Masculinity After Trujillo: The Politics of Gender in Dominican Literature by Maja Horn (review)

Abstract

Seccion Bibliografica Horn, Maja. Masculinity after Trujillo: The Politics of Gender in Dominican Literature. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2014. 203 pp. Maja Horn’s Masculinity after Trujillo is an important contribution to Dominican, Caribbean, and Latin American studies. After the introduction, the first chapter “De-tropicalizing the Trujillo Dictatorship and Dominican Masculin- ity” analyzes speeches by Rafael Trujillo, Joaquin Balaguer, and other nationalist Dominican letrados to unearth the keys to the Trujillato’s discourse of masculinity, which, according to Horn, was in part a reaction to the long-lasting US occupation of the Dominican Republic and its imposition of a racialized imperial masculinity. The title of chapter two, “One Phallus for Another: Post-dictatorial Political and Literary Canons,” is a pun on the title of one of Doris Sommer’s books, One Master for Another: Populism as Patriarchal Rhetoric in Dominican Novels. In it, the author carries out a close analysis of two novels by Marcio Veloz Maggiolo, De abril en adelante and Una y carne, to show how even leftist-leaning Dominican intellectu- als reinforced this same rhetoric of masculinity during Balaguer’s governments, thus indirectly naturalizing authoritarianism. Horn argues that the attempts by Domini- can canonical writers to emasculate the image of Trujillo as the country’s most virile man reproduce the same masculinist ideology popularized by his government. In fact, they reduce serious political problems to the sexual prowess of the dictator’s phallus. In her view, Veloz Maggiolo and other authors reproduce hegemonic no- tions of gender and sexuality that limit their vision of political resistance. The third chapter, “Engendering Resistance: Hilma Contreras’s Counter- narratives,” rescues Contreras’s important counter-narratives of resistance, which challenge mainstream notions of honor, masculinity, and sexuality, and propose the recovery of the Trujillato’s cultural practices for anti-hegemonic ends. Horn focuses on the representation of Dominican gender formations in three works by Contreras: 4 cuentos, Dona Endrina de Calatayud, and La tierra esta bramando. She also looks at how Dominican cultural practices foster anti-hegemonic alliances and collective forms of action. According to the author, Contreras’s writing presents si- lence as a site of resistance during the Trujillato. Her novel La tierra esta bramando provides examples of strategies of resistance, such as the strategic use of femininity (being seen as a harmless and apolitical subject) beyond masculinist cultural logics and hyper-sexualized imaginary. The author proposes the recovery of the Trujillato’s cultural practices for anti-hegemonic ends and proves that the return of the Do- minican diaspora has, in many cases, reinforced hegemonic, masculinist Dominican notions. The last two chapters explore the effects of globalization, neoliberalism, the tourism industry, global media, mass migration, and diaspora on a new genera- tion of Dominican and Dominican American writers that emerged in the 1990s. In particular, Horn is interested in their critique of the discourse of gender and other hegemonic formations inherited from the Trujillato. “Still Loving Papi: Global- ized Dominican Subjectivities in the Novels of Rita Indiana Hernandez” studies Hernandez’s portrayal of new Dominican subjectivities in her novels La estrategia de la Chochueca and Papi. The chapter that closes the book before the conclusion,