This is a thoroughly engaging and engaged volume with essays by historians of gender, popular culture and modern Mexico. Taking us to movie houses, to bathhouses and to whorehouses, through courtrooms and pulquerías, the essays in this collection focus on Greater Mexico from Texas to Oaxaca, beginning in the Porfiriato and continuing right down to the present, paying due heed along the way to requisite matters of class, race and regional difference. Notably, the editors, Victor Macías-González and Anne Rubenstein, selected several contributors to develop chapters on cinema and crime from different eras and perspectives, while pointing out that other questions (like employment) are still remarkably understudied and must be left for subsequent volumes.
Three broad themes among others stand out in this compilation. First, the ghosts of Octavio Paz, Samuel Ramos and other male luminaries from Mexican letters in the twentieth century refuse to surrender calmly, and thus anyone looking at men, masculinities, femininities, sexualities and national identities in modern Mexico is in effect compelled to perform a scholarly exorcism on their essentialising spirits. Their fervid imaginings left us with such extreme gender stereotypes (women do x, men do y, and if women do y they are acting like men) that the authors of this collection must strive mightily to undo them over and over. Eric Shantz's chapter on making Mexicali's red-light district ‘safe for bourgeois debauchery’ and Robert Buffington's on violence against women as depicted in the penny press of turn-of-the-century Mexico City both do this well, by presenting nuanced and tender accounts that point in these cases to the centrality of class to masculinities and sexualities in Mexico.
In another subtle critique of ideal types, Jeffrey Pilcher's review of the manly idols from the Golden Age of film (Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete and, of course, Cantinflas), it becomes crystal clear why at no time in modern Mexican history has there been one type of man – and, more importantly, why the same men (or in this case, on-screen representations of men) are themselves full of contradictions and confusion when it comes to being men, being with women and being with other men. Their portrayals are endearing and infuriating all at once for just these reasons.
Masculinity and Sexuality in Modern Mexico repeatedly brings to the fore a second theme of vital importance in gender studies across the Americas: the centrality of women in understanding masculinities and sexualities. In Anne Rubenstein's cheerful chapter on who was doing what in cinemas before the 1960s, this is shown in rather direct contrast to stick-figure portrayals of both men and women in Mexican history. As Rubenstein shows, women the taking initiative should not so casually be labelled as women acting like men. Instead of forcing women into preordained male gender categories, it has become all too apparent that our definitions must be revised.
How else to incorporate new understandings of the ways in which men and women participate and cooperate and collude together, even when not physically together? Here, too, in a similar vein, Andrew Wood's light touch with the mythopoetics of a musical celebrity, Agustín Lara, reveals a complicated part played by a movie legend, María Felix, and calls into question who exactly was conquering whom in their stormy and ever-so-public love affair.
A third theme discussed by many of the contributors is the queering of modern Mexican masculinities. As soon as homosexual behaviour gained a name, an identifiable label, as Macías-González illuminates in his account of the steamy bathhouses of Porfirian Mexico City, novel meanings of manliness and virility, heterosexuality and homosexuality, began to float about in high and low society, and began to be debated, challenged and embraced as never before. Of interest is the fact that although sanctimonious sanctions are closely associated today with the long-term history of the Catholic Church (Mary-Lee Mulholland's chapter takes up the well-known paradox of unbridled conservatism and an effervescent gay ambiente in contemporary Guadalajara), before men having sex with men became an identity, men's sex with other men often simply passed as men having sex.
Here one might make a tangential plea to graduate students entering the field: please consider seriously addressing an appalling gap in our understanding of Mexican history. What has been the role of the Catholic Church in relation to men, masculinities and male sexualities from one era to another?
My only real regret is that so much ink must still be spilt recovering from the literary magicians of mexicanidad, and that too little attention still is paid by thoughtful observers to the person who more than any other in recent decades illuminated multiple scenes both tumultuous and gentle, glaring and modest, of masculinity and sexuality in modern Mexico: Carlos Monsiváis. Monsi is badly missed, although his spirit, if not often enough his words, lives wonderfully well in this impressive volume.
