(Re)Producing Men: Homosociality in Nineteenth-Century Latin American National Narratives

In this dissertation I dispute the long-held critical tradition that national narratives are best understood by the means in which they allegorize the nation through the heteronormative construct of family. I employ feminist, gender, and queer theories, as inflected with postcolonial studies to read Latin American national narratives’ use of allegory—particularly the ways in which the objectification of the female body symbolically aids the cementing of male bonds and rivalries. The (re)production of masculinities through male-male desire and rivalry informs the social constructs of both national embodiment and idealized male citizenship whereas the female body remains subjugated and largely homogenous in its relationship to masculinity and male desire. Eve Sedgwick’s concept of the “homosocial” provides the central critical framework through which I dispute and destabilize heteronormative assumptions at the basis of national identity formations. My focus on how masculinities are negotiated through the objectified female body enables an understanding of gender performativities’ determinative importance to the hegemonic representations of other marked categories of identity and thus, the taxonomies of bodily discourse that inform them. My literary corpus consists of select nineteenth-century texts that monumentalize national mythos and/or display radical shifts pertinent to nationalism such as Mexico’s reformation period, the abolition of slavery in Brazil, or Argentina’s struggle beneath a authoritarian regime. I also look at contemporary renditions of nineteenth-century figures to extrapolate nationalism as a form of gender discourse whose origins are intertwined with the independence movements of the nineteenth century