Mexican Masculinities

In Mexican Masculinities, Robert McKee Irwin explores the “homoerotics of nation”— that is, how literary representations of social relationships between men defined what it meant to be a man and, he argues, to be from Mexico between the early 1800s and the middle of the twentieth century. The study builds on, and then departs from, Doris Sommer’s contention in Foundational Fictions (Univ. of California Press, 1991) that “the symbolic construction of nation as an imagined community occurred in nineteenth-century Latin America through romantic literature’s use of heterosexual bonds as an allegory for national integration” (p. xxvii). Regarding Mexico, Irwin asserts that “national brotherhood,” as opposed to marriage, “came to symbolize national coherence.” Indeed, he notes that “male homosocial bonding is the key allegory of national integration in literature” (p. xxx). Irwin explores such themes as criminal male sexuality, the gendering of literature, and the homosexual panic of the 1940s...