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Casting Masculinity in Spanish Film
Negotiating Identity in a Consumer Age
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Book Presentation:
The rise of consumerism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries radically changed the way we perceive ourselves and the world around us. And, as it has throughout history, the social construct of “ideal” masculinity both reflects and responds to that lived reality, helping individuals adapt. Through a close study of Spanish film of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this book investigates hegemonic, or dominant, masculinity in the wake of dramatic consumer changes that occurred in Spain. It explores the ways in which masculine identity as represented in Spanish film positions itself in relation to desire and consumption, focusing especially on representations of hegemonic masculinity from the almost 40 year dictatorship of General Francisco Franco through the transition to democracy and into the early 1990s.
Using psychoanalytic theory as employed primarily by Todd McGowan and Slavoj Žižek, this book analyzes cinematic representations of hegemonic masculine models, along with those portrayed as less favorable, to understand how political, social and economic changes in Spain in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries affect the process of masculine identity formation. In the shift from a “society of prohibition” to a “society of commanded enjoyment,” hegemonic masculinity as represented in Spanish film changes dramatically, initially organizing itself around prohibition and self-renunciation in the early Franco dictatorship and later, with neoliberal reforms and mass media promotion of consumerist values starting in the 1950s, reorienting itself around desire and enjoyment (embodied, for example, in the sexually promiscuous, fashionable young man of the 1970s). Personal pleasure and the satisfaction of one’s desires replace submission, obedience and self-abnegation―leading to a reconstruction of masculine identities in a social context that appears increasingly fragmented, plural and individualistic. The primary innovation of this text involves the repositioning of consumerism as a fundamental force in the formation of Spanish masculinity and showing how widely disseminated masculine models serve to accommodate political, social and economic demands.
About the Author:
Mary Hartson is associate professor of Spanish at Oakland University.
Press Reviews:
"This discussion of a key set of tensions around Spanish masculinities on film will be of value to students of Spanish film at all levels. It is not only a useful and exceptionally full survey that covers many canonical films but also an elegant introduction to key issues in masculinity studies and in critical gender studies more widely. It represents a finely tuned and accessible complement to existing film historical work, especially in relation to the films of the 1940s to 1960s, and has its own instructive focus on how prohibitions and taboos, desires and the consumption of goods and images play out on screen and in society." ―Chris Perriam, University of Manchester
See the publisher website: Lexington Books
> On a related topic:
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From Banderas to Bardem
Volatile Whiteness (2025)
Race, Cinema, and Europeanization in Spain
Spanish Meta-Art and Contemporary Cinema (2025)
Mirrors to the Unconscious
Catalan Cinema (2024)
The Barcelona Film School and the New Avant-Garde
Dir. Anton Pujol and Jaume Martí-Olivella
Patriarchy's Remains (2024)
An Autopsy of Iberian Cinematic Dark Humour
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