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How Machismo Got Its Spurs--in English: Social Science, Cold War Imperialism, and the Ethnicization of Hypermasculinity.
- Source :
-
Latin American Research Review . 2017, Vol. 52 Issue 4, p606-622. 17p. - Publication Year :
- 2017
-
Abstract
- This article seeks to shift the framework of decades-long debates on the nature and significance of machismo, debunking the commonly held notion that the word describes a primordial Iberian and Ibero-American phenomenon. I trace the emergence of machismo as an English-language term, arguing that a tradition of unself-consciously ethnocentric scholarship in the 1940s and 1950s enabled the word's entrance, by the 1960s, into popular sources. In fact, machismo was rather a neologism in Spanish, but midcentury US scholarship presumed the category's empirical validity and applied to it to perceived problems in the "Latin" world. Much of machismo's linguistic purchase-the reason it has become a global shorthand for hypermasculinity-stemmed from mid to late twentieth-century anxieties about hemispheric security, the Cold War, immigration, and overpopulation, particularly vis-à-vis the United State's near neighbors, Mexico and Puerto Rico. I have sought out the word's earliest appearances in various English-language media (books, scholarly articles, newspapers, magazines, and television) and explained how it has long escaped scrutiny as a construct in and of itself. As a result, machismo has resisted the most earnest and well-intentioned of challenges to its scholarly primacy and remains a pathologizing point of departure in approaches to Latin American gender systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 00238791
- Volume :
- 52
- Issue :
- 4
- Database :
- Academic Search Index
- Journal :
- Latin American Research Review
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 126481777
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.25222/larr.100