Latin Lover Research Articles

The Latin Lover Narrator as Cultural Mediator in Jane the Virgin

The Latin Lover Narrator as Cultural Mediator in Jane the Virgin

Depiction of Machismo through Castillo Brothers in Oscar Hijuelos’ The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989) is a novel by Oscar Hijuelos, a Cuban-American writer. It talks about the lives of Cesar and Nestor Castillo, Cuban immigrants who live in America to pursue their dreams as musicians. The novel strongly connects to Latin American culture. The Castillo brothers are known for embracing their "Cubanness" as men. Men in Spanish-speaking countries are recognized for their masculine solid pride. Their strong masculine pride is often associated with an exaggeration of their masculinity. People often call it machismo. Machismo, derived from destructive aspects such as aggressiveness, womanizing, emotional withdrawal, and male chauvinism, is known for having harmful outcomes for men who embed it. Operating Hall's Theory of Representation and Kupers' concept of toxic masculinity, this research aims to show how the Castillo brothers represent machismo and reveal the ideology of Oscar Hijuelos' regarding machismo. This research is conducted as qualitative research, utilizing narratives and dialogues. The study found that Cesar's practice of machismo through the act of being a Latin lover affects his participation in alcoholism and resistance to professional help. Besides, Nestor's practice of machismo for being a "man with muscle" eventually leads him to depression, anxiety, and rejection of therapy. It is acknowledged their status as immigrants heighten their practices of machismo. Through his writing, the author expects to criticize machismo.

Phonaesthetics and personality—Why we do not only prefer Romance languages

IntroductionPrevious aesthetic research has set its main focus on visual and auditory, primarily music, stimuli with only a handful of studies exploring the aesthetic potential of linguistic stimuli. In the present study, we investigate for the first time the effects of personality traits on phonaesthetic language ratings.MethodsTwenty-three under-researched, “rarer” (less learned and therefore less known as a foreign language or L2) and minority languages were evaluated by 145 participants in terms of eroticism, beauty, status, and orderliness, subjectively perceived based on language sound.ResultsOverall, Romance languages (Catalan, Portuguese, Romanian) were still among the top six erotic languages of the experiment together with “Romance-sounding,” but less known languages like Breton and Basque. Catalan and Portuguese were also placed among the top six most beautiful languages. The Germanic languages (Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and Icelandic) were perceived as more prestigious/higher in terms of status, however to some degree conditioned by their recognition/familiarity. Thus, we partly replicated the results of our earlier studies on the Romance language preferences (the so-called Latin Lover effect) and the perceived higher status of the Germanic languages and scrutinized again the effects of familiarity/language recognition, thereby calling into question the above mentioned concepts of the Latin Lover effect and the status of Germanic languages. We also found significant effects of personality traits (neuroticism, extraversion, and conscientiousness) on phonaesthetic ratings. Different personality types appreciated different aspects of languages: e.g., whereas neurotics had strong opinions about languages' eroticism, more conscientious participants gave significantly different ratings for status. Introverts were more generous in their ratings overall in comparison to extroverts. We did not find strong connections between personality types and specific languages or linguistic features (sonority, speech rate). Overall, personality traits were largely overridden by other individual differences: familiarity with languages (socio-cultural construals, the Romanization effect—perceiving a particular language as a Romance language) and participants' native language/L1.DiscussionFor language education in the global context, our results mean that introducing greater linguistic diversity in school and universities might result in greater appreciation and motivation to learn lesser-known and minority languages. Even though we generally prefer Romance languages to listen to and to study, different personality types are attracted to different language families and thus make potentially successful learners of these languages.

STEREOTYPES OF THE IMAGE OF THE “COLOR” POPULATION IN AMERICAN MOVIES OF THE XX – FIRST QUARTER OF THE XXI CENTURY

The article considers the peculiarities of the stereotypical image of the “color” population in the US film industry of the XX – first quarter of the XXI century as one of the manifestations of racism; the reasons for the transfer of “ethnic stereotypes” in cinema have been identified. The brightest ethnic stereotypes in film and television are presented in the form of so-called “tropes”. The heroes of films of Asian descent were endowed with excessive militancy and the ability to master martial arts (tropes “All Asians know martial arts”, “All Chinese people know kung-fu”); Asian women were portrayed as defenseless as opposed to a strong white man (“Mighty Whitey and Mellow Yellow” trope); to describe the black hero took the trails “Humble Servant” (“Mammy”), “African-American criminal” (“Blaxploitation”), “White Savior”, “Magic Negro”, “Black Best Friend”. Latin American heroes are physically perfect, sexual and romantic (tropes “Latin Lover”, “Spicy Latina”). In 2010–2020, the “color” population in Hollywood movies is portrayed from a new angle. The main “non-white” heroes show absolute equality with whites, and sometimes dominance over them. This is a social film about problems of general scale and their perception in society, in particular homosexuality (“Moonlight”); a movie with a black superhero (“Black Panther”); a thriller about the confrontation of a black guy with a group of white killers (“Get Out”). Films of this genre are focused on the “color” spectator. The catalysts for changes in Hollywood policy were the #OscarsSoWhite (2016) and Black Lives Matter (2020) movements. As a result, there was a review of the composition of film production teams with an approximation to the proportion typical of the national population of the United States – 40 % (2020, the share of “color” actors in films was 39. %, directors – 25.4 %, writers – 25.9 %); implementation of new requirements for the Oscar (“Best Film” nomination, from 2024) with quotas on gender and racial composition of the production team, etc.

Performative Ethnicity, Embodied Memory, and Oral History in Narratives from the Bronx Italian American History Initiative

Research Article| January 01 2020 Performative Ethnicity, Embodied Memory, and Oral History in Narratives from the Bronx Italian American History Initiative Kathleen Lapenta; Kathleen Lapenta KATHLEEN LAPENTA is a senior lecturer in Italian at Fordham University and is co-director of the Bronx Italian American History Initiative. Her research specializes in modern Italian culture, diaspora studies, and memory at the intersection of literature and cinema; and she has published on Giovanni Verga, Florestano Vancini, Roberto Rossellini, as well as on Italian American identity and representation. She is currently at work on a book-length project that investigates representations of national diasporas in the contexts of migration, exile, and border crossings in Italy and abroad throughout the twentieth century. She is member of the Scientific Committee of the Italian Diaspora Studies Seminar at the University of Calabria. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Jacqueline Reich Jacqueline Reich JACQUELINE REICH is professor and chair of the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University. Her areas of expertise include star studies, film history and theory, and Italian and Italian American cinema. She is the author of The Maciste Films of Italian Silent Cinema (Indiana University Press, 2015) and Beyond the Latin Lover: Marcello Mastroianni, Masculinity, and Italian Cinema (Indiana University Press, 2004). She is also co-author, with Catherine O’Rawe, of Divi: La mascolinità nel cinema italiano (Donzelli, 2015) and co-editor with Piero Garofalo of Re-viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema, 1922-1943 (Indiana University Press, 2002). Currently she is co-director, with Dr. Kathleen LaPenta, of the Bronx Italian American History Initiative, a community-engaged oral history research project at Fordham. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Italian American Review (2020) 10 (1): 1–18. https://doi.org/10.5406/italamerrevi.10.1.0001 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Kathleen Lapenta, Jacqueline Reich; Performative Ethnicity, Embodied Memory, and Oral History in Narratives from the Bronx Italian American History Initiative. Italian American Review 1 January 2020; 10 (1): 1–18. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/italamerrevi.10.1.0001 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressItalian American Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2020 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

L’Avventura. International Journal of Italian Film and Media Landscapes, no spécial 2018, « Latin lover »

L’Avventura. International Journal of Italian Film and Media Landscapes, no spécial 2018, « Latin lover »

The Spanish Latin lover: a strictly domestic myth?

The character of the Mediterranean Latin lover became increasingly popular in late-Francoism Spain owing to a subgenre of films that exploited masculine phantasies of sexual encounters with foreign tourists. Building on a visual analysis of several media (brochures and magazines, Government propaganda, guidebooks and travel books, postcards), this paper examines the actual presence of the Latin lover in Spanish tourism imaginaries during the Franco dictatorship. Despite its important role in the hegemonic narrative of Spain’s tourism boom as a liberalizing factor that clashed against the regime, the myth of the Spanish Don Juan remains absent from the destination image intended for foreign audiences. This suggests that its circulation was strictly domestic, and reinforces its interpretation as a governmentality device.

Hollywood and the Americanization of Britain from the 1920s to the Present.By Mark Glancy.

Studies of the American film’s influence on British culture are nothing new, but whereas most books tend to offer analyses of particular films or focus on debates about legislation to challenge the dominance of Hollywood, Mark Glancy breaks new ground in his detailed analysis of the popular culture of film-going in twentieth-century Britain. Such an approach is to be welcomed as it enables us to get a much clearer idea of the reception of American films amongst the British public and their wider cultural influence. Given its heavy use of popular film magazines, such as Picture Show and Picturegoer, Glancy’s book is strongest in its coverage of the ‘golden age’ of cinema-going, with half of the chapters focused on case studies covering the 1920s to the 1940s. Glancy demonstrates that, while Hollywood films had a great appeal to British audiences, film magazines gave a specifically British context to popular film culture, seeking to promote the development of a UK film industry and expressing anxiety about aspects of the depiction of sex and violence in American movies. In any case, many Hollywood stars, particularly in the silent age, appealed for their exoticism rather than any specifically American attributes. Rudolph Valentino, who played characters of various races, provides the classic example. As Glancy skilfully demonstrates, Valentino had a quite different reputation in Britain compared to the USA, which resulted, in part, from differing attitudes to the ‘Latin Lover’s’ racial identity (pp. 66–74).

DETERMINATION OF LEAF AREA AND LEAF NUMBER OF CALANDIVA® ASSOCIATED WITH THE ACCUMULATION OF DEGREE-DAY

Calandiva® is an ornamental species that is gaining prominence in the market of potted flowers due to the attractiveness of its inflorescences. Since it has been cultivated recently, some aspects of its development are still unknown. The objective of this study was to verify a mathematical procedure that allows to describe the formation and development of Calandiva® leaves associated with the growing degree-days accumulation (GDD). Two experiments were conducted using cuttings of Kalanchoe blossfeldiana 'Bisset' (Calandiva® Pink) and K. blossfeldiana 'Latin Lover Rio' (Calandiva® Orange), planted and grown in plastic pots containing substrate and submitted to fertigation. The experimental design was complete randomized block with four replicates. Each useful plot consisted of three plants, totaling twelve plants per assessment. Every fourteen days, during 105 days, the leaf area was determined with the aid of a leaf area meter. Seven destructive assessments were performed in each experiment. Two models were developed describing the relationship between leaf growth and GDD accumulation in Calandiva®. Growth data obtained of the 'Bisset' cultivar were used to develop these models and the validation was performed using data of the 'Latin Lover Rio' cultivar. The models have been validated and are acceptable for use to correlate of leaf area and number of leaves with growing degree-day in Calandiva® plants.

I'll Meet You in Your Dreams

In May 2012, we received a telephone call from a colleague at a regional cancer center. She asked whether we could admit a patient to our hospice—a man with relapsed, metastatic oral cancer and a life expectancy of only a few weeks. She seemed hesitant while describing the patient’s history. “This is a complicated case, from the medical as well as the psychological point of view. Dealing with the family won’t be easy. But we have to discharge him, and your hospice is the closest to his native village.” To care for patients throughout the whole course of their illness and until their eventual death, our oncology unit includes an inpatient hospice, one of the only such facilities in our region of Italy. As a result, we often receive requests for admission of patients we do not know, many with complicated medical and relational challenges. All too often, these patients tell us that they were caught off guard by being sent to a hospice, and they arrive too late for optimal clinical management. On the basis of our colleague’s description, we guessed that this patient, too, did not know his prognosis and would be unprepared to transition to a phase of palliative care only. Mr T turned out to be a wealthy and charming 45-year-old man, born and raised in Italy, who, approximately 15 years earlier, had started a business in Romania. He had been living with a Romanian woman, and the couple had a young daughter. Six months before we met him, he had undergone surgical resection and standard chemotherapy for his malignancy in Romania, but when his cancer rapidly recurred and progressed, he decided to return to Italy, hoping for more effective therapy. Three months before he was referred to our hospice, the cancer spread to the left side of his face and lymph nodes. In a desperate attempt to eradicate his disease, he underwent radical surgery to remove large parts of his face, followed by reconstructive surgery using two flaps of skin from his chest. He also required two subsequent interventions to repair surgical complications, after which his facial features were significantly altered. Despite these aggressive surgeries, the cancer quickly recurred again and progressed rapidly, eroding into the bones in the skull. He received palliative radiotherapy, but cure was no longer possible. And so Mr T was sent to our hospice. He was able to see only with one eye and could do that only by lifting his ptotic eyelid with his fingers. Skin and lymph node metastases were visible in his neck and chest. He required frequent aspiration of pus-like secretions from his tracheostomy and was fed through a gastrostomy. He could still walk for a few steps with some help, and his pain was adequately controlled by a continuous infusion of morphine. No longer able to speak, he was forced to communicate in writing, but what he wrote made it clear that his mental status was still normal. As we had anticipated, despite all that he had been through, the patient seemed unaware of the rapid and irreversible worsening of his clinical condition. He informed us that he had not been told by the referring hospital that he was going to die, but rather that the goal of this admission was to help him recover from damage caused by the palliative radiotherapy. It was painful to watch Mr T ask about all the details of his care plan with the idea that he could still be cured. More than anything, he wanted to get well enough to go back home to his 8-year-old daughter in Romania, even though he realized that this was outside his grasp at the time he arrived. Mr T was an ambitious and intelligent man, with a good sense of humor. When we asked him to suggest how we could reduce the lengthy, intrusive visits of an overzealous family member, for instance, he replied by making a hand gesture that mimed shooting her with a pistol. Despite his physical limitations, he was charming toward the hospice personnel, paying special attention to young female nurses. Of course his face was not even close to what used to be—but he would often show an old picture of himself before the disease, as a reminder of his past as a Latin lover. Walking by his room, we would sometimes catch him sitting on the edge his bed, with his elbow leaning on the bedside table and his fingers lifting his paralyzed eyelid, staring at his destroyed face in a mirror. We wondered how he could possibly cope with such a devastating change of his appearance. JOURNAL OF CLINICAL ONCOLOGY A R T O F O N C O L O G Y VOLUME 31 NUMBER 4 FEBRUARY 1 2013

Introduction: Italy and the emotions

Characterised as the country of gestural expressiveness and animated verbal exchanges, of Latin lovers and of operatic excess, Italy has long been seen as a domain of emotional intensity. However, this association between Italy and the emotions has tended to remain a matter for popular imagination and stereotypical representations, and it is only recently that the question of emotions has started to become a focus for scholarly investigation. This special issue has its origins in the Association for the Study of Modern Italy's 2009 annual conference,Italy and the Emotions: Perspectives from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, organised by the editors. The conference offered the first opportunity to bring together scholars of Italy working in a wide range of disciplines in order to hear from the pioneers of such research and to exchange ideas on the new insights and new lines of research being opened up by a focus on emotions. There is considerable interest in this emerging field of study in Italy, as the response to the conference demonstrated, but other than the widely known work of scholars such as Alberto Mario Banti, Luisa Passerini and Alessandro Portelli (discussed briefly below), little else has been published so far. With this issue we hope both to showcase some of the work that is being done, and to provide an impetus for further research.

<i>Gay Hegemony/Latino Homosexualities</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Gay Hegemony/Latino Homosexualities Horacio N. Roque Ramírez Gay Hegemony/Latino Homosexualities. By Manolo Guzmán. New York: Routledge, 2006. Pp. 116. $120.00 (cloth) Iam glad I did not cheat by reading the end of this book before the rest to find out what it is supposed to be all about, but I am also glad Manolo Guzmán makes it explicit in his last paragraph: “Gay Hegemony/Latino Homosexualities was motivated, all along, by a deep suspicion of racial metaphors in the elaboration of gayness in the US. Its focus lay on the organization of same-sex desires in Puerto Rican society, especially its New York diaspora” (102). We do quite a lot of very close, careful reading [End Page 170] before we get to that magic pithy summary moment from Guzmán. Indeed, although this is a “little” book at just over a hundred pages, the author packs a punch in many places, some better placed than others. This brief review cannot do justice to a book that should have been at least twice as many pages in length. But I will try. Guzmán is honestly ambivalent about the direction of his work—that it “is and is not about gay Puerto Rican men or about the organization of same-sex eroticism in Puerto Rican society” (1). We know by the end that it’s the former, but he first takes us into quite a long ride of theory (unnecessarily so, I would argue) and some original ethnographic material and readings of cultural texts to understand, for one, the positioning of the Latin (Puerto Rican) lover in mainstream (white) US culture historically but especially in what he aptly refers to as “the gay epoch,” and second and primarily, the relationship between Latino homosexualities and what he refers to as “gay hegemony.” Contrary to its publisher’s claim that Gay Hegemony/Latino Homosexualities “weaves ethnographic interviewing with the analysis of texts and material culture,” the book’s first chapter, “Queer Theory and Race,” is by far the longest of the five at twenty-four pages and is the most challenging to get through. Here the author first takes the theoretical stand to which he returns in later chapters. His main goal is to recenter, through queer theory, the intersection of race, sex, and class in the United States. For Guzmán the starting point is found in the classic This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, first published in 1981.1 Just as Guzmán reifies this canonical text, he strikes it down: “The strength of Bridge resides in its championing of difference. Its limitation, however, lies in its commitment to the opposite of difference, identity” (6). These forms of both/and and neither/nor arguments are common in Gay Hegemony, so much so that they leave the reader confused, at the very least. He then engages Michel Foucault, Ann Stoler, Sigmund Freud, and Judith Butler, among others, to work his way toward linking the erotic, the sexual, and the racial, declaring “queer theory’s unwitting complicity in that conservative project seeking to reduce the realm of the erotic to the realm of the sexual . . . . Racial formations must be understood as other than the displacement of our fears and fantasies onto the other” (28–29). Chapter 2, one of the most subtly argued, is where Guzmán’s focus on homosexuality in Puerto Rican society takes off, noting the centrality of “syncretism” to understand the island in general but gayness or homosexuality specifically. “Is there a Puerto Rican gayness” (my emphasis), he asks, especially in relation to US cultural imperialism? His main analytical text is Rafael Ramírez’s What It Means to Be a Man (1999), one of the first to study homosexuality in Puerto Rico, and Guzmán argues that, like other writers [End Page 171] (native and foreign) on Latin American homosexualities, Ramírez falls into a simplified top/bottom binary paradigm, arguing that homosexuality need not have a homosexual identification.2 Also engaging the work of other scholars such as Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, Guzmán notes that...

A Latin Lover in Ancient Rome: Readings in Propertius and His Genre (review)

A Latin Lover in Ancient Rome: Readings in Propertius and His Genre (review)

Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare (review)

Reviewed by: Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare Danijela Kambasković-Sawer Menon, Madhavi, ed., Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2011; paperback; pp. 512; 18 illustrations; R.R.P. US$27.95; ISBN 9780822348450. In the Acknowledgments to Shakesqueer, the editor, Madhavi Menon calls this book a labour of love. I believed her. The love shows not only in the quality of the idea itself, but also in the way the book has been put together, which is a recipe for success. Take forty-eight smart and interesting thinkers working in the field of queer theory – some of them Shakespeareans and early modernists, some not – that is one for each of the forty-five works by Shakespeare, plus three for the Sonnets. Get them to write – more or less reluctantly – their observations on the individual work of William Shakespeare allocated to them. Precede their musings with an Introduction which defines things that the reader is likely to have been thinking about, but did not dare to ask: what is ‘queer criticism’, how it is distinct not only from gay and lesbian criticism, gender studies, theory of the other, and deconstruction theory, but also from twentieth-century queer theory, even the way our expertise and academic jobs are defined? Then, in a deliciously hip anachronistic move, apply the notion of queerness to Shakespeare’s opus in order to uphold the idea of its continuing relevance. By rearranging the pixels on the icon of Shakespeare, turn him into an altogether different, modern, fresh, re-thought kind of icon; yet an icon nevertheless. Or, as the Bard himself puts it: one must be cruel only to be kind. ‘Privilege’, argues Menon in the Introduction, ‘is not all that it appears to be, and being canonized … deprives the text of agency … If canonizing Shakespeare protects our idea of ourselves, then not engaging the canonical Shakespeare allows that protection to continue unimpeded’, and this is not [End Page 225] a good thing. But any shaking of Shakespeare must also shake queer theory and rethink two main assumptions: ‘that queerness has a historical start date [which Menon argues is the nineteenth century]; and that queerness is a synonym for embodied homosexuality [which Menon argues is a post nineteenth-century phenomenon]’ (pp. 2–4). Rather, the question proposed as being at the heart of this project is: ‘Can Shakespeare be regarded as a queer theorist, or is he always the object on which queer theory acts in a one-sided relationship?’ It is proof of its impeccable academic credentials that the book also acknowledges the fundamental problem with this question: that ‘Shakespeare … lies beyond the pale of acceptable chronology, so to extend queerness to him is to play fast and loose with academic credibility’ (p. 5). In response to this, Menon proposes queer theory that is ‘a hybrid, an amalgamation of several different theories and texts that thwarts our desire to pin down its essence’. In essence, then, this is a theory which explores itself and its relationship with the unusual, weird, unorthodox, unexpected, surprising, and, above all, self-interrogating types of self-expression, then applies the result to the works of William Shakespeare. It was good to see in the volume the likes of Bruce Smith, Lee Edelman, Stephen Bruhm, Ellis Hanson, Stephen Guy-Bray, Kathryn Schwarz, Alan Sinfield, and others associated with a study of sexuality and otherness, both in and out of the field of the Renaissance Studies (though Stephen Orgel is conspicuous by his absence), as well as some unfamiliar names. As it is impossible to discuss all forty-eight contributions in a review, I offer here a small and personal selection. Bruce Smith’s ‘The Latin Lovers in the Taming of the Shrew’ is a light-hearted and highly incisive piece on the relationship between the vagaries of (Latin) grammar and generation of sexual meaning (no pun intended here): it is characteristically informative and pleasurable. Lee Edelman’s ‘Hamlet’s wounded name’ is also an exploration of language, but written in a denser, Derrida-esque style. Edelman casts Hamlet as a ‘personification of too-muchness beyond the grasp of...

French New Wave Cinema and the Legacy of Male Libertinage

it be like if a man were pregnant?” and turned the reigning Latin lover of the 1970s, Marcello Mastroianni, into that man on-screen. Demy worked well past the years of the New Wave. By looking at Demy, we can reevaluate the meaning and signifi cance of the New Wave not only in its own time but also by considering its relation to the longer history of French fi lm after the wave had clearly passed. If adding Demy allows us to follow the wave across time, it also serves as a reminder that the current study of the New Wave has cut it off from the popular cinema to which it was clearly tied. Our understanding of French fi lm in the 1950s and 1960s, especially outside France, has been telescoped unnecessarily into a narrative about the New Wave, and we have been held prisoners to the articulate pronouncements of its most celebrated practitioners such as Truffaut, who was fi lmmaker and propagandist in one. The New Wave’s eloquent proponents accomplished a good many things: they championed new practices in fi lmmaking, codifi ed new modes of narrative, and empowered a young generation who imagined themselves as artists when they made fi lms. Moreover, they gave an enormous boost to those who wrote about fi lm, helping to transform the amateur practice of cinephilia into a legitimate discourse of fi lm criticism and in some ways laying the groundwork for institutionalizing Film Studies as we know it today. The concerned UniFrance report from 1965 cited above complained that only universities and university towns would book French movies after the New Wave. University courses on the New Wave have, at least, created a steady market for French fi lm. Yet we must rethink the New Wave long enough to remember the audience and to try to understand their love of Bardot and Demy.

A Latin lover in ancient Rome: readings in Propertius and his genre

A Latin lover in ancient Rome: readings in Propertius and his genre

America on film: representing race, class, gender, and sexuality at the movies

America on film: representing race, class, gender, and sexuality at the movies

A Room of (His) Own: Italian and Italian-American Male-Bonding Spaces and Homosociality

This article focuses on underlying psychosocial rationales for perpetuating male-exclusive associations. Further explored is what establishment of such female-excluding male spaces reveal about relative parallels and/or differences in construction of gender identity and definitions of masculinity held by participating members of two male group—one in the Tuscany region of Central Italy, the other in southwestern Connecticut and made up largely of second and third generation Italian-Americans. Do these men, when in their own and exclusive company, act out too easily assumed stereotypes of Italian and Italian-American masculinities—hot tempered, competitive, prone to violence, mother adoring, Latin lovers? Or are their constructions of masculinity based on other and socioculturally and ethnohistorically tempered criteria of masculinity (Società, skill attainment, physical strength and separation from an impoverished past and the feminine)?

Buscando para nuestra latinidad: Utilizing La Llorona for Cultural Critique

This essay analyzes the contemporary constructions of Latina/o identity, Latina/o gender and Latina/o nationality as evidenced in the self-proclaimed “first major studio comedy to reflect the Hispanic cultural experience in America,” Chasing Papi. The contradictions between the film's progressive mission and the film's representations are teased out by a cross-reading of the film's usage of the popular Chicana/o mythic figure, La Llorona. Invoking La Lorona as muse and means, we find that the Latin Lover stereotype succeeds in its anti-assimilationist task while concurrently furthering confusion on who and what is a U.S. Latina/o. However, the authors also demonstrate how cultural cross-readings can provide hope out of delimiting discursive constructions.

Introduction to the theme ‘Masculinity and violence in Spain and Latin America’

The first five articles in this edition of JILAS address the theme of masculinity and violence in Spain and Latin America. Despite—or perhaps because of—the proliferation of tropes of posturing machos, Latin lovers, vain, prancing toreros and enraged, jealous husbands, which are often peddled in the media and popular culture, the question of masculinity in Spanish and Latin American societies has been largely ignored in critical studies. In fact, the study of gender in these societies is usually limited to women and, to a lesser extent, gay men. The intention of this collection is to move beyond the stereotypes of masculine behaviour and discourse in these societies and to lay bare the intricate nexus between the rituals and practices of masculinity and their frequent manifestation in acts of violence. It has been problematically argued that violence is primarily attached to the masculine and knows no limits in terms of age, class, race, ethnicity or nationality. In contemporary Latina/Hispanic societies, as in many others, while women are sometimes complicit in domestic violence (abuse of children or homicidal revenge against spouses), it is masculine violence that is ubiquitous and rampant, whether in the domestic sphere of spousal and child abuse, in sexual aggression, or in the public sphere of extortion, robbery, gangs, sport, war and state violence. It has also been suggested that specific acts of violence such as terrorism, sabotage, and bullying are overwhelmingly performed by men. How is the nexus between masculinity and violence portrayed in cultural creation? In this collection of essays, literature and film provide pathways to understand the damaging conjunction of masculinity and violence for both society and the individual. An extended literature review of trans gender peoples forms a companion piece.