ABSTRACT
Masculinities and Violence in Latin American Cultures began in 2008 with a conference panel which led to the publication of a special issue of the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies in 2010. The work of Matthew Brown on a single letter to a Colombian colonel demonstrated the important role that questions related to masculinities play in the field of military history. Formal considerations are vital to understanding the ways in which masculinities are constructed in literature. In the twenty-first century, political instrumentalisation of Mapuche masculinities by the post-dictatorship State and press have resulted in descriptions of the Mapuche as “terrorist,” recalling nineteenth-century depictions of them as “savages” and frustrating alternative, liberatory discourses in Mapuche poetry. Recalling Amit Thakkar’s treatment of the relevance of a “social script” to the construction of masculinities, the object over which power is being contested is the text itself and thus “text control” becomes a vital aspect of Carpenter’s analysis.
