La representación de la(s) masculinidad(es) en la industria cultural colombiana. Las políticas de género en SoHo y sus escritores

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation examines the social representation of masculinities in the contemporary Colombian cultural industry. The corpus of the study is composed by the novels of four Colombian writers (Santiago Gamboa, Alonso Sánchez Baute, John Better, and Efraím Medina) and their contributions to SoHo, a magazine for heterosexual men that is considered the Colombian version of Playboy. The research proves that gay and trans male bodies and subjectivities are commodified, spectacularized, and appropriated in order to include them in the late-capitalist logic that Colombia adopted at the beginning of the 90s. This dissertation relies on an interdisciplinary approach that combines Literary, Cultural and Gender Studies, and Queer Linguistics. In the first chapter, I argue that SoHo is a site of hybridization where local, regional, global, as well as hegemonic and counterhegemonic discourses about male Colombian sexuality concur. The second chapter focuses on the representation of gay and trans masculinities in Locas de felicidad (2009) by John Better and Al diablo la maldita primavera (2007) by Alonso Sánchez Baute, and shows how these Colombian authors question the neoliberal policies implemented in their country by constructing the male gay body as a commodity. Such construction reveals that LGBTQ subjects can only be fully considered citizens if they are useful to the imperatives of a liberal market economy. In chapter three, I explore the connection between Colombia's armed conflict, neoliberal policies, and masculinities in the novel Plegarias nocturnas (2012) by Santiago Gamboa. In this analysis I demonstrate that a violent, protectionist, and liberal masculine figure was erected in Colombia's national discourse as one of the means to cope with the longstanding military conflict in the country. Plegarias nocturnas contests this figure by emphasizing queer ways of living. The final chapter deals with Sexualidad de la Pantera Rosa (2004) by Efraím Medina and shows that although the subaltern protagonist of the novel presents himself as a critic of patriarchy, the power of his criticism is concealed through the use of an ironic and ambiguous discourse that, in the end, leads to the conservation of his heterosexual dominance. This research project is the first to analyze contemporary Colombian masculinities. The study of the rhetorical strategies employed by several writers to portray late capitalist masculinities enriches our knowledge of 20th and 21st-century Latin American literature demonstrating how it reflects the sociopolitical and economic changes of this period. In addition, by looking at how Colombian masculinities intertwine with regional and global gender politics, this research contributes to the current debates about sexual minorities and their role in maintaining neoliberal normative ways of living. Therefore, this study proposes innovative discussions regarding how the South reproduces and/or contests hegemonic discourses.