This is Vindoh Venkatesh's third book, which is part of an impressive and prolific body of work on gender, masculinity studies, and urban studies. Here, he examines the shifting and contested nature of male gender identity at the global and local level as presented in recent Latin American fiction. Clearly intended for advanced graduate students, researchers, and others in academe, the book ambitiously links 11 novels published since 1990 by authors Venkatesh labels ‘Generation Alfaguara.’ These authors, from representative nations of the global South “escape the traditional boundaries of a national corpus . . . [and are] “intimately linked to the neoliberal paradigm . . . held together by their participation in a global literary market” (12). The author centers his analysis on masculine gender portrayals and expands the idea of a literary and physical corpus by suggesting that, in a neoliberal economy, the male body is transnational and transactional. The author argues that, “[T]he body as capital . . . operates on micro and macro levels . . . [and] is singularly commoditized in the writing of specific bodies in . . . a market of masculinities” (4).

Building on Gayle Rubin's notion of female oppression in capitalist societies and Raewyn Connell's theories on the practices and positions of men in gender hierarchies, Venkatesh's provocative and sometimes playful analysis is also informed by a broad range of theories that serve to rewrite and recenter “the idealized and multifaceted position” of “the Masculine.” The author puts “hegemonic masculinity” in dialogue with “transnational gender expressions” in order to “elucidate how masculinities are reconstituted during and as a result of the crisis in gender brought about by neoliberalism” (11).

The book is divided into three parts. In each, the author uses the male body—and particular body parts—as points of entry for analysis. Before each section, the author provides much-needed overviews that serve to remind readers of the overall argument, map the specific analysis that follows, and connect previous and upcoming arguments across sections. These linkages are particularly important because the arguments are dense and complex, sometimes to the point of wandering away from the main points.

Part 1, New Historical Masculinities, attempts to “decenter traditional constructs of the past in favor of a new configuration of historical events” by focusing on the figure of the Latin American dictator and the center of masculine power: the phallus. Venkatesh links together the various novels by looking at the different ways that authors use the image of the phallus to rewrite “both the dictator figure in Latin America and the male body in a traditional genre (the new historical novel) that exemplifies the phallic power of men” (37).

Part 2, Lyrical Readings and Deterritorialization of Masculinities, moves away from the figure of the (impotent) dictator to another part of the body—the singing and enunciating mouth that functions as “a bodily site of discursivity that is not limited to the actual text of the music, instead becoming a position by which gender is written onto the literary bodies extant in the text[s]” (58). Venkatesh theorizes “an affective intertextuality between sound song and the narrated plot . . . through a variety of mediums and textual strategies”(63).

Part 3, Novel and Transnational Masculinities, builds on “the postulates, theorems and analyses put forth in earlier pages to examine how masculinities can be rewritten moving forward in the neoliberal age” (110). Novels treated in this section deal with urban spaces, localized gender positions, and global masculine identities, subjectivities, and practices. The author uses this final section to argue for multidimensional and historically changing models of masculinities and the male body to resist masculine hegemony in neoliberal Latin America.

The literary corpus that Venkatesh situates within particular social, political and economic processes of globalization and neoliberalism is ambitious, impressive, and laboriously researched. The theoretical framework is equally impressive in scope and is a valuable contribution to the field of Latin American literary studies generally and masculinity studies more specifically. However, due to the number of novels studied throughout the book and the array of theorems, postulates, and analysis employed, the focus is somewhat unbalanced.