Purdue University Press spoke with author Carolina Castellanos Gonella about her new book, Warrior Women and Trans Warriors: Performing Masculinities in Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature.
Q: Could you give a brief description of your book?
Warrior Women and Trans Warriors reexamines three characters that have been originally analyzed from a conservative perspective of gender in three major Latin American novels. They are 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). The book analyzes and investigates how performing masculinities and transgressing gender rules allow Pintada, Doña Bárbara, and Diadorim to develop strategies of empowerment and occupy the most-desired position within their respective contexts. Additionally, it studies how these characters are disempowered because of each novel’s urge to reestablish the traditional social order.
Q: What is the goal of your book? What motivated you to write it?
I have two main goals with my book. The first one is to reassess the understanding of characters who typically have been analyzed in stereotypical ways and, the second one is to widen the discussion on masculinities in Latin America, by including those performed by cis women and trans men.
I observed that Pintada, Doña Bárbara, and Diadorim had in common being strong and powerful while in times of armed combat, and that literary critics had not examined them in such a way. That gap in literary criticism compelled me to write about them as trans warriors and warrior women, so that I could expose their complexities and emphasize the value of their empowerment strategies.
Q: What are a few things that are being studied for the first time in this book?
What is being studied for the first time in my book is women’s and trans masculinities in Latin American literature of the twentieth century. Masculinities not only involve cis men, as they also embrace femininities, trans people, and cis women.
People should read my book because it reassesses three major Latin American regionalist novels using queer and trans theory and, as such, it provides an innovative reading of Pintada, Doña Bárbara, and Diadorim. Additionally, the book creates a framework to analyze Brazilian and Spanish American literature together that goes beyond national borders.
Q: Is there anything that shocked or surprised you while working on this project?
Even though I apply an intersectional lens to analyze Pintada, Doña Bárbara, and Diadorim, I was still surprised to see how intrinsic sexism, classism, and racism are to each other. Still, I would say that the analyses I conduct in the fifth chapter, in which I examine other warrior women and trans warriors during the twentieth century, were the most surprising to me. While masculinization is less important, sexuality gains importance in the depiction of guerrillas. Also, in the Mexican novel La Negra Angustias (1944), the novel aims to emphasize the contributions of Black Mexicans to the Mexican Revolution with the Angustias, a poor Black woman, but her transgressions and empowerment are constantly controlled and diminished.
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