Men and Masculinities

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Beyond Machismos : Recent Examinations of Masculinities in Latin America

PETER M. BEATTIE
Men and Masculinities 2002 4: 303
DOI: 10.1177/1097184X02004003005

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MEN AND MASCULINITIES / January 2002
Beattie / BEYOND MACHISMOS

ESSAY

Beyond Machismos
Recent Examinations of
Masculinities in Latin America

PETER M. BEATTIE
Michigan State University

Scholars and casual observers often conflate Latin American masculini-

ties with the term macho. Machismo shapes how Latin societies have been
perceived by outsiders and how many Latin Americans describe their own
society in relation to others. The term has been widely adapted as a reference
point for describing sometimes favorable but mostly offensive behaviors
associated with male abuse of sanctioned social prerogatives. Given the
prominence of the macho stereotype wielded in myriad and often contradic-
tory ways by individuals and groups, it seems surprising that scholars inter-
ested in gender have only begun to explore more rigorously Latin American
masculinities. After decades of developments in gender theory and method-
ology in the study of women, only in the 1990s have Latin Americans begun
to apply some of these new tools to the study of men. These studies come at
the same time as other supposedly normative categories such as whiteness are
undergoing scholarly scrutiny in the United States. Not surprisingly, your
“average” guy becomes somehow strange, complex, and hard to pin down
under the magnifying gaze of analysis, while his “nonnormative” male coun-
terparts become more clearly understood as integral to the shaping of mascu-
line identities. As the studies under review demonstrate, masculinity and
machismo are complex and malleable concepts that invite contestation and
reinterpretation by individuals, groups, and scholars. These works chart new
ground in the sands of gender identity, cautiously outlining rough patterns in
the constantly shifting terrain.
Mathew Gutmann (1996) explores masculinity in the working-class Santo
Domingo neighborhood of Mexico City. It seems odd that a scholar has to
state some things that most familiar with gender studies and poor neigh-
borhoods in Latin America would find unremarkable. Machismo, like its
female counterpart marianismo, exists mainly as an exaggerated stereotype.
Gutmann documents how poor and often unemployed or underemployed
Men and Masculinities, Vol. 4 No. 3, January 2002 303-308
© 2002 Sage Publications
303

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304 MEN AND MASCULINITIES / January 2002

Mexican men do housework. They also take an active interest in parenting;

children are doted on by men and women and included in a number of adult
activities in a way that many in the United States would find excessive.
Indeed, many macho stereotypes are a luxury that only wealthier Mexican
men can afford to fulfill when wives are not required to work or when maids
and nannies can provide everyday household and child care services. This
illustrates how fulfilling supposedly appropriate and socially desirable
manly roles often has a class basis that can cut in different directions accord-
ing to circumstances and point of view. Gutmann himself has a tendency to
portray middle- and upper-class Mexican males much less sympathetically—
dare one say as less “manly”—than the working-class men who are the
focus of the study (pp. 50-88). This may be partly a corrective of prominent
class prejudice that often labels lower-class Mexican men as macho villains,
a perspective too often unchallenged in scholarly literature. However, it may
also reflect his informants’ views. Most men of all classes tend to compare
their ability to fulfill their vision of manhood favorably against those whose
conditions and practices differ from their own.
The sensation of reading about what seems to be the unremarkable nature
of gender relationships in Santo Domingo in Gutmann’s work, however,
quickly gives way to the realization that there is an astounding lack of schol-
arship on Latin America debunking male gender stereotypes. This makes
Gutmann’s work especially important for audiences unfamiliar with working-
class Mexicans outside of the cinema or the classic works of Octavio Paz,
Samuel Ramos, and Oscar Lewis.
Ultimately, Gutmann is a “splitter.” He decries “lumping” or making
overly broad generalizations about masculinity within and across national
cultures. Yet it seems that these kind of comparisons are constantly being
made by men and women when they speak of their own gender identities.
Caution is certainly in order, but it seems incumbent to consider the effect of
what one might call “masculine fashions” that transcend the borders of
neighborhoods and nations and, at least in idealized forms, demonstrate some
striking similarities in many cultures.
Gutmann historicizes machismo, a term that only came into common use
in Mexico in the 1940s and 1950s. Generally, informants did not identify
themselves as “machos” and when pressed, they found it hard to name some-
one who they would consider macho. Interestingly, most believed that machos
once had been common but are now rare. This opens the door to interesting
new questions. What explains the success of “machismo” as an identity
among the popular classes in the mid-1900s? Why did many poor men adapt
an identity that apparently granted them comparatively few privileges other
than (borrowing from David R. Roediger, who borrowed from W.E.B.
DuBois) the “psychological wage” of macho superiority? Or did they? As
Gutmann points out, the pelado stereotype of the uncouth Mexican plebeian
who drinks hard, beats his wife, and commits unpredictable acts of violence

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 Beattie / BEYOND MACHISMOS 305

served as a symbol of rugged Mexican independence and as a justification for

the urban poor’s marginalization by their political and economic superiors.
What role did machismo play in securing the unequal relationships between
classes, races, and genders as the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI)
consolidated its control of the state? Gutmann’s patient refutation of mono-
lithic conceptions of machismo lays an important foundation for more
nuanced explorations of masculinities, past and present.
In a similar vein, Marit Melhuus and Kristin Anne Stølen (1996) offer a
variety of interesting studies of gender roles, the majority of which focus on
masculinity in Spanish American nations. Essays analyze a variety of topics,
including gender imagery in descriptions of Argentine soccer styles, the con-
text of homosexual desire in Mexico, the significance of native women’s
fashion in the Andes, and Dominican slang. Lorraine Nencel’s essay on Peru-
vian men’s views of female prostitutes, loose women, and virtuous ladies is
the essay that most directly engages many of Gutmann’s insights. She cri-
tiques prominent feminist studies of prostitution in Latin America that tend to
reduce “Johns” into a monolithic category of “machos.” She argues that re-
searchers have to understand the class, ethnic, age, and gender differences
between men as well as the importance of their subjective experiences. Oth-
erwise, analyses of gender oppression and identity are “straitjacketed,” essen-
tializing male behavior and attitudes.
The works of Lumsden (1996), Schaefer (1996), and Carrier (1995) focus
on homosexual behavior and identity, and they share some of the weaknesses
that Nencel finds in studies of gender and sexuality. Although careful to note
the limits of their research, these authors fall back too easily at times on vague
references to “machismo” and “well-defined” gender roles. Carrier, for
example, begins his study by citing an anthropologist who asserts that “there
is near universal agreement on what a ‘real woman’ is.” The work of
Gutmann, Nencel, and others illustrate the fallacy of assumptions of “univer-
sal” consensus in terms of gender norms and how individuals act on them.
Carrier’s analysis centers on the question of how mostly working-class
mestizo men cope with same-gender relations in their everyday lives.
Through participant observation, interviews, and several selected life stories,
he examines same-gender relations by focusing on the “cruising” scenes of
Guadalajara and several other selected sites from the 1960s through the
1980s. The fact that Carrier began his research on this topic in the 1960s
makes his work exceptional. Long before homosexuality was a fashionable
research topic, he carried out a project that enriches our longitudinal under-
standing of the development of homosexual identity in Mexico. As a pioneer-
ing study in sexuality, it is perhaps not surprising that this research has only
recently been published. Ultimately, Carrier is more interested in aspects of
homosexual identity, an identity the majority of his informants assume. His
research illustrates how integral masculine and feminine identities are for
homosexuals and heterosexuals alike. He illuminates how masculine identity

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306 MEN AND MASCULINITIES / January 2002

is in part built around the existence of effeminate men and examines how gay
men define themselves in reference to heterosexual men and women. Car-
rier’s field work records the contradictions and conflicts that accompany
ideas of appropriate gender behavior and sexuality among men who engage
in same-gender relations. In this sense, his work demonstrates a sophistica-
tion that belies his initial statements in regard to the clear definition and com-
mon understanding of gender roles among the Mexican populace. Like
whiteness, masculinity is often in the eyes of the beholder.
Like Carrier, Ian Lumsden’s analysis of the Cuban government’s policies
toward homosexuals would have been strengthened by more nuanced consid-
erations of the dynamics of normative masculine ideals and their history. For
instance, Lumsden credits Cuba’s prerevolutionary history of machismo for
much of the revolutionary regime’s poor treatment of homosexuals. While
there is much truth to this assertion, the portrait is too static. While Lumsden
is careful to historicize many terms in the Cuban context such as homopho-
bia, he does not historicize machismo. Indeed, it would be interesting to know
if many heterosexual Cuban men identify themselves as machos, a term
Lumsden uses at times as a synonym for straight men. Gutmann and Nencel’s
work, for instance, make it difficult to accept at face value sweeping state-
ments such as, “At the outset of the Cuban Revolution, machismo was deeply
ingrained. . . . Gender roles were clearly identified and differentiated” (p. 55).
Clearly, revolutionary policies challenged gender stereotypes (particularly in
relation to women), but the idea that gender roles were clearly defined and
acted on at any given point in time tends to oversimplify the complexity of
gender and sexual identities.
This critique does not detract from Lumsden’s important analysis of gen-
der relations and sexual identification in the 1960s and 1970s. He analyzes
how leaders justified the revolutionary state’s legitimacy using rhetoric that
condemned the social and sexual regime of prerevolutionary Cuba. The “new
man,” so central to revolutionary rhetoric, became enmeshed in metaphors
that asserted that Cubans had been cuckolded and emasculated. Leaders
pointed out that their island had become a site of North American sexual tour-
ism under Batista and expressed embarrassment that Cubans had been made
into subordinate partners of the U.S. capitalist economy. They tended to asso-
ciate homosexuality with cowardliness and capitalist corruption; Cuba’s
“new men” under socialism would be “healthy,” meaning heterosexual.
Lumsden perceptively links this homophobia in part to large-scale military
mobilization and the nationalist rhetoric that accompanied it. This suggests a
connection between militarist nationalism and intolerance for those who do
not conform to masculine norms that may be independent of whether a gov-
ernment is democratic or authoritarian, socialist or capitalist. Cuban homo-
sexuals, for example, were disproportionately targeted for service in UMAPs
(Military Units to Aid Production). This agricultural labor draft did not single
out homosexuals but targeted “degenerates,” counterrevolutionaries, and

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 Beattie / BEYOND MACHISMOS 307

young men who avoided work. UMAPs thus separated and stigmatized those
suspected of not supporting revolutionary norms and policies.
Lumsden’s critique of the revolution’s homophobic record is balanced by
his evaluation of recent reforms. He is careful to make these apologies with
“ambivalence,” noting their piecemeal nature, but he cautions North Ameri-
can gay rights activists who have made sweeping statements denouncing the
revolution’s policies toward homosexuals. In particular, he documents
improvements in the treatment of homosexuals who are victims of AIDS as
well as a more tolerant social attitude toward the gay community. Lumsden
compares Cuban attitudes and policies toward homosexuals favorably in a
number of regards to Canadian, American, Mexican, and Costa Rican gov-
ernments and society. Unlike Gutmann, Lumsden is not afraid to make broad
generalizations about social, political, and sexual attitudes on the scale of
national cultures. It is hoped that future work will seek a middle ground be-
tween the “lumpers” and “splitters.”
Schaefer is the only literary critic under review in a group of works domi-
nated by anthropologists. She examines a body of Mexican literature that has
received scant attention from academics: novels from 1964 to 1994 whose
plots primarily focus on homosexuality, lesbianism, and sexual transgres-
sion. Her book is more of a collection of essays linked by similar themes than
an overarching analysis. This hampers her ability to make comparisons and
generalizations about this body of literature. She analyzes the work of Miguel
Barbachano Ponce, Luis Zapata, Sara Levi Calderón, and José Joaquín
Blanco. Her analysis of José Rafael Calva’s El Jinete Azul (the blue horse-
man) is most compelling because of its analysis of the cross-cultural implica-
tions of sadomasochism as a critique of Mexican nationalist and internation-
alist rhetoric in the 1990s.
Since Schaefer focuses on literary representation, however, it is harder to
criticize her references to the entrenchment of heterosexual consumer society
and its productive and reproductive norms in the 1970s and 1980s. These ref-
erences seem clear, but they need to be spelled out and supported with more
than impressionistic observations by Mexican intellectuals. This would
allow the author to make more clear how changing economic and political
practices influenced the development of the body of literature under analysis
and vice versa. Other than giving primary emphasis to the theme of homosex-
uality, how do these novels differ in their criticisms of Mexico’s economic,
political, and sexual identities during the past four decades? Of course, this
question goes beyond the scope of Schaefer’s investigation, but an answer,
however partial, might help to clarify the distinctive character of this body of
literature. As Doris Sommers argues in Foundational Fictions, the novel was
the literary form most closely associated with the rise of romantic national-
ism. What does the appropriation of this form by groups such as homosexuals
(who have traditionally been repressed or at best neglected by the nationalist
state) indicate about globalization and the development of social criticism

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308 MEN AND MASCULINITIES / January 2002

during the past four decades? Schaefer’s work leads us toward fascinating
though hard to answer new questions.
Taken as a group, these five books illustrate the importance of masculinity
as a new approach that offers important new insights to broader issues in
Latin American societies. Like studies of whiteness, the analysis of mascu-
linity should not be viewed as reactionary but as an affirmation of advances in
the study of women, minorities, and sexuality. By placing dominant social
identities under the same scholarly scrutiny as those that categorize the less
powerful, academicians are forced to engage sexual, gender, class, age, and
racial ranking systems in a fuller and more dynamic fashion. In the future,
one would hope that more historians, political scientists, and sociologists will
follow the lead of anthropologists and literary critics whose pioneering work
still predominates in the study of masculinity. Interdisciplinary studies and
dialogues promise to move scholarship beyond machismos to a fuller exami-
nation of the complexity of masculine identity in Latin America.

REFERENCES
Carrier, Joseph. 1995. De los otros: Intimacy and homosexuality among Mexican men. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Gutmann, Mathew C. 1996. The meanings of macho: Being a man in Mexico City. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Lumsden, Ian. 1996. Machos, maricones, and gays: Cuba and homosexuality. Philadelphia, PA:
Temple University Press.
Melhuus, Marit, and Kristin Anne Stølen, eds. 1996. Machos, mistresses, madonnas: Contesting
the power of Latin American gender imagery. London: Verso.
Schaefer, Cladia. 1996. Danger zones: Homosexuality, national identity, and Mexican culture.
Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Peter M. Beattie is an assistant professor of history at Michigan State University.

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