Performing Masculinities

This is an exploration of how masculinities (and maleness) are performed and how men perform gender. The course is a survey of literary and cinematic texts from around the world, with emphasis on Hispanic and Latinx communities (from Spain, Spanish America, and the USA) that adopt cross-dressing as a subversive device to question and delegitimize authority at various arenas (heteronormative gender roles, sexual and national identities, state politics and citizenship, and cultural hegemony). It also seeks to dissect binary understandings of gender while exploring the concept as a performative social construct, and establishing connections with and drawing examples from literary production, cinema, and popular culture. From this angle, emphasis will be placed on the performance of socially regulated gender roles whose scripts are constantly altered and in flux, albeit at times guarded violently by diverse social members and institutions. Beyond the analysis of literary texts and films, the course incorporates critical theory and cultural artifacts (music videos, magazine ads, billboards, art works) that frame the class discussions and enable us to connect the primary texts with local and global discourses around social demarcations of gender.