess through the
almighty phallus.
In the plot line of the Mexican, Bulmaro, Serna explores the potential-
ity of orthodox masculinities to survive in an age of transnationalism,
 Materializing the Penis · 123

highlighting the relationship with transnational business masculinity as

seen in Rodríguez Matte’s textual challenge. The character leaves behind a
wife and children in Mexico City and is subjugated to the desires and whims
of Romelia, a Dominican lounge singer who brings him to Barcelona when
searching for her big break in show business. Their relationship inverts the
traditional roles of man and woman, as Bulmaro is the househusband who
begrudgingly welcomes Romelia after she has a night out with Wilson
Mendoza, a music producer who promises riches. Upon smelling alcohol
on her breath and another man’s cologne, he observes that “lo mismo hacía
mi mujer cuando yo regresaba pedo de mis parrandas” (183). Perhaps the
greatest inversion from the position of macho Latino comes in the shape of
his attitude toward modern women, as he characterizes them as jealous
Don Juanas who resentfully rein in the male gaze while unabashedly flirt-
ing and fornicating with a bevy of men.2
The three plot lines highlight the penis as the true corporal and dis-
cursive locus of traditional masculinities resituated in the contemporary.
Bulmaro, for example, attempts to recapture his dominance over the female
when “la puso bocabajo con bruscas maneras de violador, para cogérsela
como lo que era: una perra libidinosa” (190), only to be foiled by “su
blandengue instrumento” (191), which refuses to be engorged. The idea
of the failing penis has been rehashed by writers attempting to pen a non-
hegemonic position, but its inclusion in La sangre erguida goes beyond a
simple literary artifice of characterization, that is, of the usual maricón, or
emasculated male. Serna is acutely aware of the power of the biological
phallus from a textual standpoint, knowing full well that sexual impotence
is a metaphor for societal impotence. The writer aptly and amply uses
literary referents that have historically constituted masculine gender
norms, such as Don Juan Tenorio and Martín Fierro, to juxtapose ca-
nonical representations of the macho with contemporary men who
model their behavior on the masculine figures of literature. The Argentine
Juan Luis, for example, exclaims that he must win over his lover “como los
gauchos del Martín Fierro, que seguían luchando con un trabucazo en la
espalda” (198). The relationship between literature as a means and mecha-
nism of doing gender is reflected on in Serna’s narrative, highlighting the
connection made between the potency of the penis, or lack thereof, in the
construction of the diegesis. Just as the writers of the new historical novels
focused on the discursive sites of the male body to problematize gender
within debates of the nation, Serna appropriates the penis as a symbol and
site for writing masculinity, resisting metaphorically blowing the body up
or reterritorializing it as a reflection of broader processes.
 124 · Chapter 10

The novel is centered on the supply and demand of the erectile dysfunc-
tion drug Viagra (sildenafil citrate), which caused a seismic shift in talking
about male sexuality as it became mainstream to discuss the flaccid prob-
lems of age and anxiety, which were previously held at bay by public displays
of machismo. The contract of silence that Vargas Llosa pens around the
flaccid Trujillo is torn up and handled head on. The theme of impotence in
La sangre erguida is more than purely physiological, as Serna emphasizes
the societal disenfranchisement of his characters through the metaphorical
connotations of the noun. Men are not only sexually impotent but also
unable to assert themselves as lovers, husbands, and heads of the household.
A prime example is the husband of Ferrán’s ex-girlfriend, Gregorio Mar-
tínez. Upon discovering that his wife is leaving him for the Viagra-popping
businessman, he disappears into his studio for half an hour, only to emerge
“con las mallas negras de mimo, la cara y las manos maquilladas de blanco.
Se había pintado en los pómulos dos lágrimas con marcador negro, y en el
pecho un corazón rojo con espinas . . . él quería [gritar] su dolor en el len-
guaje que mejor domina. Hizo la pantomima de arrancarse el corazón y
pisotearlo en el suelo” (256). The mime evokes the inability to speak and to
verbalize the problems of masculinities in contemporary societies (and crit-
icism), lest the enunciative subject be considered non-Masculine.
Faced with the inevitability of a gender-democratic future, Serna’s char-
acters retrograde into their own bodies as they attempt to find the answers
to the problematization of traditional systems of masculinity that held them
to impossible and powerful standards. There is a cognitive separation
between the self and the penis, the subject and its libidinal appendage,
that drives the narrative forward. All three protagonists maintain extended
conversations with their genitalia, isolating their true identities from what
their penises force them to do. Bulmaro, for example, comments that he
no longer has free will and feels like “el último eslabón en la cadena de
mando” (22). A similar separation occurs in Ferrán when he stops to pon-
der the mental disconnect between the penis and the mind, asking “¿por
qué la voluntad puede alzar una pierna o un brazo, y en cambio no tiene
control sobre el pene? . . . ¿Qué oscuro poder gobierna el mecanismo hi-
dráulico de la erección?” (31). The separation of the subject from the penis
calls to attention the importance of the body in constructing gender, akin
to the rewritings and reimaginings seen in previous novels, though here
the narrative exercise refuses to decenter masculinities from the traditional
heteronormative site of male power.
The penis as a physiological and discursive site is appropriated by Serna
as he emphasizes its hold over male subjectivity: though it is textually
 Materializing the Penis · 125

separated from Bulmaro, Ferrán, and Juan Luis, it is not a separate entity
but a controlling force that reigns over their every move. Men in La sangre
erguida operate under the autocratic regime of a “dictadura de la testoster-
ona” (20), headed by a “caudillo rapado” (147) who orders their movements.
It is not fortuitous that the penis is described as a caudillo uncompromising
in its power, evoking the portrayal of dictators in the new historical novel.
The focus on the penis, furthermore, aligns La sangre erguida with
Vargas Llosa’s Trujillato, as though the penis is problematized and made
vulnerable, yet never fully castrated from a position of hegemony. We
observe its challenge and reclaimed power in the relationship between
Bulmaro and Romelia when she kicks him out of their apartment after a
heated argument. Out on the street and smarting from being emasculated
by the domineering female, Bulmaro contemplates “hacerse respetar a la
antigua, con un par de nalgadas y una buena cogida” (146) but hesitates to
follow through because he is conscious of his secondary role in the
household (and perhaps of changing norms that do not turn a blind eye to
domestic abuse). What follows is a debate with the little caudillo, which
encourages him to admit his mistake and climb back in bed with Rome-
lia, but Bulmaro resists, instead opting to pack his bags and leave. He
undermines the dictator’s wishes and takes the reins of subjectivity, or-
dering the caudillo to “baja[rse] del trono y entreg[arle] la corona” (149).
His domestic politicking has the desired effect, as Romelia chases him
onto the street, where “le bastó forcejear con ella un momento para com-
prender que había bajado a rendirse” (150). Their bout of make-up sex leaves
the two satisfied and fatigued as Bulmaro lights a cigarette and comments
to his penis: “te lo dije, compadre, a los dos nos conviene que me dé a
respetar” (150). Though at first glance it seems that the subject has over-
thrown the phallic dictator, upon closer inspection, we realize that noth-
ing has changed; Bulmaro is back in the household and is still the last in
command, subjugated by the will of Romelia and the libido of the caudi-
llo. He is removed from his previous position of power afforded by patriar-
chy and relegated to the role of the subservient housewife, not challenging
patriarchal systems of domination or the importance of the penis in deter-
mining masculine expression.3
The effects of giving complete control to the “little general” are illus-
trated by the Viagra-fueled Ferrán, who assumes the schizophrenic identity
of Amador Bravo: “di por muerto a Ferrán Miralles, el agachado solterón
sin agallas para ligar, y adopté como programa de vida el nombre de mi
álter ego Amador Bravo” (122).4 Unlike the dialogue established by Bul-
maro, which resists complete control, the penile politician who assumes
 126 · Chapter 10

power overruns Ferrán’s identity—splitting his libido from his impotent self.
By doing so, Serna modifies the transnational masculine and realigns it
with a traditional masculinity that emanates from the butcher homosocial
(evoked by the naming of Bravo). There is a melding of two distinct posi-
tions within the theater, as the new position now posits the realities of a
hybrid Latin American transnational male who is global and local in his
gender position. Ferrán/Amador’s body becomes a site of converging forces
that are artificially put into play by the pirated Viagra he buys from Bul-
maro. It seems that Ferrán metonymizes a political discourse of autocracy
and the potential failings of giving a single person or entity complete con-
trol, that is, of effectively merging the two masculine actors. He routinely
seduces and forces women to have sex with him and records them in the
act, fueled by a desire of “la contemplación, no de los cuerpos que había
poseído, sino de [su] propio desempeño en la cama. Narciso posmoderno,
lo que más [le] fascinaba de esa pornografía casera era ver[se] de pronto
con el nabo erecto cuando cam[biaron] de postura. Ellas eran un mero in-
strumento para glorificar [su] pene, para ceñirle la diadema de emperador
y pasearlo en triunfo por las calles de Roma” (177). The character’s mega-
lomania suggests that this type among Serna’s masculinities implies the
obsession with the phallus as not so much an issue of knowing the self or
individuating the body, but of putting masculinity on display—of asserting
a social hierarchy based in and around the penis.
Ferrán’s rise (both corporal and societal) furthermore inculcates him
within Connell’s hypothesized position as seen in his relations with a Paki-
stani immigrant. He plies her with alcohol and blues music, noting that “el
primer paso en corremperla era derribar sus prejuicios contra la civilización
europea” (173). His cultural and sexual colonization of the third-world fe-
male is compounded by the joy he feels when sleeping with Mercé, a rich
Catalan socialite who cuckolds her husband for the young, dashing Ferrán.
This second relationship inscribes the economic characteristics of trans-
national masculinity onto the protagonist when he notes that while kissing
his lover, her rich husband “estaba metido entre [sus] lenguas, de manera
que [él] besaba también su yate, sus hoteles, su astronómica cuenta ban-
caria” (171). It is not only the obsession with wealth that drives Ferrán
but also a need to assert himself over other men, as he “descubri[ó] que
buena parte de [su] placer provenía del daño inflingido al esposo engañado”
(171). Serna again stresses the confluence of a traditional patriarchal mas-
culine with a transnational masculinity.
This melding of two strains poses the value of the novel in analyzing
local reactions to nonlocal gender orders. Escaping, in a sense, the
 Materializing the Penis · 127

structuralist categorization of masculinities that Bryce Echenique, Vargas

Llosa, and Rivera Garza adhere to and play off against each other, the writ-
ing of masculinities in La sangre erguida is predicated on the importance
of the orthodox biological space/site in constructing and identifying gen-
der. By writing, voicing, and usurping the testosterone-fueled little caudi-
llo, the author effectively undermines the façade of power traditionally
associated with the penis (exposing it for what it is, a malleable site of
contention), creating a textual space where masculinity is problematized,
though not necessarily dethroned as a symptomatic expression of the real
body. If anything, Serna highlights the inescapability of the body in theo-
rizing the Masculine, which, as Ben Sifuentes-Jáuregui argues, is intrin-
sic to any notion of gender in Latin America.
 chapter eleven

Challenging Novel
Masculinities

The impact of acknowledging the inescapability of the body resonates in

the landscape of Latin American literatures, where the hegemony of ma-
chismo and phallocentric positions has greased the wheels of writing in the
transnational position. Though Serna does not explicitly challenge trans-
nationality (he does implicitly ponder its real effects), we see in La sangre
erguida an evolution of Rodríguez Matte’s protagonist, who situates him-
self in opposition to his peers working in banks and for multinationals. Men
and masculinities according to Serna can be dialogued with or belong to
the new hegemon—the latter a position that is not impermeable but ne-
gotiable and transmutable. Within this discussion arises a need, then, for
tropic (and not metaphorical, as is the case of the technological body) fig-
ures that confront Connell’s also tropic position.
What is poignant in Connell’s sociohistorical synonym for the Mascu-
line is the increasing discord it has inspired in the field of masculinity
studies. The criticism directed at transnational business masculinity as a
concept can be summarized into two rough categories. On the one hand,
we find a challenge of the very idea of hegemony when theorizing gender
(Coles 32). This line of thinking, however, often fails to accurately under-
stand the fluidity of Connell’s original scheme. This fallacy is succinctly
treated by Demetrakis Demetriou when he notes that “hegemonic mascu-
linity generates not only external but also internal hegemony, that is, hege-
mony over other masculinities. In this second sense of the term, hegemonic
masculinity refers to a social ascendancy of one group of men over others”
(341). This second sense of the term therefore accurately describes the

128
 Challenging Novel Masculinities · 129

position of transnational business masculinity as a gender expression that

ascends above local extant models.
The second debate, though, is more convincing, in that it problematizes
Connell’s vision of the role of transnational business within a global order.
What is posited is that no global position can really be hegemonic in reach
(Jefferson 66), because to be so would imply a systemic shutting down
of local cultures and normatives. This critique is elaborated by Beasley
(“Rethinking” 92) when she notes that Connell fails to engage with litera-
ture that contests globalization, or that promotes other notions of the very
concept. These points of contention, in harmony with the previous line
of critique, force us to pause and ponder the validity of a transnational
masculinity that oversees and controls a hypothesized world order.
The transnational figure has already been textually woven into Latin
American narrative explorations of the effects of globalization, urban-
ization, and commercialization, resonating with Connell’s notion that
“neoliberalism . . . works at the level of organizational life . . . at the level
of personal life, re-shaping our understanding of the social agent” (“A
Thousand Miles” 247). The inclusion of this neoliberal trope in these dif-
ferent contexts channels Connell’s notion that “the gradual creation of a
world gender order has meant many local instabilities of gender” (“Masculini-
ties” 16), but that “one response to such instabilities, on the part of groups
whose power is challenged but still dominant, is to reaffirm local gender
orthodoxies and hierarchies” (17). It comes as no surprise, then, that a sec-
ond panel of masculine tropes permeates these narratives, oblivious at
times to transnational businessmen, yet unabashedly phallogocentric. Here
we can cite the teenage protagonist in Barrio Alto, or the disenfranchised
mechanic Bulmaro in La sangre erguida, for these reactive agents are often
unreactive given their failure to confront the avatars of neoliberalism.
Jaime Bayly, an emblematic figure within Generation Alfaguara, has
written a series of novels that are distinctly autobiographical (No se lo digas
a nadie [1994], Y de repente, un ángel [2005], and El canalla sentimental
[2008] among others) and a second series that follows a separate trajectory,
focusing less on the realities of a drug-using polysexual member of the
upper middle class and more on systems and relationships of power. This
second line can be traced through La mujer de mi hermano and El cojo y el
loco, where characters often go nameless, and the narrative stops to pon-
der and reflect on philosophical and ethical questions. What we see in
the stylistic simplicity of El cojo y el loco and La mujer de mi hermano is
the use of types (akin to Serna) in lieu of developed characters as a
metaphor of the times, a structured and systematic mise- en- scène of the
 130 · Chapter 11

vicissitudes of gender, which in the former is a treatise on the state of

contemporary Latin American masculinity. A further characteristic of
Bayly’s type- descriptive narrative in El cojo y el loco is the presence of an
omniscient narrator who always positions himself at a critical distance,
both from the traditional diegetic elite and from the very locus of the
narrative, Lima. By doing so, the narrator locates us at a critical distance
that permits a further analytic study of the typologies and their intricate
relationships.
The challenge mounted against Connell’s theorization of a new hege-
monic masculinity in the twenty-first century is put into practice in La
mujer de mi hermano, where the protagonist and his sister-in-law cuckold
the brother, who works in a bank. The nuances of transnational business
masculinity are not lost on this character, as he spends the majority of the
day laboring in a central financial institution in an unnamed Latin Ameri-
can city. He dresses in business suits, bends the definitions of marital loy-
alty when on business trips abroad, and spends hours on his fitness and
physical appearance, reminiscent of Connell and Wood’s hypothesis that
“treating oneself as an entity to be managed” (356) accommodates within
the physical body an economic doctrine of profitability, capital gain, and
limited loyalty to any one corporation. The narrative strategy deployed in
La mujer de mi hermano, however, falls short of positing an alternative to
the neoliberal brother and instead focuses on emasculating the figure
through the philandering wife and the repeated insinuations of his own
repressed homosexuality. The novel ends with the neoliberal male agree-
ing to father what is surely his own nephew, on the one hand suggesting
that capitalism as a model is limited in its sustainability as a viable status
quo for future generations, yet on the other, putting forth a more ominous
reading of the neoliberal male, as a body that disregards traditional sys-
tems and hierarchies in favor of a future based only on profit and the un-
dermining of all other local masculinities, for by assuming fatherhood, he
annuls the usurping brother/father of the child.
The figure of the cojo, then, appears as a literary motif after Bayly’s first
engagement with the transnational male, though we can see distinct par-
allels between the hegemonic order in El cojo y el loco’s bourgeois pre-
neoliberal order and the globalized metropolitan space of La mujer de mi
hermano. What the former suggests, when read against the latter, is that
though it is theoretically catchy to postulate cogent and new models of
hegemony, the internal structures of domination do not significantly differ,
that is, there cannot be any true “new” form of the Masculine, just replica-
tions of extant positions. El cojo y el loco traces a gendered system in Peru
 Challenging Novel Masculinities · 131

immediately prior to the implementation of globalizing neoliberal moves,

which permits a reading of masculinity that connects both epochs, espe-
cially given the fundamental demarcation of the business-hegemonic model
in La mujer de mi hermano.
The cojo as a meditative critique of the times can be traced through ear-
lier narratives, such as Enrique Terán’s El cojo Navarrete (1940), which
reflects on questions of race and social class in Ecuador, and Rodrigo Rey
Rosa’s El cojo bueno (1996), which narrativizes postwar economic systems
that foster inequity in Central America. Keeping these antecedents in mind,
we can observe the genesis of an indigenous dialogic affront to the posi-
tions at the apex of hegemonic structures in Bayly’s text. Divided loosely
into two different yet intertwining accounts of growing up during the sec-
ond half of the twentieth century, El cojo y el loco posits an archetypal read-
ing as the protagonists are reduced to their physical and temperamental
compositions. Through the naming of the cojo, Bobby Jr., and to an extent
the loco, Pancho, in relation to other competing masculinities, we see a re-
currence of the market of masculinities that is (unlike the theater) grounded
in a referent sociohistorical and cultural context. It is within its dynamics
of challenging positions that the novel is enabled to interrogate cojo and
transnational Masculinity.
The Latin American cojo is both an object and an agent within a
narrative-reflexive practice, where the narrative objectifies the imperfect
male body in relation to other orthodox representations of hegemonic mas-
culinity, yet at the same time imbues the trope as an active agent against
the hypothesized axis of a hegemonic position. The position here is that
the cojo as a textual mode acknowledges the presence of a hegemonic mas-
culinity that shares many similarities with Connell’s model, though the
Peru that El cojo y el loco uses as a stage is better known for its non-neoliberal
policies, namely the appropriation of private capital and land by the govern-
ment and the nationalization of a substantial part of foreign- owned inter-
ests. The novel, like Bryce Echenique’s musical interlude, includes the
presidencies of Fernando Belaúnde and Juan Velasco Alvarado, which
roughly coincide with the first stage of rapid economic growth in Peru’s
national gross domestic product in the twentieth century. This stage, how-
ever, remedied a liberal national economic model that allowed the rich to
get richer while domestic standards of living declined. The novel, there-
fore, locates the reader in what can be considered the crisis of the agro-
capitalist bourgeoisie. By situating the plot within a period of economic
upheaval caused by competing economic strategies, the text is at the cen-
ter of a historical point of contestation, where the emerging doctrines of
 132 · Chapter 11

privatization, free markets, and austerity measures come into dialogue

with government-led economic policies.
The cojo, Bobby, evokes a familiar conundrum of contemporary Latin
American masculinity, as “el cojo no nació cojo. Nació jodido. . . . Nació
jodido porque su destino era el de ser cojo” (11). This circular logic with
no viable exit, perhaps best articulated by Enrique Serna in his essays and
in La sangre erguida, summarizes the disconnect between traditional and
modern representations and ideals of gender, particularly when we note that
“cuando nació todo era felicidad porque era el hijo mayor, el que llevaba
el nombre de su padre, y porque era robusto, rollizo y varón” (11). The jux-
taposition between the traditionally virile aesthetics of masculinity and
Bobby’s condition points to a narrative preoccupation in El cojo y el loco
with the construct of masculinity in relation to the body, exemplifying the
notion of capital as object and agent. His physical disability, or what can
be viewed as a symbolic dephallicization, is something that is acquired, as
Bobby loses only eight centimeters from his right leg at the age of eight
when he contracts osteomyelitis. Prior to the illness, he is a happy and loved
child, described as “un niño mofletudo, moreno de tanto ir a la playa, de
anchas espaldas y piernas de futbolista, con la contextura de un boxeador
en miniatura” (12). The author proceeds to correlate this traditionally mas-
culine aesthetic with the commercial ethic of Bobby’s father, Bobby Sr.,
thereby connecting the virile youthful body, a symbol of traditional Latin
American heteronormativity, with a narrative evocation of the capitalist he-
gemonic trope: “El cojo, que todavía no era cojo, parecía haber heredado
el carácter agrio de su padre, que era un jefe implacable, despiadado, que
llegaba a la fábrica de neumáticos a las seis de la mañana y se paraba en la
puerta para tomar nota de los empleados que llegasen cinco o diez minutos
tarde, a los que descontaba el sueldo por la tardanza, sin escuchar siquiera
sus disculpas o explicaciones” (12). The father, a repatriated Irishman, be-
lieves that “el cariño excesivo podía ablandar el carácter de su hijo mayor y
convertirlo en un pusilánime, un sujeto apocado y abúlico, como le parecía
la mayor parte de los peruanos, cuyo país había elegido para vivir y en el
que había prosperado rápidamente” (12). His position, both as a foreigner
and as a successful businessman who fails to integrate into the local cul-
ture (he only speaks English to his offspring), evokes a formative version
of transnational business masculinity and questions the validity of re-
christening the hegemonic position as such, as its precursors freely ambu-
lated during neocolonial paradigms. The novel begs us to ask, how differ-
ent is the transnational male from extant capitalist masculinities? This
correlation is further anchored in the fact that Bobby Sr. “había triunfado
 Challenging Novel Masculinities · 133

en Lima y acababa de fundar un banco” (15), “[el] Banco del Progreso, el

banco más poderoso de la ciudad” (59), connecting him to the emergence
of the banking sector, which is a key component in the shift toward a free
market.
In El cojo y el loco we see the first hints of how Bayly creates a market
where an approximation of capitalist masculinity is allowed to come into
contact and dialogue with the alternative and culturally indigenous
masculinity of the cojo. It is here that we can begin to chip away at the theo-
rization of a transnational neoliberal masculinity as a distinct gender expres-
sion (a theme in La mujer de mi hermano). Also on this stage, the narrative
exposes the figure of the cojo as a textual alternative to the financially
obsessed father trope. Within the gender structure of the novel, the cojo is
initially an other, abjected from the spaces of family and power that tradi-
tionally house the social and political nuclei of the imagined community.
After the life-altering operation that leaves him lame, Bobby Jr. is exiled to
a “habitación al fondo del jardín, donde dormiría . . . acompañado siem-
pre de una empleada doméstica . . . no le dejaban participar de las fiestas,
de las comidas, de los cumpleaños de sus hermanos” (14). He is not allowed
to attend school like his peers and is considered “una mancha en la familia,
un error genético, una molestia para todos” (15). We can thus read the novel
as a fictionalization of the crisis of reproduction of the old order, which in
turn promulgates the shift toward the neoliberal space, but only if success-
ful, that is, if procapitalist strategies are embraced. The author, through the
cojo, succinctly deconstructs the old bourgeois family yet highlights the
gendered characteristics of Bobby Sr. as a purveyor of a capitalist model that
evolves with the times, especially since he is responsible for branching out
into the banking sector. The cojo’s exile from the heteronormative enclave
of Bobby Sr.’s house and family is heightened when Bobby Jr. escapes from
his room during a birthday party and proceeds to urinate on a birthday cake
in the company of invited guests. This act of protest is not without autho-
rial intent, for by staining the celebration, Bobby inverts his position as a
stained object (mancha) to a staining agent, formally establishing a chal-
lenger position within the cartography of power mapped out by the Mas-
culine. It becomes evident, then, that Bayly’s protagonist asserts himself as
a trope that enters the milieu of competing masculinities under the yoke
of Bobby Sr.’s business masculinity.
The latter’s reaction to the challenge is predictable, as he puts the cojo
on a boat destined for an English boarding school so that others may “edu-
carlo y hacerlo un hombrecito y meterlo en vereda” (18). To become a man
in this context is to be ingrained within the paternal model, as Bobby
 134 · Chapter 11

“estaba solo frente al mundo, solo, engominado, con saco, corbata, panta-
lón corto y un zapato con un taco bien grande para emparejarlo con el
otro zapato sin taco” (19). Of note in the description is an effort to super-
impose the aesthetics of business conformity over the cojo’s body, evocative
of Benja’s mindless consumerist peers in the Chilean text. Bobby Sr.’s at-
tempts to exert his control over the possibility of a challenging cojo mascu-
linity, however, are futile, as “durante esos cuatro largos años en los que el
cojo se hizo hombre, se hizo un hombre malo y vengativo y lleno de odio
contra el mundo” (19). This failed attempt at indoctrination into the new
capitalist order that the father represents is the result of the notion of an
inverted brothel (as the quintessential space of masculine becoming),
where the young male becomes the penetrated body, as “el viaje en barco
se le hizo eterno entre los vómitos por los mareos y los vómitos por las vio-
laciones que sufría cada noche cuando el capitán del barco y sus tripulan-
tes se turnaban sodomizándolo, metiéndole una media en la boca para
que no gritase” (20). The repeated gang rape of the cojo and his subse-
quent realization that “el mundo se dividía entre quienes rompían el
culo y quienes tenían el culo roto” (20) underscore the hesitation to com-
pletely disassociate cojo masculinity from traditional practices of sexuality,
where being active or passive often has more value in gender identification
than the object of desire. Though dialoguing with Connell’s axiom of
hegemonic masculinity, the cojo reaffirms local stereotypes of gender,
reminding us that theorizations of a global hegemony, such as the idea of
transnational business masculinity, must be debated, questioned, and
reconceptualized because the local does not simply go away.
The carnal lesson that the cojo learns on the boat is complemented by
a modification of the masculine aesthetic that was superimposed on his
body, as he reverts to the traditional model of the muscular and virile ma-
cho, thereby creating a physical referent to the challenge of the business-
man. He does not fuse together competing models, as is the case with
Ferrán, but undertakes a different subject position; he affirms: “mi cojera
es una tontería que puedo superar siendo un toro, la verdadera cojera es
cojear porque te han roto el culo tres ingleses borrachos turnándose para
montarse encima de ti y dejarte el resto de la noche cagando leche en el
inodoro. Yo seré de los que rompen el culo” (20). A contradiction in cojo
masculinity arises here, as the position is always defined by being handi-
capped, in terms of both a physical disability and the symbolic emasculation
of the subject. With “las espaldas anchas, los brazos hinchados y fibrosos [y]
el pecho de un atleta” (25), his lame leg is even more noticeable, forcing
him to hide it under clothing. The attempts at reestablishing the muscular
 Challenging Novel Masculinities · 135

male body as an alternative to capitalist masculinity is met, then, with

frustration and increasing violence, as Bobby realizes that hours in the gym
and repeated beatings of his colleagues cannot declassify him from the
semantics of the body, conditioning the cojo to spiral out of control in his
attempts at challenging the father model.
After completing his studies and returning to Lima, the cojo is fully sub-
jectified as a mature and competing force to the father, presenting an al-
ternative thesis to the representation of hegemonic transnational business
masculinity. Aware that he will never stop being a cojo, Bobby declares,
“mira, soy cojo, pero así cojo como soy te puedo romper la cara y el culo
cuando me dé la gana” (34), reiterating the place of the body and its ability
to engage in an epistemology of erotics. This affirmation of a local tenet of
masculinity furthermore forces us to reconsider just how global Connell’s
postulate is, supporting, in part, the detractors who argue that no true global
masculinity can be hegemonic. The reception the cojo receives attests to
this, as Bobby Sr. promptly exiles the mancha to the room at the end of the
garden, but this time the son reacts violently, warning, “no me hables así,
viejo conchatumadre, que la próxima vez te aviento por la ventana y te meo
encima” (35), connecting his newfound power to the event that caused
his ultimate banishment and rape. A similar confrontation of the father
occurs in No se lo digas a nadie, albeit in the semiautobiographical vein of
Bayly’s fiction, where the protagonist spits in the face of the businessman
figure of authority. The challenge posed here is subversive, as the homo-
sexual son refuses to assume the mantle of masculinity in neoliberalizing
Lima. We can read the father in the novel as a nontypological interpreta-
tion of the transnational trope, unlike the type depicted in La mujer de mi
hermano, and emphasize that what is being contested here is the hege-
monic grasp of the transnational male over the queer expression of the
son. The confrontation between Bobby Jr. and his father similarly poses a
tableau of challenging gender positions, albeit in a prior-to-the-Fujishock
context, thereby connecting the gender structures of El cojo y el loco to the
gendered episteme of transnational business masculinity. The author
traces a similar scene and compels the reader to identify the points of con-
tact between the hegemonic positions, centering us on the fact that Limeño
approximations to the Masculine do not necessarily distinguish between
neoliberal and bourgeois eras.
The cojo further stands in the face of what is expected of him as the
heir-apparent to Bobby Sr.’s business masculinity when he refuses to attend
university, spitting in the face of convention and asserting his role as a
mancha. Bobby, paradoxically, is not against capitalism or the economic
 136 · Chapter 11

doctrines of the bourgeois state, instead asserting himself as an anarchic

agent who does not have to comply with extant systems of masculinization,
as “[él] ya t[iene] plata, ¿para qué mierda [va] a estudiar huevadas que [le]
enseñen profesores culorrotos?” (35). By aligning himself to the importance
of capital, that is, by formalizing the economic ties that bind in the con-
struction of the gendered subject, the cojo gains a certain respect from his
father, who indulges his passion for guns and motorcycles and pays for his
trips to a brothel. The father, therefore, becomes an enabler of the cojo
within the latter’s assimilation into a capitalist masculinity, mirroring
Connell’s notion that (transnational) business masculinity does not theo-
retically liquidate local models of power but instead supplants current
hierarchies through the border- transgressing panoptical practices of
capitalist doctrine. There is no need for conflict when the challenger is
not actively engaged in the system that creates and facilitates the hege-
mon, or textual incarnation of hegemonic masculinity, as the cojo is only
a cog in the machine and not, at this point, a systemic affront. The point to
take away from this newfound alliance is that the father’s bourgeois mascu-
linity mirrors the theorized practices of transnational business masculin-
ity, furthering the thesis that hegemonic positions in Peru, at least, haven’t
greatly differed between the bourgeois and the neoliberal states. If any-
thing, the position of hegemony is held in place and proliferated through
the common denominator of a reliance on capitalism as an ethos, under-
lining Bayly’s transnovelistic critique of all bodies that domineer.
The friendship between Bobby Jr. and Mario, peers in terms of social
status and wealth but not in aesthetic conformity to the virile norm, shows
how the latter aligns himself with Bobby against the common figure of the
profit-minded father type. Bobby “de verdad quería a su amigo Mario, lo
quería porque era como él, un loco de mierda, un loco de mierda que nunca
en su puta vida quería trabajar en una oficina ni tener un jefe ni mucho
menos ser un jefe” (42). Both characters lead a life of excess, riding loud
motorcycles and shooting guns in the hours not spent at the local brothels.
This hard and fast brand of masculinity, a throwback to the previous stan-
dard of the macho male, echoes Connell’s notion that “one response . . .
on the part of groups whose power is challenged but still dominant, is to
reaffirm local gender orthodoxies” (“Masculinities” 17). This strategy, how-
ever, falls to the wayside as both Bobby and Mario fall in love with Dora, a
girl from a respectable and affluent family. The two men, as can be ex-
pected, compete for her affections.
The reaffirmation of a local orthodoxy of masculinities is furthered, in
this regard, when both characters are juxtaposed in their positive traits as a
 Challenging Novel Masculinities · 137

potential partner. In Bobby’s case, it is revealed that “los centímetros que

le faltaban en esa pierna los compensaba sobradamente en la pingaza que
se manejaba, veintidós centímetros medidos por el propio Mario” (45).
Dora, however, is scared of the cojo’s organ (a critique, perhaps, of its pre-
vious hegemony?) and chooses the more stable Mario as a partner. Betrayed
and taken aback by this choice, Bobby shoots Mario in the head during one
of their frequent duels, not before reflecting on what had brought him to
this point:

El cojo vio en su cabeza toda la sucesión de eventos humillantes que el

destino le había impuesto con una crueldad y una saña que parecían
no tener fin, vio a su padre insultándolo . . . vio a los marineros violán-
dolo, se vio solo en el internado . . . vio a Brian tratando de darle un beso,
vio a su padre escondiéndolo de sus invitados . . . vio a su amigazo
Mario robándole a Dorita, vio a Mario, su hermano del alma, comiéndole
la boca a Dorita como si fuese una puta más. (107)

The accumulation of events that define the genesis of the cojo as a victim
by birth and by circumstance forces him to kill and to assert himself once
again as a violent and marginalized masculinity. After the killing, the pro-
tagonist resumes his courtship of Dora and viciously rapes her in a hotel.
What the text elicits is that the cojo only achieves and asserts power when
enacting a per formance of violent, aggressive masculinity, that is, a vari-
ant of the butcher homosocial or the extant ontological model that has,
as suggested by Bayly and Serna, been domesticated by the hegemony
of late capitalism. Bobby’s assumed gender role is not at the apex of the
slowly neoliberalizing state and rests below the controlling position of
the capitalist father, who has evolved to using other means to procure
sexual satisfaction.
The cojo’s actions leave Dora pregnant, forcing her parents to rush into
a marriage of convenience. A final possibility of integration into the capi-
talist order is presented at this point when Bobby Sr. finds Bobby a job at
the local General Motors factory. The naming of the company is not hap-
penstance, as it reflects postbourgeois free market inversion in Peru’s econ-
omy, permitted by the doctrines of capitalist expansionism, which laid the
groundwork for the neoliberal episteme that characterizes the hegemonic
males in No se lo digas a nadie and La mujer de mi hermano. As expected,
the cojo’s tenure lasts only a few months as the American CEO is forced to
fire him after he repeatedly harasses the women who work at the plant.
Bobby’s father realizes that his efforts to refashion his son are futile, as “su
 138 · Chapter 11

hijo el cojo no había nacido para trabajar allí ni en ninguna parte . . . ese
inútil había nacido para joderle la vida a todo el que pudiera” (141), and
decides to exile him to the country. The moving of the cojo from the city
to the country is the final stage in the disenfranchisement of the model as
a challenging masculinity, because away from the city (that was so cruel to
Carlitos in El huerto), Bobby is permanently defined as a mancha, a failed
genetic bourgeois experiment in regeneration: the runt of the litter unable
to find sustenance and therefore doomed to death.
The writing of a challenging model to the hegemonic position proves
original and well-structured in El cojo y el loco, because in opposition to
other contemporary works that write and challenge the transnational male,
Bayly’s novel brings to the fore a connective tendon between the bourgeois
and the neoliberal state. The challenge mounted and the challenging trope
are written into the epoch of demise and birth that overlaps in the biogra-
phies of the cojo. More importantly, however, is the unchanging posi-
tion of the hegemon, for the position of control within the gendered
structure of the diegesis is regimented not by virile, violent manliness
but through a formal and open espousal of capitalist doctrine. The author
puts forth the notion that sustainable masculine hegemony, whether bour-
geois or neoliberal, is successfully reproduced only by the commitment to
economic liberalism, and not necessarily by the defining episteme of glo-
balization. If anything, a gendered reading of El cojo y el loco points to the
fallacy of theorizing new positions of hegemony, since the transnational
business paradigm is only an evolution from the bourgeois capitalist
model.1 The age- old adage that the rich get richer remains in effect, even
as the manchas of the cojo and the loco pose a challenge, highlighting a
second adage that hegemony is always hegemonic, even if we try to call it
by another name.
Conclusion
Of Tropes and Men

In addition to cojo masculinity, several other tropes of resistance in con-

temporary Latin American fiction bear mentioning as indigenous textuali-
ties that challenge a neoliberal gender order. The first figure worth citing
is that of the journalist, the pen-in-hand urban chronicler who untangles
and decenters the Masculine as a system and a position of oppression and
corruption. Note here, for example, the protagonist and his mentors in
Alberto Fuguet’s Tinta roja (1997) or the writer turned detective in En-
rique Serna’s El miedo a los animales (1995). Aesthetically disheveled but
intellectually strong and inquisitive, this mode of masculinity relies on the
rewriting of history and other official discourses as a challenge to the pow-
ers of the hegemonic. The journalist or writer, armed with the queering
power of words and fiction, is able to counteract master narratives and de-
crees, exposing the Masculine for what it is and positing several exit strat-
egies away from patriarchal control. Through the linguistic and mediatic
field, journalistic masculinity poses a threat to order, suggesting, in a macro
sense, that the work and narratives produced by contemporary writer-
journalists are viable strategies to combat the tensile forces of globalization
and the subjugation of the local to the transnational.
Another potential for challenging patriarchy is evidenced in recent texts
from the science fiction genre and how they question the binary of tech-
nology/biology as it relates to gendered bodies. Working with the idea of
transnationality, Santiago Roncagliolo situates Tan cerca de la vida (2010)
in an indeterminate yet futuristic Tokyo. The narrative picks up the story
of Max, a logistician working for the multinational company Corporación

139
 140 · Conclusion

Géminis, as he arrives in a postmodern city to participate in a conference

on artificial intelligence. The novel develops Max’s feelings of not belong-
ing to the identity espoused by the multinational and his subsequent affair
with Mai, a hostess at the conference hotel.
Roncagliolo’s Tokyo is a carefully constructed site of disconnection and
simulation, discursively disconnected from the global network, which
Rodríguez Matte alludes to, by the quarantine operations at Narita airport:
“Bienvenido a Tokio. Si siente algún tipo de malestar, fiebre o tos, pase a la
enfermería” (9). The control enforced at entry points into the city, which is
to say a calculated reckoning of those subjects allowed within its discursive
walls, suggests that the author has created a space that is not the real
Tokyo, but is instead an assembled site of debate. It is a controlled, nonpo-
rous city-text (evocative of the center in El huerto and El cojo) that comes
to life as Roncagliolo dialogues with broader questions of technology, mas-
culinity, neocolonialism, and globalization. The city of Tokyo in Tan cerca
de la vida becomes a series of images and simulacra, as Max spies a suc-
cession of images “[que] había visto en otras ciudades, la mayoría sólo en
películas: un castillo Disney, un puente de Brooklyn sobre un fondo de
edificios, una Torre Eiffel. Tokio parecía infestado de réplicas, como un
parque temático de las grandes ciudades” (10). The author suggests that
the Tokyo we observe and read in the novel is nothing more than a col-
lage of other metropolises, a pastiche of the modern world that can easily
be dislocated to any other global city.
Any allusions to a global space, however, are conflicted by the inclusion
of characteristically Japanese vignettes, which the author emphasizes to
lend credibility to his simulation of Tokyo. The cemetery-like cubicles that
serve as overnight hotels for overworked urbanites who miss a train to the
suburbs is not science fiction, though the protagonist’s surprise would sug-
gest otherwise. Similarly, the manga-inspired café and the cat brothel, where
city dwellers without pets go to get their furry fi x, are not figments of
Roncagliolo’s imagination. This play between veracity and simulation,
self and other, subject and object, is a repeated trope in Tan cerca de la
vida, as emphasized by the Corporación Géminis billboards that dot the
city’s landscape. Showing closeup shots of frogs and other living and non-
living subjects that are reflected over a clear pool with the slogan “Corpo-
ración Géminis, Tan cerca de la vida, Como dos gotas de agua” (116), the
narrative proposes a consideration of reality and subjectivity that is rooted
in the visual and experiential. Roncagliolo undoubtedly sparks inspira-
tion from Hollywood projects that repeatedly depict those spaces that
come together in his vision of Tokyo, but further skims off near-future,
 Of Tropes and Men · 141

posthumanistic celluloid projects like Blade Runner, the Terminator series,

and Minority Report, to name a few, which explore the role of humans and
their identity/body.
The author’s reimagining of Hollywood is not the only filmic source for
Tan cerca de la vida, as the neohorror scenes between Max and a mysteri-
ous girl in the hotel’s elevator lend a sly wink to the Japanese horror genre
that has enjoyed recent critical and financial success, particularly with
Hollywood remakes of cult favorites such as The Ring (1998), The Grudge
(2000), and Dark Water (2002). This renaissance in the Japanese horror
genre is characterized by the recurrent figure of the demonic zombielike
child, which signals a narrative continuity with a horrific and covered-up
past. The inclusion of this figure in Tan cerca de la vida provides an autho-
rial clue as to the true nature of Roncagliolo’s protagonist, adding to the
discursive separation of Max and his surroundings from a textually vera-
cious Tokyo or identity.
The development of a distinctly Japanese cinematic referent in the novel,
along with the traditional inclusion of Hollywood and Mexican cinema
tropes and figures, calls to attention the divide and binary the author em-
phasizes with the visual cues and propaganda for the corporation, pro-
phetically named after the Zodiac constellation represented by a set of
twins, which on a symbolic level enshrine the dialectic of self that Ronca-
gliolo attempts to decipher in the novel. Nonfraternal twins, as we know,
are genetically identical. Their genotypes are replicas, with identical genomic
expressions at all loci. There is, however, by scientific logic a single source,
which is to say that within a pair of identical twins, one is always the replica
of the other. The source of origin, even within a seemingly identical sam-
pling of identical twins, is what interests Roncagliolo’s investigation into the
questions of identity that espouse Tan cerca de la vida.
He establishes a point of entry into this quandary by juxtaposing Max to
his colleagues and to the larger ideal of the Géminis man put forth by the
corporation and its leader, Marius Kreutz. The relationship between the
individual and the company, the individual and society, is what propels
the narrative forward, as Max’s unrest with belonging to the carnivalesque
assemblage of men, machines, and automatons establishes a diegetic point
of contention that permits an examination of his own identity as it relates
to the group, a linkage built in part on the pursuit of the origin suggested
by the repeated twin image. The group, composed of educated interna-
tional men of all shapes, sizes, and backgrounds, is carefully depicted in
the narrative, escaping the superficial characterization of transnational
business masculinity. Roncagliolo goes beyond diegetically confronting the
 142 · Conclusion

businessman with subordinate masculinities or female bodies, instead

embarking on a thorough examination of how Connell’s idea of a global
Masculine operates in relation to other competing masculinities.
Transnational business masculinity as a gender expression is intimately
connected to the operational capabilities and characteristics of the neolib-
eral economy, characterized by a lack of allegiance to any par ticular so-
ciocultural context and an egotistical reliance on the subject rather than
other communities and their interests. Men who express this gender con-
figuration are therefore concerned primarily with their own financial
well-being, without taking into account the negative effects their finan-
cial transactions may have on the environment, women, and local hierar-
chies. They view corporal bodies as marketable economic units within a
global system of production. From a relational standpoint, their position
subordinates local masculinities and femininities through the exporta-
tion and mechanization of jobs, and through their noncommitment to
strengthening local infrastructures and social ser vices.
From an aesthetic standpoint, and perhaps more pertinent to the textu-
alities of fiction, transnational business masculinity is slick, styled, and pred-
atory. The men that work in Corporación Géminis adhere to this mold, as
they are meticulous in their gray suits and stylishly coiffed hairdos. The
chief executive officer of Géminis, Kreutz, is the bastion of Connell’s sub-
ject position, as he is quick to define this new breed of masculinity, this
new world order that is intent on global domination, and that is very differ-
ent from previous avatars of phallic power. Kreutz, more importantly, gels
together the idea of a unified transnational gender expression, as he always
uses the first person plural subject when talking about the corporation and
its dealings, “decía somos una familia. O nos preocupamos por usted” (66).
There is no individual or self within the position of transnational mascu-
linity, calling to attention the paradox between the subject and the group
that exists in Connell’s theorization. The individual who professes this
brand of hegemonic masculinity must be highly self-reliant and self-serving
in his behavior but can only attain this position of power through belong-
ing to a larger corporation of like-minded individuals, thereby emphasizing
the unviability of the position and its economic model. This paradox, how-
ever, simply adds to the critique of neoliberalism as a short-sighted plan for
development that does not foster any sense of community or continuity to
current systems and structures of power.
The men that populate the convention center are representative of this
paradox between self and group that characterizes Connell’s theorized
position of power. They come from different backgrounds, countries, and
 Of Tropes and Men · 143

cultures but are unified by their uniforms and their adherence to rising
within the power structures perpetuated by Géminis. Power within the
multinational company (MNC) is created and perpetuated by the execu-
tive branch that makes decisions. Therefore, when Max introduces him-
self to his colleagues as someone who works in logistics, they ignore him
and instead wonder if peripheral departments have also been included
in the meeting. This is the first in a series of juxtapositions made be-
tween Max and the drones of the corporation, emphasizing Roncagliolo’s
questioning of the hierarchies and hegemony of transnational business
masculinity.
The men in the corporation are also subjected to the nature of neolib-
eral economics, as they are “etiquetados, como productos con códigos de
barras” (40), like products in a global supply chain that can always be tagged,
located, and accounted for. The detail paid to this masculinity is careful
and thorough in Tan cerca de la vida, differentiating it from other narratives
that simplistically critique the role of the businessman in contemporary
Latin American societies and its impact on other gender expressions. By
creating Géminis, its workers, and Kreutz, the author textualizes the
threat of transnational business masculinity, putting forth a fictive study of
its systems, hierarchies, and semantics of power. This is fine and well, as
from a literary standpoint, an examination of the trope is needed, but what
is the greater purpose of delving into this power structure? Particularly
within the petri space that Roncagliolo quarantines, what is the narrative
aim of writing the transnational businessman?
The answers to this problematic are rooted in the experiential and ex-
perimental protagonist, who infiltrates the convention on artificial intelli-
gence from his seemingly peripheral role as a logistician, which does not
belong to the executive order of Corporación Géminis. As evidenced in his
rejection by his peers, Max plays a challenger role to hegemonic mascu-
linity. He does not occupy the categories of subordinate or complicit mas-
culinity but is instead involved in a textual work in progress, a narrative
examination of how hegemony is constructed and what makes it tick. It is
through the corporal body of Max that Roncagliolo attempts to challenge
the omnipresent hegemony of Kreutz and company.
This challenge is carried out through a calculated per formance of
gender on the part of Max, who, after encountering the transnational busi-
nessmen of the company, “se dio ánimos mentalmente. Se dijo que todo
era cuestión de actitud. Ensayó movimientos naturales, de hombre de
mundo” (43). But this per formance fails abruptly as his coworkers ignore
his standing within the company, because his job description, not his
 144 · Conclusion

virility or musculature, qualify him for inclusion within the homosocial,

as “se dio por vencido en el propósito de codearse con sus colegas. En vez
de confundirse entre ellos, trataría de apartarse de ellos” (45). The con-
struction of Max’s masculinity fails at performing a viable position against
the hegemonic expression of gender, which Connell argues is the di-
lemma faced by contemporary masculinities; yet Roncagliolo follows Ro-
dríguez Matte’s cue of reimagining the male body. Unlike the new his-
torical novels that recalibrate the anus, testes, and mouth as discursive
sites of expression, Roncagliolo’s futuristic narrative computerizes the male
anatomy, but not through a superficial semantic system of equivalencies
between the body and hardware as was seen in Barrio Alto. In Tan cerca
de la vida, the distinction between technology and anatomy is blurred, as
the narrative confuses what is robotic and what is alive and breathing
within a larger matrix of how masculinities subsist under the yoke of he-
gemonic masculinity.
The fusions between technology and masculinity become a reality in the
novel as the company-assigned PDA (personal digital assistant) “evalúa to-
das sus señales vitales, incluso las físicas” (66). The handheld device be-
comes the new neural center of the globalized subject, who is connected
to other bodies through the global positioning satellite system that plots the
minions of Géminis in relation to their desires, whether they be restaurants
or brothels and massage parlors. When Max is feeling lonely, for example,
the device pops up the following message: “sé de un lugar que ofrece com-
pañía femenina. ¿Quieres la dirección? ¿Información sobre tarifas?” (62).
Technologizing the body does not stop at the male characters of the
corporation but extends toward all spaces of the novel, punctuated by
the convention center, where the latest advances in artificial intelligence
are paraded. Mixing in with the groups of international men in suits is a
plethora of robotic projects that perform various tasks. The little boy who
sings oldies is the first example of cybernetic engineering, though the de-
signers “le habían dejado la parte posterior desnuda” (21) to emphasize the
artificial nature of the singing subject, who is merely a glorified jukebox in
terms of the tasks it can perform.
Other robotic bodies in Tan cerca de la vida are not as clear-cut in their
adherence to either side of the binary robot/human. The domestic assistant
BIBI, for example, recognizes voices and commands and is designed to
perform everyday household tasks. Kreutz summarizes what she is able
to do, including “contestar el teléfono (de hecho, ella es el teléfono)” (26).
Another robotic figure, DEV, is designed to deactivate explosive devices and
is marketed as a global necessity for police and security forces. Kreutz notes
 Of Tropes and Men · 145

that “él y BIBI son en este momento nuestros módulos estrella” (29). Note
the genderizing of the robotic body, as the domestic, anthropomorphic-
ally svelte servant with “labios sensuales” (83) is automatically rendered
female, whereas the brutish “cubo metálico con una puerta que se abría y
se cerraba, como si fuese a tragarse a alguien, y un solo brazo con una
pala mecánica” (27) is necessarily masculine. Commenting on the future
of robotics and cybernetics, Michelle Chilcoat affirms that “the obsoles-
cence of the body also implied the loss of biological matter, traditionally
viewed as the immovable or fixed material upon which to construct gen-
der differences and inscribe male privilege” (156). But this promise, we
see, is resisted from a linguistic standpoint, as the robotic, nonhuman
bodies are still categorized as male and female, based on their performa-
tive and aesthetic characteristics. The possibilities of technology in rela-
tion to gender are often posited avenues into dislocating traditional bina-
ries. As Claire Taylor and Thea Pitman argue, technology and cyberspace
have a “contradictory position, in that [they] offer [their] users the oppor-
tunity to swap gender at will, but frequently the alternative gender identi-
ties chosen have recourse to gender stereotypes” (13–14). The technologi-
cal and cybernetic in Tan cerca de la vida fulfill this evaluation of a
gendered posthuman existence, as the machines engineered, designed,
and produced by the company perpetuate the gender structures of Cor-
poración Géminis.
Following this line of argumentation, the technological gendered
bodies of BIBI and DEV do not pose a challenge to the hegemonic, but
they operate instead as a rhetorical tool in the construction of Max as the
true challenger to Kreutz and the corporation. Just as he is juxtaposed to
the executive branch of Géminis, Max is contrasted with the automatons
that exemplify the purely robotic. While riding the elevator with one of
the robots, she asks him how his day has been, to which he replies, “no
dormí nada. . . . Me emborraché con unos tipos que trataron de atacar a
una mujer. Y luego tuve pesadillas” (82). Adhering to the categorization
of nonhuman, thereby implying a cerebral inability to produce coherent
language, the robot responds, “yo también tengo una buena mañana” (82),
emphasizing the disconnect between Max and the alternative to transna-
tional business masculinity at the convention.
Before continuing, it bears mentioning that Max’s reflections on his
own behavior and performance qualify him as robotic and repetitive in his
need to categorize and organize information as part of his job, characteris-
tics that also appear in his descriptions of his subjectivity, such as his views
on love: “Era un dato fuera de su sistema lógico. Un electron libre de su
 146 · Conclusion

experiencia” (85). By alluding to the body as a machine, Roncagliolo

seems to hint that Max is more robot than human, at least more robot than
transnational masculinity, but disqualifies this notion through the inco-
herent dialogism between the protagonist and the robot. By playing the
character off against several positions along the masculine and robot-
human binary, the narrative calls attention to the problem with conceiv-
ing the subject along a twofold system, putting forth instead a theory of
continuity that is less drastic in its separation of man from machine, and
from power.
This strategy is brought to fruition in the subsequent conversation be-
tween Max and Kreutz, as the former notes that BIBI, DEV, LUCI, and
the other examples of artificial intelligence are not very intelligent at all.
Standing in front of the executive board of directors headed by Kreutz,
Max affirms that LUCI is just a machine and lacks the cerebral coher-
ence to be truly intelligent. The CEO surprisingly supports his position,
exclaiming that “LUCI es una máquina. Ése es el problema, y no hay nada
que podamos hacer para solucionarlo . . . Por mucho que aceleremos sus
movimientos, incrementemos su repertorio de frases hechas o la forremos
con cuero de cerdo, no conseguiremos cambiar ese hecho esencial” (86).
Kreutz’s, and by definition, the corporation’s aim is to create something
more than machine, something “capaz de aprender, de adquirir todas las
habilidades que le demande su entorno, de adaptarse a cualquier situación
nueva y extraer de ella conclusiones para prever situaciones futuras”
(88). The corporation’s intentions, however, are not to create a human but
to engineer life, placing the onus on the action of programming, design-
ing, and manufacturing gendered bodies that are enslaved to the deified
position of the transnational corporation and its par ticular trope of
masculinity.
It is at this juncture that Roncagliolo’s novelistic imagination appropri-
ates the clichés and repeated scenarios of science fiction and Hollywood,
where man and machine coalesce into a cybernetic hybrid that is neither
one nor the other, eliminating the binary and establishing a continuum of
being that challenges the hierarchical power of the hegemonic. It takes
little detective work on the part of the reader to deduce that Max is not a
simple worker in the corporation, as he is invited to this high-level meeting
and is favored over the homosocial mass in understanding the corporation’s
next move. His personal circumstances and the textual cues that point to
an unresolved past and domestic situation with his wife furthermore add an
aura of suspense and suspicion to his background. This is cemented by
Kreutz, as he notes that Max is different than “los miles de mediocres que
 Of Tropes and Men · 147

tenemos en nómina y que se pasan la vida hinchando sus méritos para con-

seguir promociones” (89). The protagonist is neither robotic nor masculine
(in the hegemonic sense) but is instead something else.
This other identity is the mixture of human and robot, the cyborg that
Donna Haraway theorizes in her manifesto against patriarchy (38–39). The
novel, however, rehashes the narrative recognition of otherness that has
characterized neofuturistic Hollywood narratives revolving around a point
of self- consciousness that establishes the subject as nonhuman. Akin to
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character in The Sixth Day (2000), who realizes
that he is a clone of his previous self, Max realizes that his current body has
been reengineered and reproduced. He used to work for a large business
but committed suicide after murdering his family and cutting out the
eyes of his daughter. He is reprogrammed and regenerated just as he ar-
rives at the Tokyo airport, emphasizing the spatial separation of the narra-
tive in the simulated space of the Japanese capital. Max’s moment of
unveiling, or auto-subjectification, occurs just as Kreutz markets the pro-
tagonist’s body to a group of Japanese investors, commenting that “Max
está rediseñando toda la estructura comercial de nuestra corporación. Es
un trabajo que debería hacer un equipo de técnicos, ingenieros y aboga-
dos, pero él lo está realizando en solitario, ¿no es increíble?” (249). Any
doubts that Max is a cyborg are dispelled as Kreutz recalls the Hollywood
blockbuster The Matrix and its imagined world of artificial intelligence and
generated experiences, explaining to Max that he is now a product of the
transnational corporation’s engineering.
Writing Max as a cyborg body in opposition to the transnational busi-
ness masculinity of his peers at Corporación Géminis posits a strategic chal-
lenge to the predicament of masculinities in the twenty-first century, given
Connell’s emphasis placed on the overarching power of the hegemonic over
previous systems of control, such as the military (we must remember that
this new incarnation of masculine power does not adhere to traditional
codes or aesthetics of masculinity or phallic power, as Kreutz affirms: “Esto
no es el ejército” [68]). The cyborg as a strategy of subverting patriarchy
is forwarded by Haraway, who argues that “cyborgs have more to do with
regeneration and are suspicious of the reproductive matrix and of most
birthing. . . . We require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities
of our reconstitution could include the utopian dream of the hope for a
monstrous world without gender” (38–39). The power of the cyborg as a
body lies in its nonconformity with the process of reproduction, which
stresses the anatomic differences that give rise to a semantic, sociological,
and theological system of gender. By reneging from the commitment to
 148 · Conclusion

the duality of reproduction, the cyborg body resists the genderizing tenta-
cles of patriarchy and can posit a theoretical paradigm for understanding
the self, rooted in the blurring of boundaries and dualities.
What is important to note at this point is Haraway’s vision for the cyborg
as a decentering force against patriarchy and its subjugation of women.
The role of women and men in Tan cerca de la vida is not nearly as
problematized or problematic as the relationship between transnational
business masculinity and subordinated masculinities. Roncagliolo’s text
maintains the domination of man over woman, as evidenced by the sex-
ual relations between Max and Mai, the hostess at the convention who
starts a romantic relationship with him. We learn that Mai too is a cyborg,
a regenerated suicide victim who, given the technological limitations of
earlier models, cannot speak but instead communicates through a silent
language that Max and other cyborgs understand. Sex between Max and
Mai is consensual but always violent and assertive, as the male takes a dom-
inating role over the female cybernetic body. The author is careful, how-
ever, in writing these scenes, as he dabbles between the line of rape and
BDSM in describing how Mai lets out “bocanadas de aire que podían ser
tanto de placer como de sufrimiento” (178). The subservience of the female
is not purely coital, as Roncagliolo’s narrative condemns the female cyborg
body to an objectified position that appears sporadically in the second per-
son register, seemingly placing the reader within the position of the domi-
nated female. The feminine lacks narrative and narratological subjectivity
in Tan cerca de la vida, to the extent that only the male cyborg can actively
stand against Kreutz’s transnational business masculinity. Therein lies
Roncagliolo’s reinterpretation of the cyborg manifesto, as his foray in the
blurred bodies of the nonhuman and nonrobotic is not necessarily con-
cerned with decentering patriarchy, but is instead a challenge of one mas-
culinity by another.
Cyborg masculinity thus puts in motion a possible escape from the
“inescapable body” that Connell underlines as ontological in the theo-
rization of masculinities. Importantly, Roncagliolo’s novel is inserted in
a trajectory that examines the possibilities of the cybernetic in a global age,
as Geoffrey Kantaris observes:

The Latin American cyborg seems to condense specific anxieties sur-

rounding the dissolution of collective identities and collective memory,
anxieties which connect historically to the experience of colonization on
the one hand and, on the other, to the erasure of the nation as a space of
collective agency and memory, an erasure which seems to be inscribed
 Of Tropes and Men · 149

in the very mechanisms which affect the transition from nation-state to

global market. (52)

The Latin American cyborg is essential, therefore, in concentrating these

subjective anxieties that are reactive to broader processes of change, but it
maintains the essential anxiety behind the crisis of masculinity produced
by demographic changes in the continent. The Latin American iteration,
therefore, is not Haraway’s cyborg, which potentiates the dissolution of
gender, but is instead a body that, from a literary standpoint, provides a
metonymic challenge to the forces of change and the structures of subjuga-
tion. The protagonist in Tan cerca de la vida is not a condensing of the anxi-
eties of gender change; he is a symbolic coalescing of the anxiety faced by
Latin American men at the mercy of transnational business masculinity,
which has successfully supplanted and eviscerated traditional metaphors
and positions of power. The writing on the body here, unlike Rodríguez
Matte’s technologically imagined body, is built on the fantastic identity
of the cyborg as a symbolic affront and not as a theorized reappropria-
tion of the male anatomy. It is not preoccupied with gender demo-
cratization or the ending of patriarchal systems, but is focused on decen-
tering the omniscient power of the hegemonic, which other narratives take
as axiomatic. At first glance, it seems that Roncagliolo’s writing echoes the
words of Claire Taylor and Thea Pitman, who argue that “rather than aping
metropolitan literary currents, . . . Latin American writers are feeling the
need to think through the implications that global technologies have for
the writing of the Latin American experience” (20). Upon further review,
however, it is clear that the author is not preoccupied with the local or
continental crisis of masculinity; instead he is scripting a transnational,
nonspecific text that lacks political, geographic, and linguistic markers of
origin, much like the products of a neoliberal economy.
The textual process of writing a challenge to regimes of power is not
complete without a mention of the roles of revolutions and revolutionaries.
Going back to the earlier years of Leftist upheavals in Central America, to
modern writings of revolution, the figure of the revolucionario bears men-
tioning as an axis around which gender systems can be balanced. Gioconda
Belli’s La mujer habitada is useful in understanding and characterizing the
figure of the revolutionary who wants to dethrone the caudillo. A contem-
porary writing of this trope can be found in Cristina Rivera Garza’s Nadie
me verá llorar and Pedro Lemebel’s Tengo miedo torero, where young groups
of men organize urban movements that seek to usurp the Masculine body.
In both situations, the figure, or trope, of revolutionary masculinity is
 150 · Conclusion

characterized by an agile and sensual body, virile and attractive to the

female and male gaze, yet carefully separated from the expectations of
caudillo masculinity. They are often poorly dressed, unwashed, and sweaty,
antithetical to the hygiene of the textual Somozas and Pinochets, yet
alluringly sexy in their bad-boy image. The rough but groomed erotic body
is combined with a linguistic inaptitude at the moment of formulating
sentences or writing memorandums, in sharp contrast to the narrative strat-
egies of journalistic masculinities. As challengers to the Masculine order,
their language demonstrates a refusal to adhere to spelling and grammatical
norms, planting a challenge to the powers that be in both the form and the
content of their manifestos. The trope of revolutionary masculinity is, how-
ever, only revolutionary in the political sense, in its stated desire to dethrone
the government or the autocrat, and is in no shape or form indicative of a
revolution of gender norms, as these movements succeed in perpetuating
the evils of homophobia and sexism. The female protagonist in Belli’s novel,
for example, is made to perform domestic duties and is initially regarded as
a mere housemaid to the revolutionary fighters. She does, however, demon-
strate that masculinity as a gender expression can also be performative,
though it is importantly located in and inscribed onto the body.
The novel has been read as a socially conscious manifesto that poses the
idea of a “new woman” in Latin America, structured around the female
protagonist, Lavinia, with several men holding peripheral places within
the machinations of the narrative. In the fictional country Faguas, a central
setting in Belli’s narrative universe most recently seen in El país de las
mujeres (2010), the protagonist finds work as an architect and leaves her
parents’ house to take up residence in the place left to her by her late
spinster aunt. By doing so, she essentially severs herself from the traditional
expectations and roles of women in the (barely) fictive Central American
country. Part of this separation includes a social shift as she enters into a
relationship with a colleague, Felipe, and slowly gets caught up in his un-
derground revolutionary movement to overthrow the military junta. This
process of becoming part of the movement is instrumental in under-
standing the development of the protagonist, for the narrative heavily
focuses on her thoughts and behaviors as she assimilates into an actively
subversive role against the status quo, a similar process to Matilda Burgos’s
first interactions with the young rebel Cástulo.
The notion of performativity in relation to masculinity is built in the
novel around local (if we are to read Faguas as a poorly veiled Nicaragua)
understanding of gender and desire, that is, masculinity “is based on a man’s
aim . . . of penetrating . . . no matter whether the sexual object is male or
 Of Tropes and Men · 151

female” (Irwin xxiv). For men to assert themselves as hegemonic, they must
“assert their masculinity by way of practices that show the self to be active
or passive . . . every gesture, every posture, every stance, every way of act-
ing in the world is immediately seen as masculine or feminine, depending
on whether it connotes activity or passivity” (Lancaster 114). Masculinity
is, therefore, about being active and being the penetrator; penetrating,
furthermore, implies a violent and performative gesture.
Lavinia essentially acts out what Judith Halberstam calls female mascu-
linity, a “unique form of social rebellion; often female masculinity is the
sign of sexual alterity, but occasionally it makes heterosexual variation;
sometimes female masculinity marks the place of pathology, and every now
and then it represents the healthful alternative to what are considered the
histrionics of conventional femininities” (9). A woman with a vagina who
acts and performs a role underlined by the sociohistorically contextualized
nature of masculinity is, in effect, performing female masculinity. Therein
lies a problem with the thesis of solely placing a premium on the body as a
discourse of definition in gender, for how can we then define Lavinia? The
answer lies, perhaps, in allowing some flexibility to the construct, and not
relying overtly on either side of the dyad. The body and performance are,
after all, mutually important components in the construct of Bayly’s cojo.
Furthering the assertion that masculinity is produced by an activeness
of the subject, we note how Lavinia shifts from a passive stance toward an
active performativity within the rebel group. She first cringes at the thought
of Felipe bringing the injured Sebastian to her house, noting that “sólo quiero
dejar bien claro que yo no comulgo con estas ideas. No tengo madera para
estas cosas” (69). Her hesitance gives way to a more active involvement in
the politics of the movement, as she slowly assimilates its ideals of revolution
and violence, slowly performing their cultural brand of masculinity. The
protagonist initially positions herself in opposition to the larger group,
acknowledging that “pero ella no era de esa estirpe. Lo tenía muy claro. Una
cosa era no estar de acuerdo con la dinastía y otra cosa era luchar con las
armas contra un ejército entrenado para matar sin piedad, a sangre fría. Se
requería otro tipo de personalidad, otra madera” (69). Note here in addi-
tion to her reluctance to be active that she reinforces violence as a signi-
fier within the hegemonic discourse of the regime, bringing us back to
the butcher homosocial in sexually symbolic terms.
The doing of gender in the novel reveals a precocious practice of con-
structing the corporal body that is rooted in the performativity of the
female. The body reappears, as masculine per formance in Lavinia is an-
tagonistically linked to her corporal femininity. During her morning ritual,
 152 · Conclusion

for example, she applies makeup “ante el espejo, aumentando el tamaño

de sus ojos, los rasgos de su cara llamativa” (12). When arriving at a con-
struction site, she maintains the theatrical costuming of femininity: “El
sudor corría por sus piernas ajustándole los pantalones a la piel, la camiseta
roja a la espalda. El maquillaje manchaba el kleenex con que se secaba la
cara” (27). She is detailed in keeping up this visage—after visiting the con-
struction site and before meeting again with Felipe, she puts on the cos-
tume of woman once more: “Ella se metió al baño y se secó con la toalla
la piel. El polvo en sus brazos se hacía lodo al contacto con el agua. Se veía
pálida en el espejo. Sacó el colorete para recomponerse el maquillaje antes
de hablar con Felipe” (29). What is critical in the narrative self-awareness
of performance in La mujer habitada is the use of reflections, as the protago-
nist sizes up and modifies her appearance in accordance with the observed
image in the spatial referent of the mirror. Interestingly enough, Itzá, the
indigenous voice operating in a different time and space, undergoes a simi-
lar process involving the mirror, as seen in the epigraph to these pages.
Belli weaves together temporalities that explore the connections between
an oppressive past and a patriarchal present, a narrative tool already seen
in the new historical novels analyzed in part 1 of this volume. Although Itzá
does not gaze into the reflective glass to retouch her lipstick or check her
cleavage, she does see in the mirrored surface an image of herself. The
mirror and the reflected image come to be the Butlerian costuming or im-
ages that establish or permit what society deems the proper performance
of the subject. Lavinia, for example, is aware of the importance and power
of the mirror, stating that “cuando uno menos lo imagina resulta que
traspasa el espejo, se entra en otra dimensión, un mundo que existe oculto
a la vida cotidiana” (94).
Her development of a masculine position is contingent on her under-
going a textual méconnaissance, which then initiates her into the imagi-
nary order. The fixation on the image in the mirror and the acknowledge-
ment that it exists permits the assumption of the masculine ideal, which
leads to her involvement and need for belonging in the revolutionary
movement. This movement, as metonymized by Felipe, represents revolu-
tionary masculinity, or the masculinity associated with politically subver-
sive groups. In a sense, it is an Oedipal masculinity, as its primary goal is to
usurp the hegemonic variant through a symbolic and ritualistic beheading
of Masculine apex. It operates under the same principles of violence and
activity, with the exception that it is not grounded or stoic like the father or
dictatorial masculinity, as embodied by General Vela in the novel. Other
characteristics of this trope include a failure to identify with state-sponsored
 Of Tropes and Men · 153

tentacles of control, such as the law and medical fields, and an avowed
deviation from hegemonic linguistic norms that cement the authority of
government over the bodies that constitute the nation. Revolutionary mas-
culinity, however, is not a form of complicit or subordinate masculinities,
as Connell theorizes (it surprisingly falls outside the otherwise holistic
structure), but instead hovers over the sociocultural model, gun in hand,
waiting to usurp traditional hierarchies of power.
By beginning to assert herself and her agency in the relationship with
Felipe, Lavinia assumes a performance of gender that strays further from
the performed femininity of the social cotillion and is, instead, more in tune
with the rebels who cautiously organize acts of sabotage around Faguas.
By means of this Oedipal masculinity, Lavinia gains agency, progressively
becoming more active against the Masculine, as the next day at work after
the shooting of a fellow revolutionary, Sebastian, she encounters her own
reflection in the metallic walls of the office. At the thought of being found
out in her role of the previous night, which included active involvement
with the counter-government forces in an operation, she assures herself that
“nadie lo va a notar. . . . Soy la misma. La misma de todos los días” (77). We
are then told, however, that she “no estaba muy convencida; en su interior,
la sangre se mecia de un lado al otro en una tormenta de adrenalina” (77).
The internal struggle at this moment symbolizes a break in the character’s
psyche, as she idealizes and identifies with the challenging trope of revolu-
tionary masculinity.
It comes as no surprise, then, that the dialectic between the character
and the reflection is not played out further in the novel: there are no more
moments of self-evaluation. Lavinia, who before getting involved with Fe-
lipe and the movement was a lost and fragmented woman, has now gained
a misrecognized idea of herself, performing and embodying the masculine
type. This is evidenced by her renewed affinity for all things violent and a
new affinity for assault weapons and bombs, which previously agitated her
fragile femininity. She starts assimilating into the homosocial by repeating
the performative gestures of its masculine members, such as folding the
sheets of her bed neatly, thereby emulating Sebastian and Felipe’s diligence
and precision, though she is not actively conscious of why she does so, as
“se levantó y recogió las sábanas, doblándolas cuidadosamente sin saber por
qué” (100). Their attention to detail stresses their military nature as a char-
acteristic of their masculinity, as we must remember that their aim resides
in usurping the extant military regime. Lavinia further assumes a linguistic
belonging to the group when Flor, another member within the movement,
instructs her to “sustituir el ‘yo,’ por el ‘nosotros’ ” (63).
 154 · Conclusion

The change from being a passive object to an active subject is further

illustrated by the metaphor of a doll. Lavinia places documents given to
her for safekeeping in the empty chest cavity of the figurine and promptly
announces that “ahora tendrá corazón” (118). The revolutionary documents
buried in the inert female body metaphorically imbue the subject with a
joie de vivre, for her heart is made present and palpable as the rhythmic
and omniscient soundtrack to the narrative: “aceleró en las calles holgadas
de sábado por la tarde; el sonido rítmico de su pecho era la única inter-
rupción en el silencio del miedo” (126). Activity, not passivity, is the per-
formance she strives to capture. Activity and not passivity is what denotes
masculinity. From being a primping-in-front- of-the-mirror architect to in-
filtrating the Somocista’s palatial stronghold, Lavinia underlines a perfor-
mativity of masculinity to engage in the movement and to put ideas into
practice, as she “anhelaba el momento de participar más activamente” (199).
By reading the protagonist through the optic of masculinity, and not as
a(nother) transgressive female, we illuminate a separate critical route estab-
lishing Belli’s protagonist within a genealogy of subjectivities that actively
struggles against the (writing of the) Masculine as a monolithic stereotype,
only to be engaged with othered bodies. By doing so, we enter a critical
site of unraveling, where action (violence) can be understood as the only
way of supplanting political and gender dictatorships.
The example I use here to illustrate revolutionary masculinity opens,
in turn, two separate tangents on the writing and state of masculinities in
contemporary Latin American fictions. On the one hand, it posits that
gender criticism can be read against solely gynocentric routes by focusing
on the structural and semantic masculine schema extant in certain nov-
els, such as La mujer habitada or Nadie me verá llorar, and by reading be-
yond the archetypal (and quite frankly, overdone) “transgressive female”
trope. I say this knowing that it inspires a visceral and almost automatic
backlash, as the oppression of femininities and women continues unabated.
The argument being made here, however, posits that by avoiding this
critical route, and by instead engaging the systems and structures of the
Masculine (through a study of all gendered bodies), criticism situates
itself as a dialoguing agent that can then potentially trace a way out of
patriarchy, instead of overly relying on the act of transgression, which is,
of course, effective in highlighting the injustices of patriarchal gender
systems, but equally ineffective in actually plotting an alternative episte-
mology, because transgressive bodies are, more often than not, only al-
lowed to transgress and do nothing more. The second tangent underlines
the need for local and culturally attuned models, metaphors, and tropes of
 Of Tropes and Men · 155

masculinity to be written against domineering or transnational gender

positions. By doing so, Latin American fiction will resist the (culturally and
financially) tempting proposition of solely writing neoliberalized (read, glo-
balized and McOndo-ized) bodies that bend to the imperialistic and
homogenizing whims, norms, and cannibalizing practices of the Global
North.
Notes

Introduction

1. This analytics of gender, or a study of its implications within a literary treaty of

subjectivity and identity in relation to the social and the nation, has been attempted
in several critical works from the first decade of the twenty-first century. A useful tome
is Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba’s Modernity and the Nation in Mexican Representa-
tions of Masculinity (2007), which adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the study of
gender in Mexico. The title of the book presents it as an exploration of masculinity
and the homosocial mass before, during, and after the Mexican Revolution. In reading
the critic’s work, however, it is clear that the author’s punto de partida is the dichotomy
extant in masculinity studies, with heterosexual, or heteronormative, masculinity on
one end of the binary, and everything else negated, abhorred, and persecuted by it on
the other. This latter group becomes the core of his analysis and focuses on how queer
representations are formed and survived by hegemonic masculinity. Domínguez-
Ruvalcaba’s exercise in itself is fundamental in building an understanding of Latin
American masculinity, as it emphasizes the position of control held by the Masculine
throughout the twentieth century. In another study dedicated to national identity in
relation to masculinity, Robert McKee Irwin diachronically examines Mexican texts
from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to develop a theory of masculinity and its
heteronormative constructs that confronts Octavio Paz’s traditional take on Latin
American sexuality. Citing Paz, Irwin argues that the aim of sexual relations, not the
object of desire (as is the case in North American identity politics), is important in
sexuality (xxiv). Focusing on how the construct of hegemonic masculinity changes
from the noneroticized homosocial of the “hombre de bien” (47) of the nineteenth
century to more transgressive relationships in the twentieth century, Irwin develops a
theory of queer masculinity that challenges Paz’s ideas. Guillermo Núñez Noriega’s
Just Between Us is an anthropological study of interest to readers that follows the
queer studies angle to masculinity favored by Domínguez-Ruvalcaba and Irwin.

157
 158 · Notes to Page 3

Unlike the cultural and literary scholars, Núñez Noriega bases his work on case stud-
ies and interviews (very much like Raewyn Connell’s seminal Masculinities) and evi-
dences the tensions of border identities and how cultural osmosis has led to changes
in Mexican masculinities. Of note in the study is the author’s hesitance to use Anglo
terminologies, a move that must be applauded for shying away from implicit academic
colonialization.
Another must-read study of masculinity is Rebecca Biron’s Murder and Masculin-
ity: Violent Fictions of Twentieth- Century Latin America (2000), in which she examines
masculinity in the detective novel of the continent, not confining herself to country,
period, or movements. Like Domínguez-Ruvalcaba, Biron’s text rarely talks about mas-
culinities, focusing instead on the relationship between the Masculine and subju-
gated femininities. The methodology behind her analysis positions masculinity as a
hegemonic, phallocentric entity that dialogues with women, who are in effect the
primary concern of her text. Biron’s point of departure is the binomial conception of
masculinity as being a pole with a necessary opposite, or other, with masculinity and
the other mutually defining each other. It is clear that Biron, like Domínguez-
Ruvalcaba, views gender as a phenomenological construct, though she sidesteps the
ontological questions of masculinity, which are left undiscussed. As an example, we
can glean from the text how the novels included in the study “explore the actual
erasure of women and its implications for prevailing images of masculinity” (7).
According to Biron, masculinity is about violence, about the repression of the other,
whether it be queer or female, and the imposition of a heteronormative discourse in
the national literary space. This contention sustains a powerful inquiry into the Mas-
culine, as violence is indeed a primal tactic in its establishment and perdurability, an
idea seen in the later work of Ana Belén Martín Sevillano and her discussion of recent
Cuban narrative.
Reading Connell, Biron notes that though few men meet the normative definitions
of masculinity in a given cultural and historical context, “they may nonetheless par-
take of the power associated with hegemonic masculinity” (8). Biron does not delve
further into Connell’s structuralizations of masculinity into more categories, however,
and instead focuses solely on the violence exerted by men in Latin America who are
“in crisis” and who use violence to “simultaneously celebrat[e] and undermin[e] hege-
monic masculinity” (8). What I would like to highlight, and develop later in parts 1
and 2, is that these men occupy a paradoxical position, as both perpetrators and vic-
tims. Taking this observation in hand, I add to Biron’s excellent analysis a study of how
violence operates within circles of men, and how the oppressors against women are
equally oppressive against subordinate male bodies. Societal violence stemming from
and against groups of men, rigidly held in position by hegemonic masculinity, is evi-
denced in Franz Galich’s Managua, Salsa City (¡Devórame otra vez!) (2000), where
violence is both a fundamental narrative and a linguistic device. The city of Managua
as depicted in the novel adheres to Biron’s idea of a Latin America whose “contempo-
rary violence points to crisis tendencies” (8), as Galich, by means of a tightly spun
narrative focusing on a prostitute and her band of con men, weaves a tale of urban
violence and corruption in a city that lays bare at night the open wounds of a bloody
civil war. Linguistically, the text is violent in its abrupt changes of narrative voice from
the first to the third person and vice versa. The prevalence of colloquialisms, idiolects,
and nonstandard syntax in the text signals a violent shift from a normative narrative.
 Notes to Pages 4–5 · 159

The violence against women of Biron’s theories does exist in the novel, but on a fanta-
sized level. The one-time street but now club-going prostitute, Tamara, tells her potential
john, Pancho, that she was sexually abused as a child. When asked how many people had
raped her, she explains that she was gang-raped. Pancho does not believe her because
she later corrects herself by saying her cousin assaulted her and that her parents did
not ever discover the rape.
This verbal intercourse plays itself out over a greater game of seduction between
the two, as they dance, eat, and converse with the topic of sex for money never openly
discussed in the third person narrative, though it is explicated in the first person shifts.
Physical violence in the text, however, is only exerted between men. Just as Biron no-
tices an allegory between the men and the nation in the texts she studies, Galich evokes
a similar motif in the characters he builds in Salsa City. Pancho is an ex-soldier who
works as a houseboy for an affluent family vacationing in the United States. Tamara sided
with the Sandinistas. Pancho drives a modern Toyota, whereas the group of con men
who pursue him around the city drive an antiquated Russian (communist) Lada (15).
The Calle Ocho duo, another group of men who get caught up in the con game run
by Tamara, are Americanized, speak Spanglish, and do not fit the local model of the
“latin lover” (60). One of them is both rat faced and an opportunist who attempts to
seize Tamara for himself. Even among Tamara’s ragamuffin band of thieves, there are
individual characters who subscribe to macro-level subject positions. Mandrake is an
ex-soldier who fought against the Contras. Hodgson is a drug dealer of African heri-
tage, who plays the role of the hypersexualized black man, or what Connell calls
marginalized masculinity.
With so many male characters populating a microcosm of the nation within
Galich’s diegesis, the issue of violence cements the struggles between men. In fact,
Tamara is treated as sacred and always protected, even at the cost of male lives in the
final showdown in Pancho’s place of work. Contrary to Biron’s claim that masculinity
is an assertion of violence against women (who represent the other) to promulgate a
new national space within times of crisis, Galich shows how violence and masculinity
need not always be formulated with an analytical focus placed on the other. Violence
can and is exerted by and against men, who negotiate and define the various incarna-
tions of masculinity within their historical and political context. A clear example of
this occurs in Mario Vargas Llosa’s La fiesta del Chivo (2000), where an impotent and
incontinent dictator unleashes physical and emotional violence onto a community of
men who live in a constant state of fear. In this particular case, the Peruvian writer (re)
writes a historical account of the last days of Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship and exam-
ines the symbols and practices of regime-based masculinity.
2. Recent tomes have examined masculinity in nineteenth- century Latin Amer-
ica, while there is also a boom in studies examining masculinity in the medieval and
colonial periods.
3. José Quiroga goes to great lengths to underline this disconnect in his seminal
Tropics of Desire, where he argues against a transnationalism of identitarian politics
in reading and writing about Latin American sexualities. His gesture is hopefully
echoed throughout these pages, as I strongly resist simply reading the South from
“over here.”
4. I am not suggesting that hegemonic masculinity is a fixed position, as it is by
definition a relative construct. What I am affirming, however, is that its relation to other
 160 · Notes to Pages 5–16

variants of masculinity is now placed in contention, as open borders and markets dis-
engage traditional enabling mechanisms.
5. The shift to neoliberal strategies, however, is not a universal in Latin America.
I recognize here that “Latin America” itself is often only an academic placeholder, and
that any type of generalization tends to run into fallacies and errors. Economies such
as those of Cuba and Bolivia in recent years have followed a different trajectory, and
the election of socialist-leaning governments in Chile and Uruguay, for example, point
toward a rethinking of the neoliberal episteme. In the Cuban case, Ana Belén Martín
Sevillano’s piece on recent Cuban fiction and the writing of masculinity and violence
is an excellent example of how non-neoliberal climates are also prime sites of analysis
for masculine relations.
6. See Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba’s study of Mexican masculinity. Beyond
actively defining the project of nation, “the male body claims its centrality as the hero
figure[;] this centrality makes his body an object of desire. . . . On the other hand, if
virility is prestigious, effeminacy is dishonorable,” thereby placing virility at the center
of national aesthetics (65). Men are not only central as political bodies; they are also
primordial in aesthetic representations and allegorical constructions of the nation.
7. Guillermo Núñez Noriega reminds us that “cultural and political forces, even
in modernity, are complex and contradictory; and the tensions generated by such con-
tradictions can be detected in sexual and gender power relations” (12).
8. This converse process is excellently developed in Domínguez-Ruvalcaba’s ex-
amination of nineteenth- and twentieth- century Mexican texts, where the masculine
embodies a political ideal and position and is potentiated with a corresponding sym-
bolic capital.
9. What I am advocating follows a paradigm established in the field of masculin-
ity studies of placing the critical onus on masculine subject positions to deconstruct
patriarchal and heteronormative structures. This perspective, while acknowledging
feminist and queer approaches, examines and detangles the positions of the Mascu-
line in relation to other masculinities, instead of solely focusing on the Masculine as
a binary position to the Feminine or the Queer. By doing so, we move into a terrain of
gender studies that has been lacking in depth, where what is being examined is really
the relationship between men, as masculinities are also deemed to be oppressed by
the Masculine. The proposed line of inquiry borrows from feminist and queer ap-
proaches in that it textually decenters heteronormative and patriarchal positions, but
it tends to focus, instead, on textual male bodies and entities as potential positions for
this very deconstruction.
10. See my arguments regarding domestication in “La hermana perdida de Angélica
María” for examples of how domestic subnational actors “perform” the economy.

Part I

1. As Carlos Pacheco explains, the transition to democratic governments on the

continent has led to a rise in the writing of novels of and about dictators (7). Com-
menting on the inefficacy of previous critical work done on the dictator narrative, which
established congruencies and disjuncts between novels and reality, Pacheco surmises
 Notes to Pages 16–17 · 161

that a new branch of study must undertake an analysis of the narrative in itself and
examine how and why dictators are written (42). María Dolores Colomina- Garrigós
notes that the dictator novels from the nineties evidence a shift from their antecedents
in the seventies and eighties. The critic summarizes previous studies done on the genre
and establishes three distinct phases. Colomina- Garrigós’s addition to the field lies in
her identifying a new phase in the genre beginning in the 1990s, when authors leave
behind questions of representation and authorial authority in favor of writing about
marginalized and alternative versions of history.
2. This investigation follows Norma Fuller’s assertion that “la identidad de género
masculina debe ser entendida dentro de un marco mayor, como la expresión de un
orden sociopolítico, fundado en el control de los medios estratégicos de producción y
reproducción, como son el parentesco, los sistemas económicos y políticos y del poder
simbólico que igualan al orden patriarcal con el ‘mundo real’ ” (57).
3. Seymour Menton establishes six general characteristics for this genre of novel.
First, there is an attempt at probing philosophical ideas, instead of simply mimetically
reproducing the past. Second, there is a distortion of history through omissions, exag-
gerations, and anachronisms. Third, there is a fictionalization of historical characters
that differs from the writing of purely fictitious characters. Fourth, Menton mentions
the usage of metaliterary devices as authors comment on their own works, exhibiting
a consciousness of the process of writing, of putting pen(is) to paper. Fifth, the narra-
tives in this genre are bonded to other texts and discourses as intertexts. Last, Men-
ton notes the dialogic, carnivalesque, parodic, and heteroglossic nature of these new
novels (42–45). María Cristina Pons agrees with Menton on most points but further
adds that these new historical novels do not pretend to be neutral in their takes on his-
tory: they are subjective and stress the relativity of historiography (256). Furthermore,
they reject the supposition of historical truth and the notion of historical progress, and
put forward new nomos of representation from the margins of the social. Ramón Luis
Acevedo, citing Fernando Aínsa, adds to the critical corpus of the new historical novel,
noting that the genre promulgates a multiplicity of perspectives and interpretations of
the past and a distancing from the mythological hegemony of historiography (4).
4. The use of Connell’s theory in dealing with Latin American literature and cul-
ture is documented and prevalent. In an excellent anthology on masculinity in Latin
America, Lo masculino en evidencia: Investigaciones sobre la masculinidad (2009), José
Toro- Alfonso repeatedly cites Connell’s ideas in his introductory remarks (14–23).
Other critics, such as Oscar Misael Hernández, use Connell’s ideas on hegemony and
its challengers without specific citation. Hernández uses the terms “modelo de mas-
culinidad hegemónica” and “modelo normativo de masculinidad” (68) in “Estudios
sobre masculinidades: Aportes desde América Latina” (2008) without referencing Con-
nell’s work in Masculinities (1995). Hernández further adds that “los estudiosos/as de
los hombres en America Latina ha propuesto superar la noción de masculinidad y su-
plirla por masculinidades, reconociendo la diversidad de experiencias e identidades de
los hombres y los riesgos de una perspectiva esencialista que encierre a todos los hom-
bres en una sola identidad” (68). The critic attempts to summarize the state of mascu-
linity studies in Latin America but fails to identify their underlying model. Lastly, Ana
Belén Martín Sevillano’s essay on Cuban masculinities also relies on Connell’s model
to theorize a hegemonic position that regiments the praxis of violence in both the
domestic and the public spheres.
 162 · Notes to Pages 20–39

Chapter 1

1. Keeping with this idea, Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo in La fiesta del Chivo similarly
berates his challengers by removing their testicles. In opposition to local bishops who
sermonize against the regime, Trujillo exclaims, “¡Los maldecidos! ¡Los cuervos! ¡Los
eunucos!” (32). By figuratively castrating those opposing his rule, Trujillo affirms that
the clergy are “traidor[es] a Dios y a Trujillo y a su condición de varón” (32).
2. Readers familiar with the novel and the subsequent filmic adaptation will see
echoes here of Arenas’s descriptions of cruising and seducing partners by the sea. The
aqueous, long a symbol of the feminine, becomes a metaphor for sexual fluidity and
the breaking of binaries in Latin American cultural production, perhaps most notably
in recent cinema that focuses on gender subversion and same- sex desires. See my
article on Javier Fuentes-León’s Contracorriente for more information.

Chapter 2

1. In a similar stroke, the dictator Trujillo in La fiesta del Chivo never perspires in
public, and Ramírez’s Somoza uses copious amounts of Eau de Vetiver throughout the
novel.
2. Women are, however, characterized as simple goods of trade between men in
Vargas Llosa’s La fiesta del Chivo.
3. Trujillo’s impotence in La fiesta del Chivo is predicated by the spreading stains
of urine running down his leg. Similarly, prior to the castration of Román Fernández,
the dictator stains him with the putrefying excrement that spews from a burst sanitation
pipe around a military camp. The stain, the deviance from cleanliness, is ontologi-
cal to the nonmasculine. In Pedro Lemebel’s Tengo miedo torero, the voice of the
dictator (Pinochet) similarly mourns the poor masses that come to the valley to wet
their backsides in the river (48). In Ramírez’s Margarita, está linda la mar, the con-
spirators plotting the assassination of Somoza are systematically stained by ink and
grease (148). The stain, or “mancha,” that Melgar Bao observes runs contrary to eu-
genic discourses of modernity. The stained individual becomes an unwanted mem-
ber of society, or within the paradigm of patriarchy, an effeminate and castrated
subject.

Chapter 3

1. Vargas Llosa’s own thoughts on writing and being a novelist, including the pres-
ence of inner demons, can be found in Cartas a un joven novelista (México, D.F.: Ar-
iel/Planeta, 1997).
2. I am referring to the thinker’s conceptions of power as outlined in The History
of Sexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). More specifically, “power must be
understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the
sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization: as the pro-
cess which, through ceaseless struggle and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or
 Notes to Pages 42–46 · 163

even reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another,
thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradic-
tions which isolate them from one another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they
take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the
state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies. . . .
Power is everywhere not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from
everywhere . . . is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength
we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situa-
tion in a par ticular society” (92–93).
3. By “phallocentric,” I refer to the privileging of the masculine and the male (as
semantic sites of containing the psychic phallus) in the understanding and evaluation
of meaning and social relations and structures.

Chapter 4

1. During a recent lecture on this novel, I was chided by a member of the audi-
ence, who told me (quite brusquely and in an offended tone) to never refer to the pro-
tagonist as a transvestite, as the correct term is a transgendered person. I have several
problems with this assertion. First, by calling La Loca a transgendered person, we are
assuming that she is a woman cognitively “trapped” in a man’s body. Sifuentes-Jáuregui
asserts otherwise, and I tend to agree with him, as he argues that the transvestite blurs
the boundaries of male and female, and that transvestism cannot be confused with
wanting to be of the other sex. In his recent The Avowal of Difference, he argues that
“loca cannot be translated as gay, or even as queer” (201). My second problem with my
interlocutor’s terminology resides in the unabashed application of a North American
gender studies term to a very local figure who clearly does not associate herself/him-
self with women, but instead carves out a separate and very specific gender expression.
We can note this separation in her thesis on fellatio, as she argues that “las mujeres no
saben nada de esto . . . ellas solo lo chupan, en cambio las locas elaboran un bordado
cantante en la sinfonía de mamar” (100). It is through this act of gender disassociation
from the binary that I identify La Loca as a transvestite and not as a transgendered
person, as she shows no inclinations of belonging to the parameters of woman. The
problems faced by critics when talking about trans identities is perfectly novelized in
Santos-Febres’s Sirena Selena, where the only thing we can be sure about is the trans
nature of the protagonist, which is to say a state of being that is always in between
different positions, without necessarily subscribing to any single role or rulebook, es-
caping the lingo perpetuated by gender studies.
2. The connections between Tengo miedo torero and La fiesta del Chivo are vari-
ous. Society is portrayed in crisis, undergoing a moment of flux when a gubernatorial
paradigm shift may or may not occur. Lemebel’s novel, however, is politically distanced
from the present, unlike Vargas Llosa’s narrative, which flows from a poetics of alle-
gory, as his Trujillo is reflective of a certain other Peruvian autocrat. Vargas Llosa evades
ambiguity in his recent Travesuras, however, in which the voyeuristic, sadistic, and Japa-
nese Fukuda eviscerates the female body. As Oswaldo Estrada has noted, Fukuda
undoubtedly is representative of the japonés who controlled Peruvian politics for more
than a decade (171).
 164 · Notes to Pages 47–63

3. José Quiroga provides an equally demythifying anecdote about the quintessen-

tial Communist rebel Ernesto “Che” Guevara in an essay on Virgilio Piñera. He
recounts how when Guevara “saw a volume of Virgilio Piñera’s Teatro completo in the
Cuban embassy, he hurled it against a wall: ‘How dare you have in our embassy a book
by this foul faggot!’ he shouted” (168). Quiroga explains that this anger “testifies that
Piñera has already sexualized the revolutionary hero, he has turned him into a repre-
sentation, has furnished that representation with a (homo)erotics” (177). I argue that
Lemebel has not only sexualized the hero, but also made him a subject within the
homoerotics of politics.
4. The author himself never shied away from the public spotlight and frequently
dressed in drag. The photograph in the sleeve of the edition I used shows Lemebel
wearing a dress, his long hair collected in a disheveled ponytail, his eyebrows care-
fully manicured, and his face made up with rouge.
5. Lemebel’s queering of the Communist Carlos can be contrasted with a Vargas
Llosa Communist figure. In Travesuras de la niña mala, the protagonist’s “niña mala”
leaves Paris for Cuba to undergo military training to become part of the rebel forces
planning to invade Peru. True to form, and to the chagrin of the narrator, she becomes
the lover of Commander Chacón. Though the commander never appears as an active
subject within the text, he is imagined and written by the narrative voice as being a
virile and moustached macho who struts around with a pair of pistols on his hips (38).
Beyond the aesthetics of masculinity, he is sexually superhuman as he sports a dual
phallus.
6. In much the same way Trujillo did after digitally raping Urania in La fiesta del
Chivo.
7. The experience of paralysis following desubjectification is much like that experi-
enced by Trujillo in La fiesta del Chivo, who lies crying in bed after being unable to
achieve an erection.

Chapter 5

1. Bakhtin argues that the author channels the heteroglossia incorporated into a
piece of writing, animating these voices as though they are coherent, akin to the the-
atrical device of the performer who imbibes life through speech into a mannequin
(Dialogic 181). Lemebel’s narrative speaks the discourses of multiple groups and sub-
ject positions within and outside the diegesis in a complex polyphonic register that
illuminates the multiplicities of masculine identity. Similarly, Erving Goffman’s work
in Frame Analysis builds on the art of ventriloquism in the novel.
2. See Marilyn Miller’s anthology on tango in Latin America for essays on the con-
nection between dance, aesthetics, and culture.
3. For further reading into the history of film vis- à-vis literature, please consult
Brian McFarlane (381) and Linda Hutcheon (Introduction).
4. For a comprehensive introduction to the phenomenon of the soundtrack al-
bum, see Annette Davison’s Hollywood Theory.
5. Davison defines classical Hollywood scoring as a set of practices “united in the
aim of heightening the fictive reality of a film’s narrative” (2), which saw a reemergence
beginning with a series of disaster movies in the early 1970s.
 Notes to Pages 63–75 · 165

6. Lemebel makes no reference to the song “Tengo miedo torero” by Spanish co-
pla singer Marifé de Triana, who recorded the song in 1964. The song expresses the
fear a woman feels every afternoon she sees her adored torero fight a bull. The lyrics
are vaguely voyeuristic of the erotic agony of bullfighting and place the female (or ho-
mosexual) subject at a place of power, away from the violence of the ring, yet at the
same time intimately connected to the blood and death experienced by the male fig-
ure and the bull. The verses that La Loca sings, however, do not appear in the song.
7. Born Alberto Aguilera Valadez (1950), Juan Gabriel is a Mexican singer best
known for his rancheras, ballads, and pop music. Though strongly secretive about his
own sexuality, popular opinion holds him to be a quintessentially queer Mexican pop-
ular figure.
8. This idea brings to mind José Donoso’s La Manuela, in El lugar sin límites (1966),
who proclaims that “vieja estaría pero se iba a morir cantando y con las plumas pues-
tas” (16). La Manuela, unlike Lemebel’s Loca, never succeeds in queering an other
and is queered herself when she recounts how La Japonesa, a woman, cajoles her into
having sex to win a bet. Donoso, however, does not objectify the male body but in-
stead explores the violence exerted against homosexuals by other masculinities in a
rural Latin American village. He does objectify the transvestite’s penis, which is de-
scribed to be enormous, reflecting the importance placed in fiction on the physical
phallus to characterize the masculine in early and mid-twentieth- century fiction.
9. The relationship between the heterosexual revolutionary and homosexual bears
some resemblances to Manuel Puig’s couple of Valentín and Molina in El beso de la
mujer araña (1976). Their moment of physical engagement and the subsequent queer-
ing of the dissident Valentín, however, are mediated through the anus, which I argue
is a site of political discourse that is inscribed onto the male body, and which Puig uses
to challenge Argentine censorship and oppression during the 1970s.

Chapter 6

1. Jorge Rosario-Vélez provides a succinct yet complete bibliography of the bolero

in his article “Somos un sueño imposible.”
2. Though born in Havana, Cuba, Montero has lived for over half a century in
Puerto Rico. She is politically active and has taken part in proclamations presented by
the Latin American and Caribbean Congress for the Independence of Puerto Rico
(November 2006). She heavily favors a change toward sovereignty and independence
from North American legislative rule. In an interview given in February 2008, she ar-
gues that Puerto Rico “es una colonia de los Estados Unidos, y a nadie le gusta vivir
en un régimen colonial.” In interviews, Montero endorses a distinctively Latin Ameri-
can tradition to her texts instead of a North American heritage.
3. For an excellent structural analysis of the novel, see Robert Lauer’s article (1997).
The critic organizes his analysis around the perceived speed of narrative versus epis-
tolary text, which allows for an infusion of “ficción sexual” in the novel (46).
4. I resist calling this a moment of homosexual panic, since Fernando does not vio-
lently act out but instead firmly reasserts his position of dominance.
5. My musical metaphor is of course in reference to audiocassettes, not modern
digital recording technology, which in many ways erased the traditional practice of
 166 · Notes to Pages 80–88

placing more commercial and popular tracks on side A and demoted “filler” tracks on
side B. In the age of being able to download individual songs instead of whole albums,
the concept of a side has grown irrelevant, leading some popular bands and singers to
release B-side compilations for the true fans. These compositions tend to be more ex-
perimental, less mainstream, and evocative of the singer’s true essence as an artist and
thinker.

Chapter 7

1. Born in 1939, Bryce Echenique shares some similarities with another great
Peruvian author, Mario Vargas Llosa (1936). Their first novels were published in the
1960s (though Vargas Llosa publishes Los jefes, a collection of stories, in 1959), and they
have continued to write prolifically. In opposition to other writers of their generation,
and of their commercial and editorial grouping, the two Peruvians have managed to
keep with the times in their fiction. Vargas Llosa, for example, began to explore the
feminine world in his recent novels. His highly acclaimed La fiesta del Chivo, for ex-
ample, is structured around textual strategies of trauma, such as sudden flashbacks and
the meshing of a past traumatic incident with a superfluous contemporary occur-
rence. Bryce Echenique, on the other hand, jokingly refers to psychoanalytic theories
and methods of reading literature, as when Carlitos and Natalia attempt to psychoana-
lyze their own relationship. He ponders: “imagínate tú todo lo que se imaginarían los
discípulos de Freud, si se enteraran de esto” (212). They then suggest that their case is
either characterized by “gigantescos complejos recíprocos de Edipo” or “un caso de
predestinación fálico-clitórico-vaginal” (212).
2. The tune was originally composed by the Cuban- Spanish composer Ernesto
Lecuona, though Bryce Echenique references Black’s version of the song on the al-
bum Cuban Moonlight from 1969, temporally placing the novel at least after this date,
though the text suggests quite anachronistically that the events narrated occur in the late
1950s.
3. Please see the analysis of Cristina Rivera Garza’s Nadie me verá llorar in chap-
ter 2 of this volume.
4. See Norma Fuller’s chapter on masculinities in urban centers in Peru
(Hombres e identidades de género: Investigaciones desde América Latina).
5. The inclusion of this indigenous character in the novel highlights the problem-
atic of race and power that Bryce Echenique attempts to illustrate throughout his lit-
erary production. El huerto de mi amada is rife with characters, dialogues, and descrip-
tions that unearth the plight of the cholo in Peruvian society as he seeks a place of
belonging in the urban centers of power. For a brief introduction, see Jorge Bruce’s
excellent psychoanalytic study of Peruvian society in Nos habíamos choleado tanto:
Psicoanálisis y racismo (2007), including the illuminating epigraph by Vargas Llosa,
who argues that racism in Peru “nace de un yo recóndito y ciego a la razón, se mama
con la leche materna y empieza a formalizarse desde los primeros vagidos y balbuceos
del peruano” (5).
6. Belaúnde’s presidency was preceded by the democratically elected government
of Manuel Prado Ugarteche, who held office from 1957 to 1962. He too belonged to a
 Notes to Pages 92–96 · 167

wealthy, conservative, and patriarchal family. The presidencies of Belaúnde and Prado
were interrupted by a short military regime that lasted from July 1962 to the same
month of the following year.

Chapter 8

1. Born Franz Galich Mazariegos, the author died in Managua in February 2007,
not quite a year after publishing his last novel Y te diré quién eres (Mariposa traicionera).
This novel, along with its antecedent, was meant to compose the first half of a Central
American quartet of novels dealing with the social unrest in the region. Unfortu-
nately, Galich’s work is unfinished, and the use of music in the two remaining novels
can only be speculated. The void in critical voices on the author is also surprising;
aside from a few newspaper articles and web postings, there is hardly any examination
of his work from outside the literary circles of Guatemala and Nicaragua.
2. Several critics, including me, have examined the relationship between space,
bodies, and the socioeconomic episteme in Managua. See Venkatesh (“Towards a
Poetics”) and Quirós. On Tikal, Caña Jiménez’s neoliberal critique (“Vida resurgida”)
opens new points of entry into the author’s oeuvre, in addition to aiding the reader in
locating his production in contemporary Central American letters.
3. See Caña Jiménez’s theorization of an aesthetics of disgust in recent Central
American fiction in “El asco: Reflexiones estéticas sobre la violencia neoliberal en Cen-
troamérica.” Galich’s three novels can all be cataloged under this description that
seeks affective, phenomenological, and aesthetic parameters for locating contempo-
rary cultural production.
4. For an excellent reference on the genesis, history, and genealogy of this musical
genre, see Lise Waxer’s anthology Situating Salsa: Global Markets and Local Meanings
in Latin Popular Music. Waxer argues that the spread of salsa in the 1970s across Latin
America, and in the 1980s and 1990s to Europe, Japan, and Africa, can be thought of in
terms not unlike the shift made away from boom literature in Latin America. The
critic notes, “Though salsa’s diffusion to these places does not quite fall into the cate-
gory of globalization along the lines of McDonald’s, MTV, Microsoft, and Michael
Jackson, the distinction between ‘transnational’ (cutting across national boundaries)
and ‘global’ (truly worldwide) is not always clear in salsa’s case” (8). Waxer continues
this archaeological mapping of the genre by adding that only with the aid of the Big
Five recording companies, such as Sony and BMG, in the 1990s salsa truly achieved
a globalized outreach.
5. The use of a sexual imaginary as a blueprint for national identity has been stud-
ied extensively, both from Doris Sommer’s heteronormative viewpoint (Foundational
Fictions) and from alternative perspectives. Sexuality as a negative allegory of nation-
hood has been used in the study of Puerto Rican literature. Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé notes
“that unlike those Latin American foundational texts that Doris Sommer has so pas-
sionately analyzed, Puerto Rican canonical texts have rallied us and bound us through
failure and impotence” (140). He further notes that there exists in these texts “an im-
potence that has cunningly incited us to close ranks around the father, with righteous
indignation or with race” (141), and that “at the center of the author’s paternal voice
 168 · Notes to Page 99

there’s not a subject but an abject: the monstrously mangled body of a ‘feminized’ man
that bears, like all figures of gender- crossing, the marks of a ‘category of crisis,’ of the
impossibility of sustaining paternal hierarchies that the discourse of nation identity
both spectacularizes and condemns” (141). This Frankensteinian model of a gendered
nation is borne from Cruz-Malavé’s assertion that Puerto Rico exists in that “queer state
of freedom within dependency, of nation without nationhood” (140). It is also argued
that Antonio S. Pedreira’s novel Insularismo (1934) is the founding text of twentieth-
century Puerto Rican letters, a text in which the nation’s identity is codified in a failed
bildungsroman. This founding text, when juxtaposed with José Enrique Rodó’s Ar-
iel (1900) and José Vasconcelos’s La raza cósmica (1925), demonstrates a lack of a “voz
magistral” (150), or authorial voice that promotes an author’s “version of Latin-
Americanness” (150). Pedreira’s novel instead is characterized by a conspicuous emp-
tiness and lack of inspiration. When Rodó succeeds in galvanizing the continent’s
youth, Pedreira writes: “atentad al divino Tesoro, pues el título más alto se puede con-
vertir en mote” (174).
6. In their groundbreaking anthology Rockin’ Las Americas, Deborah Pacini
Hernández, Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste, and Eric Zolov note that the initial spread of
rock music to the southern regions of the hemisphere can be attributed to a process of
“cultural imperialism” (7). Not until so ciolog ical pro cesses of urbanization and
economic growth are in full swing does rock truly become an acculturated phenom-
enon. Rock at the beginning of the 1970s “was often regarded as a sign of imperialist
attack, moral collapse, or worse” (9).
7. Zizek and Jameson have each used this term in their writings on late capital-
ism, though Zizek argues that late capitalism and feudalism were mediated by Protes-
tantism. Ian Biddle and Vanessa Knights use the latter’s theorizations, particularly on
how the national has become the vanishing mediator, to pose “a useful model for un-
derstanding the ways in which a set of new cultural conditions can hide the operating
territory of its inception: it is useful therefore to think about this tendency as part of the
mechanism by which the local/global dynamic has sought to obfuscate the fact that
the ‘birth’ of that syllogism can be traced specifically to national ideologies” (11).
8. Formed in 1978 as The Green Hat Spies, Maná’s music can be seen as a time-
line of the development of rock in Latin America. Their early cover recordings repre-
sent a period in Mexican, and to an extent continental, music history when large rock
concerts and venues were prohibited. As Pacini Hernández, Fernández L’Hoeste, and
Zolov note, rock was nationalized in the 1980s following the popularization of the use
of original Spanish and Portuguese lyrics, local slang, and local and national topics.
This rock nacional coincided with the advent of neoliberal economic policies, which
“signaled the collapse of the nationalist projects . . . that had defined the economic
policy of Latin American governments since the 1930s” (16). Following this trend,
Maná released their first album titled Sombrero Verde to reflect the new name of the
group. Their rise to international fame in the 1990s was largely due to a series of
albums composed of popular love songs, danceable tunes, and socially conscious
works, such as the 1992 hit “¿Dónde jugarán los niños?” which continued some of the
earlier themes first made popular during the boom of rock nacional in the 1980s.
Their 1997 “Me voy a convertir en un ave” famously describes the corruption of the
police and the establishment. The group deviated from the apolitical trend in Latin
American rock of the 1990s, which was no longer concerned with the politics of
 Notes to Pages 99–117 · 169

music, but that “enacted a politics of anti-politics, repudiating at the level of sound
and per formance not only the old hegemonic ideology of the socialist Left but the
ascendant ideology of neoliberal capitalism” (17).
9. Galich’s ideas of the national are circumscribed by the importance he gives
to indigenous identities in the region. In an article that questions the existence of a
Guatemalan identity, he affirms that “aunque suene como un anacronismo, en estos
tiempos de la cólera neoliberal, es más necesario que nunca que la revolución social
y para que ésta sea, pasa necesariamente por la revolución de los pueblos indios de
América Latina, pues ésta no echará a andar hasta que no marche el indio” (“Tanda”).
The importance given to indigenous rights is paralleled in Maná’s 2006 album Revolu-
ción de Amor, where the Leftist track “Justicia, tierra y libertad” advocates natives’ rights
to democracy and land.
10. Galich’s transposition of the lyrics is inaccurate; the song should read “Ay mu-
jer, cómo haces daño, pasan los minutos cual si fueran años.” The author later repeats
the same mistake in the inclusion of the lyrics of a Julio Jaramillo song, “Nuestro ju-
ramento” (206).
11. It can be assumed that Galich is aiming an implicit dagger at the North Amer-
ican press, who repeatedly and unapologetically blamed Al- Qaeda for a series of inter-
national terrorist bombings after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
12. I appropriate Jeanette Winterson’s coinage of the term in her essay “The Erot-
ics of Risk,” where the critic understands hermeneutic erotics to be “those features of
narrative form that capture the reader by setting out the diegetic erotics of the story
itself” (48).
13. Like Mayra Montero, the members of Maná have publicly supported Puerto
Rican sovereignty from the United States.

Chapter 9

1. See my article on the cartographies of the two novels (“Growing up in

Sanhattan”).
2. The use of North American superheroes as a referent when constructing mas-
culinity is a recurrent tool in contemporary fiction and can be seen in Ana Clavel’s
Los deseos y su sombra (2000) and Enrique Serna’s La sangre erguida (2010). The for-
mer juxtaposes indigenous, poor men to the crime-fighting figures of Superman and
Batman whereas the latter describes the man of steel as the apotheosis of masculine
virility.
3. It is important to note the omission of popular Latin American superheroes as
masculine referents in contemporary fiction. Most notable are the omissions of the eth-
nically hybridized Kalimán and El Payo as local rebuttals to Superman and the Lone
Ranger.
4. See also Ariel Dorfman and David William Foster.
5. Created by Rene Ríos in 1949, Condorito is an anthropomorphic inhabitant of
the fictional Chilean town of Pelotillehue and is well known throughout Latin Amer-
ica as a reference to the common citizen. He is somewhat an antihero, unambitious
and lackadaisical, who gets caught up in everyday problems and circumstances.
 170 · Notes to Pages 121–138

Chapter 10

1. Serna employs tropes and strategies inspired from Hollywood productions, much
like Roncagliolo in Tan cerca de la vida. The figure of the ghostly girl who serves as a
rhetorical interlocutor to Juan Luis in the mental institution evokes the ethereal
relationship between phantasm and troubled subject in M. Night Shyamalan’s The
Sixth Sense (1999).
2. Serna mockingly disdains modern magazines that exalt women to have multi-
ple affairs and lovers, claiming that the institution of marriage is nullified and that mo-
nogamy is not an option for Mexican men in the twenty-first century (Las caricaturas
me hacen llorar 19; Giros negros 45). See my essay “Androgyny, Football, and Pedo-
philia” for a deeper discussion on the construct of Mexican masculinities.
3. A system of usurpation connects La sangre erguida to the caudillo politics of La
fiesta del Chivo; in both, the apparent coup only solidifies the phallic power of the
dictator.
4. The autoscopic separation of Ferrán from Amador in the novel harkens to Juan
Marsé’s El amante bilingüe (1990), where a similar process defines the neurotic condi-
tion of the protagonist, who suffers a psychological break when he spies his wife with
an Andalusian lover. He assumes a new personality, speaking and thinking as a Don
Juan figure, to reclaim a position of hegemony after being emasculated. Issues of Cat-
alan autonomy, though not explicated in Serna’s text, do exist as an underlying layer
to the space of Barcelona and are fundamental in Marsé’s incursion into the linguistic
hierarchies of masculinity.

Chapter 11

1. Irene Meler reminds us that “la feminidad como la masculinidad son construc-
ciones colectivas que condensan la experiencia de muchas generaciones pretéritas,
y que contienen una compleja red de prescripciones y proscripciones para la subjetivi-
dad y la conducta de cada sexo” (Burin and Meler 150).
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Index

Afro-Caribbean, 70, 74, 78 Bolaño, Roberto, 109

Alemán, Arnoldo, 52 bolero, 69–70, 78–79, 165n1
Alfaguara, Generation, 12, 57, 62–63, bourgeoisie, 80, 130–38
107, 109, 122, 129 brothel, 35, 113, 122, 134
Anderson, Benedict, 22 Bryce Echenique, Alfredo, 80. See also
anus, 51–54 El huerto de mi amada
Arenas, Reinaldo, 24, 162n2 Burin, Mabel, 5
artificial intelligence, 140, 143, 146. See Butler, Judith, 79, 152
also Tan cerca de la vida
austerity, 16, 53, 102, 132 capitalism, 116, 130, 136. See also
neoliberalism
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 59, 164n1 Castañeda, La, 29
Barrio Alto, 112–20 Castellanos Moya, Horacio, 52, 59,
Barthes, Roland, 58 94, 106
Bayly, Jaime, 8, 110, 129. See also El cojo castration, 19–21, 27, 31, 40, 162n3
y el loco caudillo, 15, 36, 125, 150
Belaúnde Terry, Fernando, 88, 131 Chamorro, Violeta, 21
Bellatin, Mario, 109 cholo, 166n5
Belli, Gioconda, 12, 149. See also La city. See space, urban
mujer habitada Clavel, Ana, 27, 34, 109, 116, 169n2
Betancourt, Rómulo, 43 cochón, 24, 25, 104
bildungsroman, 115 cojo, 151, See El cojo y el loco
Biron, Rebecca, 158n1 comics, 117. See also manga
Black, Stanley, 82 Condorito, 117, 169n5
body, 4, 6–8, 55, 115, 132; as commodity, Connell, Raewyn, 4, 22, 29, 31, 35, 106,
6, 23–24, 84, 118; female, 29, 38–40, 112, 128, 136, 142
74, 77, 84, 94, 154; hygiene of, 27, 35, Contras, 93, 106, 159n1
43; as machine, 146; virile, 65, 132, 150 Contreras Castro, Fernando, 53

181
 182 · Index

Cortez, Beatriz, 21 globalization, 5, 15, 55, 108, 110, 129,

countertype, 6, 28–29, 32, 34. See also 138–40
stereotype gynocentrism, 154
cross-dressing, 103
cunnilingus, 74, 78 Halberstam, Judith, 151. See also
cyberspace. See technology masculinity, female
cyborg, 11–12, 147–49. See also Tan Haraway, Donna, 147–49
cerca de la vida heteroglossia, 59
heterosexuality, 24
Darío, Rubén, 18 historical novel. See new historical novel
deterritorialization, 16, 57, 97; of History of Sexuality, The, 162n2
economic systems, 16 Hollywood, 33, 62, 98, 102, 140–41,
Díaz, Porfirio, 26 146–47
dictator, 17, 26–27, 43, 54, 160n1. See homophobia, 31, 49, 150
also caudillo homosexuality, 24, 31, 43, 46, 84, 130, 135
domestication, 10, 160n10 homosocial, 7, 20, 25, 30–34, 65, 72;
Domínguez-Ruvalcaba, Héctor, 157n1 butcher, 72–79, 94, 121, 126, 137, 151;
Donoso, José, 165n8. See also loca urban, 113
horror cinema, Japanese, 141. See also
Echeverría, Maurice, 52 Tan cerca de la vida
ecocriticism, 115 hygiene, 29, 33, 50, 66, 84, 150. See also
El beso de la mujer araña, 165n9 body, hygiene
El cojo y el loco, 8, 129–138
El huerto de mi amada, 80–90 impotence, 19, 40–41, 51, 118, 121–24. See
El lugar sin límites, 165n8 also erection; La sangre erguida; Viagra
erection, 106; dysfunction, 19, 122, 124. incontinence, 40–41
See also impotence; La sangre erguida; invertido, 25, 44
Viagra invertir, 25, 36, 44
Irwin, Robert McKee, 31, 33, 64,
female, transgressive, 154 151, 157n1
Foucault, Michel, 162n2
Fuentes-León, Javier, 70, 162n2 Jameson, Fredric, 16, 99, 115
Fuguet, Alberto, 110, 112, 119–20, 139. journalist, 24, 98, 139, 150. See also
See also Rodríguez Matte, Hernán press, printing
Fujimori, Alberto, 42–46
Fujishock, 21, 46 Kalimán, 169n3
Kant, Immanuel, 81
Gabriel, Juan, 64
Galich, Franz, 11. See also Managua, Lacan, Jacques, mirror stage, 33
Salsa City; Y te diré quién eres La fiesta del Chivo, 20, 37–44, 159n1
Gamboa, Federico. See also Santa Lagos Escobar, Ricardo, 46
García Canclini, Néstor, 15 La mujer de mi hermano, 130–37. See
General Motors, 137 also Bayly, Jaime
global city, 122, 140. See also space, urban La mujer habitada, 12, 149, 152, 154
Global North, 11, 21, 28, 55, 84, 96–97, La sangre erguida, 121–27
113, 155 La última noche que pasé contigo,
Global South, 84, 98 69–79, 82
 Index · 183

Lemebel, Pedro, 17, 54. See also Tengo mouth, 65–66, 76, 78, 96
miedo torero Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria,
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 58 88. See also Sendero Luminoso
loca, 163n1. See also Tengo miedo torero music, popular, 10–11, 58, 69, 71, 99, 107
Luthor, Lex, 117. See also Superman
Nadie me verá llorar, 26–36
magical realism, 82 nature, 115–16
Mala onda, 110, 112. See also Barrio Alto neocolonialism, 140
Maná, 99, 103, 105, 168n8 neoliberalism, 4, 8, 16, 129, 142;
Managua, 21 aesthetics of, 4; as episteme, 8, 10–12,
Managua, Salsa City, 92–108, 158n1 24, 94, 101, 114, 137
mancha, 133, 135, 138, 162n3 new historical novel, 16, 25, 37, 55, 63,
manga, 117, 140 78, 115, 123, 144, 152
Margarita, está linda la mar, 18–25 new woman, 150
maricón, 47, 105, 123, 105 No se lo digas a nadie, 135–37. See also
Martín Fierro, 123 Bayly, Jaime
masculine, 3, 6 noir, 103
Masculine, 7, 8, 10, 24, 28, 32, 38–39, Núñez Noriega, Guillermo, 8, 157n1,
72–73, 89, 104, 127, 135, 154 160n7
masculinities, 7, 96; market of, 4, 30–32,
35–36, 66, 83, 85, 131 Ortega, Julio, 80
masculinity: as commodity, 6–7;
complicit, 31, 143; crisis, 5, 17, 121, Paz, Octavio, 157n1
158n1; cyborg, 148; definition of, 7; Paz Soldán, Edmundo, 109
economy of, 36–37; female, 151; penis, 19, 84, 118, 122–24. See also La
hegemonic, 5–6, 17, 22, 31–32, 35, 39, sangre erguida
90, 100, 107, 114, 128, 136; neoliberal, performativity, 7, 48, 55, 106, 150–51, 154
104; revolutionary 12, 149–50, 152–53; Pinglo Alva, Felipe, 81
studies, 4–5, 11, 72, 128, 157n1, 160n9; Pinochet, Augusto, 45–54, 113. See also
subordinate, 29, 33, 46, 105, 141, 143, Tengo miedo torero
148; theater of, 97, 102, 106, 108, 121; Porfiriato. See Díaz, Porfirio
transnational business, 8, 112, 114, porn industry, 122
117–18, 121, 126, 129–38, 141–42, 147; press, printing, 22–23, 35, 106
violent, 23, 137 Puig, Manuel, 165n9
masturbation, 78, 116 puntita, la, 66
McOndo, 9, 55, 155
méconnaissance, 8, 152. See also Lacan, queer, 3, 46–54, 67, 70, 74, 104–6, 135,
Jacques 157n1, 160n9, 163n1, 165n9
Menton, Seymour, 21, 161n3. See also Quiroga, José, 7, 159n3, 164n3
new historical novel
Mexican Revolution, 26 Ramírez, Sergio, 16, 54. See also
Mirabal sisters, 40 Margarita, está linda la mar
modernity, 23, 26, 32, 84, 160n7 rape, 38, 42, 134, 137, 148
Montero, Mayra, 69. See also La última Rey Rosa, Rodrigo, 93, 131
noche que pasé contigo Rivera Garza, Cristina, 17, 54. See also
Montiel, Sara, 63 Nadie me verá llorar
Mosse, George, 6, 28, 31 robot, 115, 120, 144–46. See also cyborg
 184 · Index

Rodríguez Matte, Hernán, 110. See also Tan cerca de la vida, 139–49
Barrio Alto technology, 119, 140, 144–45. See also
Roncagliolo, Santiago, 11, 109, 139. See cyborg
also Tan cerca de la vida Tengo miedo torero, 45–55, 61–68, 77
Rubin, Gayle, 4, 25, 27, 36 Terán, Enrique, 131
testes, 19–20, 21. See also testicles
salsa, 94–95, 167n4 testicles, 20–21, 40–41, 50, 53, 162n1.
Sánchez, Luis Rafael, 69 See also testes
Sandinistas, 21, 25, 102; Revolution, 101 Toro-Alfonso, José, 100, 161n4
Sandino, 20 transvestite, 45, 103, 105
Santa, 28, 35. See also brothel trauma, 39–40
Santos-Febres, Mayra, 163n2 Travesuras de la niña mala, 163n2,
Sarabia Rodríguez, J. E., 67 164n5. See also Vargas Llosa, Mario
science, 22, 28, 30, 35, 83; fiction, 139, Trujillo, Rafael, 37–38, 41, 43. See also
140, 146 La fiesta del Chivo
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 31, 85 Trujillo, Ramfis, 39–41
Sendero Luminoso, 88
Serna, Enrique, 59, 121, 132, 139, 169n2. Unión Nacional Opositora, 21
See also La sangre erguida
Sifuentes-Jáuregui, Ben, 7, 45, 127, 163n1 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 17, 54, 84. See also
simulacra, 113, 140 La fiesta del Chivo
sissy, 29 Velasco, Xavier, 110
Somoza García, Anastasio, 17, 24 Velasco Alvarado, Juan, 88, 131
soundtrack, original (OST), 62, 75, 89, 98 Velázquez, Consuelo, 64
space, gendered, 87, 89, 114; urban, 39, Viagra, 121, 124. See also erection;
82, 86, 113 impotence
stain, 10, 30, 47, 50–51, 59, 66, 76, 98, violence, 38–42, 73, 85, 151, 158n1. See
105, 114, 133, 162n3 also masculinity, violent
Stendhal, 81
stereotype, 6, 28, 32. See also Williams, Gareth, 15
countertype
Superman, 117–18, 169nn2–3 Y te diré quién eres, 92–108
About the Author

Vinodh Venkatesh (Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is

an associate professor of Spanish in the Department of Foreign Languages
and Literatures at Virginia Tech. He has published over twenty articles and
book chapters on such issues as gender, subjectivity, and the urban space
in contemporary Spanish and Latin American cinema and narrative. His
current research focuses on the circulations of affect and the framing of the
body in recent Latin American films.