Males in patriarchal societies occupy positions that shape and control many, if not most, aspects of the lives of other males and women. Hegemonic masculinity ‘guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women’ in patriarchal society.
1 Raewyn C. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), p. 77. Therefore, challenging hegemonic masculinity implies questioning the pillars of the patriarchal system.
While the idea that men are superior to women has been widely questioned in the framework of women’s studies, it has also been challenged on other fronts over the years.
2 Jackson Katz, The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2006). In the late 1970s, the most traditional approach to masculinity (in the singular) started to be questioned in view of the transformations in the institutional, social and interpersonal dimensions. In the early 1980s, male groups, such as homosexual men, raised their voices against the ‘logic’ of
machismo and opened up the masculinity concept to change in the context of gender hierarchies, masculinities, and social and cultural dynamics. Gay men started to denounce heterosexual men’s prejudices against those males who were considered weak or were perceived as posing a threat to hegemonic masculinity in the patriarchal system.
3 Tim Carrigan, Raewyn Connell and John Lee, ‘Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity’, Theory and Society, 14.5 (1985), 551–604, p. 586. This is very important for our analysis in relation to the abuse and authoritarianism of parents, very often followers of a traditional masculinity model, towards their children.
While male chauvinism (
machismo) exists in many parts of the world, in Latin America and the Caribbean region, it constitutes more than simply an ‘ideology’ in the classical understanding of the concept and develops in the field of productive relations among people.
4 Roger Lancaster, Life Is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), p. 19. Therefore,
machismo is presented as a way of life and a core aspect of Mexico’s cultural identity. Yet, the notion is in constant change; as a consequence, there is rarely consensus on whether a man deserves to be labelled macho or not, and a man probably views his own manhood differently from how his family and friends see it.
5 Matthew C. Gutmann, The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City (London: University of California, 1996 [2007]); Matthew C. Gutmann, ‘Men and Masculinities in Development’, The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Development, ed. by Julie Cupples, Marcela Palomino-Schalscha and Manuel Prieto (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 297–307; Matthew Gutmann and Sylvia Chant, Mainstreaming Men into Gender and Development: Debates, Reflections, and Experiences (London: Oxfam GB, 2000); Biron, Murder and Masculinity. Some men may define a friend or relative as ‘the typical Mexican macho’ (someone who exercises male power over his wife and children), yet the same man may frequently reject the label for himself, describing all the things that he does to help his wife around the house and pointing out that he does not hit his wife (hitting women being one of the few generally accepted attributes of machos).
6 Gutmann, The Meanings of Macho, p. 222.Ellos hablan represents the family dynamics sustained by the ‘male breadwinner’ model in Mexico. Separating the spheres for men and women explicitly endorses the ‘proper’ set of social norms for men as providers and for women as homemakers and carers. This ideology praises those ‘natural qualities’ that make males superior to women, including virility, ambition, assertiveness and other behavioural traits associated with males, while women are thought to be ‘naturally’ loving, cheerful, childish and compassionate.
7 See, for example, Patty Kelly, Lydia’s Open Door: Inside Mexico’s Most Modern Brothel (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008). The prevailing sex-based division of domestic and caring work is a central element in performing gender, following a set of pre-established rules. Butler’s theory of performativity maintains that gender comes into being through its performance. For Butler, sex difference is a reality that has been created through history with people playing gender roles, performing as if there were such a thing as a fixed biological sex difference dividing the world into just two categories: men and women. In this way, she contests the biological sex difference between men and women and the cultural interpretation of ‘gender’ division, which she presents as contextual and therefore transformable.
8 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 47–48 and 177–78. Performativity theory is relevant to our analysis because it suggests that gender division and norms are vulnerable to change. As we shall see later, this approach informs the change of mentality about the meanings of masculinity, the ‘real man’, the macho and the like in Cacho’s book.
Other aspects of Butler’s approach are also relevant to this study. She distinguishes between performance, which assumes a subject that consciously performs, and performativity, which is an iterative structure, meaning that performances of gender repeat and imitate previous performances.
9 Ibid., pp. 178–80. This distinction is also crucial for our study because it establishes that mothers, wives and children perform their gender role at home because they imitate previous performances. In relation to women, this means that how females perform gender in the stories of the book is not a matter of free choice, as to participate in familial and social life and to be able to perform at all, women are forced to perform their gender according to a pre-established model. This perspective alleviates (but does not excuse) the weight on the shoulders of mothers, whom the children often blame for not having done anything to defend them from parental aggressions.
Throughout
Ellos hablan, mothers, wives, girlfriends, daughters and female assistants initially appear as inevitable and collateral to the mistreatment of children. Yet, both women and children alike are neglected, humiliated, marginalised, stigmatised and objectified. This causes them to experience depression, isolation and devaluation of their self-esteem and even to attempt suicide.
10 General Law of Women’s Access to a Life Free of Violence, Government of Mexico, 2015; https://www.gob.mx/conapo/documentos/que-onda-con-la-violencia?state=published [accessed 19 January 2021]. Through the accounts of males, we can trace the driving male force that objectifies them and their mothers. Herman writes about the objectification process:
for as soon as a person becomes an Object of appetite for another, all motives of moral relationship cease to function, because as an Object of appetite for another a person becomes a thing and can be treated and used as such by everyone.
11 Barbara Herman, ‘Could It Be Worth Thinking About Kant on Sex and Marriage?’, A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, ed. by Louise M. Antony and Charlotte E. Witt (Boca Raton, FL: Taylor and Francis, 1993), pp. 49–67, at p. 55.Nussbaum presents seven ways of ‘objectifying’ a woman, which can be equally applied to children in violent environments: instrumentality, denial of autonomy, inertia, fungibility, violability, property and denial of subjectivity.
12 Martha C. Nussbaum, ‘Objectification’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 24.4 (1995), 249–91, p. 257. Women and children in the book are thus treated as disposable and violable subjects: ‘something that is permissible to break up, smash, break into’.
13 Ibid., p. 257. These behaviours pave the way for physical and spiritual abuse, rape, and even the killing of the victims of sexual abuse, which is also addressed in the book.
We shall see how some of the males in the book replicate their fathers’ behaviour and treat women as sexual ‘tools’: violable and alienated individuals with no autonomy. In denying women’s autonomy, males deny women’s agency. Reduced to mere sexual objects, women are presented as ‘inert’ identities. Dworkin relates female sexual objectification with sadistic violence and the denial of autonomy, as a woman’s privacy is:
irredeemably compromised, her selfhood changed in a way that is irrevocable, unrecoverable […] By definition, she [has] a lesser privacy, a lesser integrity of the body, a lesser sense of self, since her body can be physically occupied and in the occupation taken over.
14 Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse (London: Secker & Warburg, 1987), pp. 122–23.Therefore, women are seen as easily replaced objects in the sex-trafficking business, which is also addressed in the book. This is because, as Sandra Lee Bartky argues, sexual objectification separates women’s bodies into parts for satisfying male sexual desires.
15 Sandra Lee Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 35. Nussbaum addresses the perceptions that victims of violence have about themselves: they experience shame, anxiety, a lack of motivation, eating disorders, depression and sexual dysfunction.
16 Martha C. Nussbaum, ‘Women’s Bodies: Violence, Security and Capabilities’, Journal of Human Development, 6.2 (2005), 165–83; Bartky, Femininity and Domination; see also Meghan M. Davidson and Sarah J. Gervais, ‘Violence Against Women Through the Lens of Objectification Theory’, Educational Psychology Papers and Publications, 177 (2015), 330–54, p. 333. The trauma is similar for child victims of violence in the family environment.
Can the victims of family violence recover? Cacho proposes a solution in
Ellos hablan. She argues that her conversations with male victims of violence gave them the possibility to engage in what she defines as their ‘rite of passage to become real men’.
17 Ellos hablan, p. 260. In this way, Cacho appeals to males’ acceptance of their own limitations not as males but as individuals. The recovery process is a transitory one; from this, a hybrid identity emerges with the possibility of a new and productive future life. During the transitional period, the individual remains uncertain, as they have been separated from a clearly defined state in the past but have not yet become incorporated into a defined future state. This transitional period raises questions about the meaning of being a ‘real man’ in the
machista and patriarchal society.
A close look at the testimonies presented in Cacho’s volume shows evidence of the victims’ process of recovery, through which they find their place in society. Cacho writes that her interviews became a dialogic experience that was sustained by a bond of trust that enabled the men to interact with their inner children: ‘no doubt, that was an act of courage that reflects their need to be recognised and the construction of their own rite of passage to become real men’.
18 Spanish original: ‘sin duda, un acto de valentía que refleja su necesidad de ser reconocidos y la construcción de su propia historia del rito de paso para convertirse en hombres de verdad’; Ellos hablan, p. 260. Therefore, by making them tell their stories, Cacho placed the males in a liminal space in which meaning was produced and after which, she hoped, a ‘new person’ would emerge. Van Gennep introduced the notion of ‘liminal space’ in the field of anthropology in his book
The Rites of Passage; some years later, Turner developed this concept in
The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure.
19 Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1960); Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974). The term ‘liminality’ comes from the Latin
limen, meaning ‘threshold’. This concept nullifies all limits and opens up the possibility for a third space in which a new identity emerges. The ‘rite of passage’ indicates a recovery process for the victims of domestic violence. Similarly, Bhabha rejects the idea that cultures are ‘unitary in themselves’ or ‘simply dualistic in the relation of Self to Other’.
20 Homi K. Bhabha, ‘The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination, and the Discourse of Colonialism’, Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. by Houston A. Baker Jr., Manthia Diawara and Ruth H. Lindeborg (London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 87–107. Instead, he celebrates hybrid individuals, particularly their ability to manage critical situations within the framework of difference.
The recovery process for the men and women in Ellos hablan involves fleeing from the obscure prototypes on gender and sexuality embedded in machista education. Cacho repeats a mantra throughout the book: machismo is the cancer of the system because it constructs a pernicious idea of masculinity. Cacho presents machismo as a universal and ambiguous cultural methodology that encourages the belief that males are superior individuals and therefore can exercise power and control over women and, as mentioned, other males. One of the testimony providers, the Mexican writer Alberto Ruy Sánchez, defines male chauvinism in the following terms:
For me it is a social disease, a contagious violence spread by media […]. Its ideas and messages of contempt for women are explicit and implicit. It is present in all family situations. And in all social situations. I believe that no one totally escapes from ever being under its domains.
21 Spanish original: ‘Para mí es una enfermedad social, una violencia contagiosa y difundida por todos los medios […]. Su idea y su mensaje de desprecio por la mujer es explícito e implícito. Está presente en todas las situaciones familiares. Y en todas las situaciones sociales. Creo que nadie se escapa totalmente de estar alguna vez bajo sus dominios’; Ellos hablan, p. 137.Cacho addresses the need to combat male power in the frame of a sexist and misogynist judicial system that is ‘corrupted by their own rulers; those sagacious and cynical politicians’.
22 Spanish original: ‘corrompida por sus propios gobernantes; esos políticos sagaces y cínicos’; Ellos hablan, p. 22. Cacho thus denounces Mexican institutions for leaving male violence against women and children unpunished. She explains:
What better way to hide machismo than to normalise it and blame the victims; what better strategy than to decaffeinate it until the didactic force it contains is removed by calling it ‘gender violence’, thus, without the philosophical context that 99% of the population will never read.
23 Spanish original: ‘Qué mejor manera que ocultar el machismo que normalizarlo y culpar a las víctimas; qué mejor estrategia que descafeinarlo hasta quitarle en la forma la fuerza didáctica que contiene al llamarlo “violencia de género”, así, sin el contexto filosófico que el 99% de la población jamás leerá’; Ellos hablan, p. 24.Male chauvinism thus appears in the book as an educational strategy that causes trauma to males and women. There is a need to adopt a more empathetic and fluid model of masculinity. This is a controversial move that is often interpreted as a formal challenge to the patriarchal system. Ruy Sánchez admits that other writers have called him a ‘faltering man’ because he has ‘deviated’ from the path of traditional masculinity.
24 Spanish original: ‘hombre claudicante’; Ellos hablan, p. 140. The resentment against him for having adopted a more empathetic view of masculinity shows to him the contradictions and weaknesses of traditional masculinity in contemporary Mexican society.
25 Ellos hablan, p. 27. On this, he argues: ‘For many, sensuality is not a masculine value, tenderness much less. The worst thing is that their scheme of crude sexuality forces them to have a clumsy conception of literature and the arts’.
26 Spanish original: ‘Para muchos la sensualidad no es un valor masculino, la ternura mucho menos. Lo más grave es que su esquema de sexualidad burda les obliga a tener una concepción torpe de la literatura y las artes’; Ellos hablan, p. 140. Therefore, adopting a more empathetic position with women in the field of literature calls into question his virility and, with it, his identity as a ‘real man’.
Therefore, those men who reject
machismo and patriarchy as the main social forces are easily expelled from what Cacho calls ‘the tribe of men’.
27 Ellos hablan, p. 19. This solidarity among the male community is rooted in equal moral values and high emotional strength. However, is it realistic to believe that all Mexican men share the same views on being ‘a real man’? Let us review some of the stories presented in the book.