Modernity and the Nation in Mexican Representations of Masculinity

This book looks at representations of the male body, sexuality, and power in Mexican literature and the arts. The analysis includes literature, visual art, and cinema produced from the 1870s to the present, focusing on the Porfirian regime, the Post-revolutionary era, and the decadence of the revolutionary state and the emergence of the neo-liberal order in the 1980s to the present. 

Hector Domínguez-Ruvalcaba is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Texas at Austin.

“In this work, Domínguez-Ruvalcaba has achieved depth and scope by analyzing entire periods of Mexican nationalism through the lens of male body representations. The principal objective of this magnificent work is to explain clearly and insightfully how male body representations evolve and deconstruct themselves throughout the period from the 1870s to the present in Mexico, and to demonstrate their relationship to nationhood and Mexican modernity. This work opens a new era in the study of Mexican visual arts in relation to the formation and deformation of masculinity through male transvestism from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present.”–Emilio Bejel, Professor of Spanish, University of California at Davis, and author of Gay Cuban Nation