Amal Treacher Kabesh conceives of “postcolonial masculinities” as multidetermined spaces where different subjectivities and temporalities clash. In the case of Andean countries, beyond the positions of “hegemonic” and “subaltern,” or “white” and “indigenous,” masculinities can be conceptualized as networks of phantasies and discourses that incorporate the self and the others, in contacts that express the transhistorical racial and gender conflicts in its societies. This panel reflects around the changes and re-inscriptions of Andean masculinities during the twentieth century, as represented in novels of different styles and traditions. By establishing a dialogue between authors that are regularly studied as quite different and even ideological rivals, this panel reveals the ominous presence of the manlier, the feminized, the darker, the whiter, the forbidden and desired other masculine bodies that constitute, excite, and menace their male character’s identities. And by doing so, this panel provides new insights into these works’ revisions of and proposals for Andean history, politics, and future.

In the first presentation, "Castration and the Queer Art of Failure in Los cachorros by Mario Vargas Llosa," Javier Muñoz-Diaz analyzes the practices of homosociality devoted to configuring the hegemonic masculinity in Los cachorros (1967) by Mario Vargas Llosa. This novella narrates the accidental castration of Pichula Cuéllar and the impact this event causes on a group of upper-class Peruvian schoolboys. After his castration, Cuéllar performs hypermasculinity but fails in the courtship of women, and the schoolboys assume that he becomes homosexual. On this basis, Los cachorros presents two different gender and class socialization outcomes: the schoolboys' success and Cuéllar's failure. Nevertheless, these two socializations are not opposed since Cuéllar's failure reveals an underlying logic in the socialization process of male upper-class boys. Despite the schoolboys' efforts to differentiate themselves from Cuéllar, their hypermasculinity performance highlights the role of homosociality in their process of becoming men.

Homosociality is also addressed in the second presentation, Jonatan Guerra’s "Homosociality and Mandate of Rape in two Quiteño Novels." Guerra studies how the representation of the mandate of rape is supported by male homosocial relationships in the Ecuadorian novels No somos tu clase de gente by Roberto Ramírez Paredes and Complejo by Santiago Vizcaíno, by using Rene Girard's perspective of mimetic desire in the man-woman-man triangle and the experience of that desire in male homosocial relationships described by Eve Kosofsky Sedwick. In addition, using Rita Segato’s studies as reference, he analyzes how these homosocial relationships reinforce the mandate of rape through three forms of interpellation from the male community represented in the novels.

Violence permeating masculinity is also studied in the third presentation, "The Language of Desire: Masculinities in Tension in the Novels of Jorge Eduardo Eielson," by Carlos Rubens López Pari, who focuses in the work of Jorge Eduardo Eielson (Lima, 1921-Milan, 2006). In Eielson's two novels, the author portrayed male characters as affected by the violence that the hegemonic discourse imposed on sexualities. In his first novel, El cuerpo de Giulia-no (1971), the narrator confronted the hegemonic masculine tradition by rejecting the language and aspiring to a new way of expression. Primera muerte de María (1988), Eielson’s second novel, offered a new approach that include new racialized male characters: Afro-Peruvian subject who faced an apocalyptic reality as consequence of an environmental problem. From a critical perspective, Eielson’s novels attacked the hegemonic masculinity by problematizing language as a key component of hegemonic and subaltern values.

The negotiations of race and masculinity are the center of the fourth presentation, “Trans-racial Masculinities and New Affective Communities in Arguedas’s Zorros,” where César Romero Fernández analyzes Jose Maria Arguedas’s novel The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below, to demonstrate he produced a relational re-envisioning of Indigenous and Afro-Peruvian masculinities. Arguedas imagined them as “in-between spaces” (Bhabha) that deconstructed the hegemonic project of a whitened society. Against that grain, he promoted a new affective community based on trans-racial solidarity between Black and Indigenous peoples that “unsettled” (Wynter) what meant be a “man” in a racist and postcolonial society. And by doing so, he proposed that a new destiny for the nation is possible, beyond economic and racial domination.