Before and beyond Masculinity after Trujillo: A Critical Return

This essay is a response to Carlos Ulises Decena's and Dixa Ramírez's reading of Masculinity after Trujillo: The Politics of Gender in Dominican Literature (2014). As both discussants note, the study emphasizes the important task of multiplying the archives of Dominican literature and history. Engaging with Ramírez's essay, Horn critically revisits her historical argument about how the Trujillo dictatorship (1930–61) and the preceding US occupation (1916–24) reshaped Dominican gender formations and masculinity in particular. In dialogue with Decena's essay, Horn discusses how entrenched relations between gender, postdictatorship politics, and the Dominican intellectual culture call for conventional political responses as well as an embrace of political potentialities that lie beyond these. The essay emphasizes that postcolonial contexts invariably require grappling with questions of justice and political redress in multiple ways because of how longstanding histories of colonialism, imperialism, and unequal global power structures always already refract these across places and borders.