Hybrid Nations

This book is an interdisciplinary study that addresses the critical role that gender plays in the formation of national identities in Latin America that are negotiated and challenged within extreme struggles for power. This study, which traverses the national landscapes of Argentina, Cuba, Venezuela, and Guatemala and covers the time span between 1837 and 1946, is linked by the author's common strategy of employing gender codes in order to challenge overtly masculinist hegemonic political orders. One of the goals of this investigation is to explore the fissures that surface as a result of the ongoing fluctuations of gender codes, due in part to the diverse shifting of institutions of power during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. By disturbing deleterious conceptualizations associated with femininity and masculinity, one can embark upon new and open-ended readings of these historical national texts, and appreciate the groundbreaking strides of early revolutionary Latin American writers. -- Publisher description.