The Transnational Origins of Hegemonic Dominican Masculinity

Abstract

The Dominican presidential campaign leading up to the 2012 elections littered the national landscape with political slogans. Among these was the presidential candidate Hipolito Mejia’s ubiquitous “Llego Papa” (Daddy’s here). This slogan largely overrode more usual political promises, evincing the power of the discourse of masculinity in Dominican politics. The important role that gender plays in the Dominican national imaginary and in constructing citizenship and state power demands a more complex understanding of hegemonic notions of Dominican masculinity, of the conceptions of femininity that they produce, and of their historical emergence. In fact, notions of gender have long modulated Dominican nationalist discourses in incisive ways and continue to do so up until today. However, evocations of masculinity in Dominican nationalist discourses are usually rationalized as instances of centuries-old “traditional” Latin American patriarchal culture rearing its head. What is thereby elided is how notions of masculinity evolve and change over time; indeed, I argue that today’s hegemonic notions of masculinity were consolidated during the dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo (1930–1961) and thus are in many ways a distinctly modern formation. In turn, Trujillo’s own pervasively hypervirile discourse was, at least in part, a strategic response to the imperial and racialized notions of masculinity that accompanied the US presence in the country, especially during the US military occupation (1916–1924).