Latin American literature has depicted warrior woman and trans warrior characters in armed conflicts, but literary critics have not paid much attention to their empowerment. They also have critiqued these characters using traditional gender binary concepts or have viewed their access to power as evil or abnormal. Warrior Women and Trans Warriors: Performing Masculinities in Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature, a new book being published in November 2024 by Purdue University Press, introduces a new perspective by analyzing how one trans warrior and two warrior women from three canonical novels contest traditional codes of behavior and appearance. It examines Pintada in the Mexican novel Los de abajo (1915); doña Bárbara in the Venezuelan novel Doña Bárbara (1929); and Diadorim in the Brazilian novel Grande sertão: veredas (1956). Warrior Women and Trans Warriors focuses on how these three characters challenge conventional norms and empower themselves by giving orders, using weapons, fighting, competing with other characters, exposing traditional gender ideologies, and transgressing sartorial gender rules. Drawing on trans theory, intersectionality, gender performance theory, and masculinities studies, this book argues that performing masculinities allow these characters to occupy the place of the most-desired position of their contexts.
Series
Warrior Women and Trans Warriors will be volume 92 in the Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures series. Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures (PSRL) publishes books on topics of literary importance that make a significant contribution to Romance scholarship. Studies are written in English, Spanish, or French and deal with topics in French, Italian, Luso-Brazilian, Spanish, and Spanish American literatures. PSRL books are evaluated, edited, and prepared by the School of Languages and Literatures in the College of Liberal Arts at Purdue University, and published and distributed by Purdue University Press. Like many other volumes in the PSRL series, Warrior Women and Trans Warriors is open access.
About the Author
Carolina Castellanos Gonella is a professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Dickinson College. She received her PhD from Vanderbilt University. Her main areas of research are Brazilian and Mexican literatures and cultures. She has published articles in journals such as Latin American Research Review, Luso-Brazilian Review, Revista canadiense de estudios hispánicos, Chasqui, Literatura mexicana, Revista de estudios de género y sexualidades, and Journal of Lusophone Studies. She is currently researching how Latin American women drug traffickers are represented in literature and newspapers.
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