Abstract
The Dominican presidential campaign leading up to the 2012 elections littered the national landscape with political slogans. Among these was the presidential candidate Hipólito Mejía’s ubiquitous “Llegó Papá” (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 Leónidas 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).
Portions of this chapter are reproduced from Masculinity after Trujillo: The Politics of Gender in Dominican Literature with the permission of UP of Florida
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Notes
Christian Krohn-Hansen, “Masculinity and the Political among Dominicans: ‘The Dominican Tiger,’” in Machos, Mistresses, and Madonnas: Contesting Latin American Gender Imagery, ed. Marit Melhuus and Kristi Anne Stolen (London: Verso, 1996), 108–133;
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This view of the two countries locked in a seemingly inevitable struggle has been increasingly critiqued and modified in important ways by a number of scholars. See Silvio Torres-Saillant, “The Tribulations of Blackness: Stages in Dominican Racial Identity,” Callaloo 23, no. 3 (2000): 1086–1111;
Samuel Martinez, “Not a Cockfight: Rethinking Haitian-Dominican Relations,” Latin American Perspectives 30, no. 3 (May 2003): 80–101;
Sybille Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004);
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Gail Bederman puts it even more bluntly, arguing that US international involvement at the time was driven by the “ideology of manly, civilized stewardship of the savage and barbarous races.” Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 196.
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© 2015 Pablo Dominguez Andersen and Simon Wendt
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Horn, M. (2015). The Transnational Origins of Hegemonic Dominican Masculinity. In: Andersen, P.D., Wendt, S. (eds) Masculinities and the Nation in the Modern World. Global Masculinities. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137536105_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137536105_11
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