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Stubborn Structures: Revaluing Masculinity in Mexican Women-Authored “novelas sobre la Revolución” (1963-2010)
Hill, Dana Anne Meredith
Hill, Dana Anne Meredith
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Abstract
The 1910 Mexican Revolution is one of the most important and most represented events in 20th-century Mexican history. Although narratives written by men about men on the battlefield dominated representation in the first few decades after the Revolution, women-authored novels began proliferating and garnering critical attention in the second half of the century. Previous analyses of the latter narratives have largely focused on their representation of women’s experiences during the civil war—both on and off the battlefield—and after the armed conflict had finished and institutionalization of the Revolution had begun. Although these novels work to fill in the historical gaps left by men-authored narratives, I argue that they also respond to what those narratives and other cultural products did represent: Namely, the promotion and denigration of a machista masculine performance. In this dissertation, I propose that it is impossible to give a full account of women-authored novels on the Revolution by examining only one pole of the traditional gender binary and, furthermore, that doing so fails to acknowledge the spectrum through which we now conceptualize gender. Through my examination of men and masculinity in these novels, I outline the complicated relationships that Mexican women have with these social constructs. While all of the works analyzed in this dissertation, which were published between 1963 and 2010, recognize the drawbacks to continuing to overvalue traditionally machista and overtly violent masculinity, only some have recognized how valuing other kinds of masculinity—including female and bourgeois masculinity—also often serves to perpetuate class-, race-, and gender-based systems of oppression. By “reading between the lines” of narratives that do not center men and masculinity, I have also been able to illuminate the contemporary issues that inspired these women’s writing, reinforcing the argument that works of historical fiction can yield as much information about the time in which they were written as they can about the time about which they speak.
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Date
2021-05-31
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University of Kansas
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Keywords
Latin American literature, Gender studies, Women's studies, Historical Fiction, Machismo, Masculinity, Mexican Revolution, Mexico, Women Authors