Meeting Halfway: Contradictions, Transformation, and Alternative Masculinities in Arturo Islas’s La Mollie and the King of Tears

Abstract

Thinking about alternative masculinities constitutes a challenge at many levels: one may reflect on how to conceptualize them, how and when they emerge, or how to “measure” their existence and impact on gender relations, among others. In order to shed light on these questions, one must draw on the body of scholarly work on masculinity studies that has been actively produced since the 1960s, together with the most significant concepts that have become common jargon in this field of research. Notions of hegemonic masculinity (Connell 1987, 1995, 2000, 2005), “democratic manhood” (Kimmel), “c ritical studies of men” (Hearn), and cultural masculinities (Seidler), circulate the study of masculinity(ies) as tools to tackle masculinity issues regardless of how contested these concepts remain in the field. In this respect, it is worth pondering whether working with yet another category such as alternative masculinities would eventually cause further havoc in the field or run the risk of being perceived as filling a gap in the discipline (Gutmann). Since “masculinities are socially constructed patterns of gender practice” (Connell, Confronting Equality 10), and, as such, they are created through “historical process with a global dimension” (10), it is necessary always to “theorize from experience,” taking men’s and women’s material and discursive practices as reference.