How Machismo Got Its Spurs—in English: Social Science, Cold War Imperialism, and the Ethnicization of Hyper-masculinity
Title | How Machismo Got Its Spurs—in English: Social Science, Cold War Imperialism, and the Ethnicization of Hyper-masculinity |
Publication Type | Journal Article |
Year of Publication | 2017 |
Authors | Cowan, Benjamin Arthur |
Journal | Latin American Research Review |
Volume | 52 |
Issue | 4 |
Pagination | 606 - 622 |
Date Published | 10/2017 |
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. |
URL | https://larrlasa.org/articles/10.25222/larr.100/ |