Studies in Hispanic Cinemas (new title: Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas) - Volume 3, Issue 3, 2007

The article considers the destruction of virile masculinity by the monstrous abject in Guillermo del Toro's El espinazo del diablo (2001). Throughout the film there is an undercurrent of obsession with male potency symbolised by the recurring motifs of the unexploded bomb and the liquor sold from the medicine jars that preserve deformed foetuses. Virility is more precisely figured as both beautiful and murderous through the character of Jacinto as played by actor Eduardo Noriega, drawing on the persona brought to the film by his previous roles. His beautiful masculinity is set in opposition to an embodiment of masculinity that is monstrous and abject, primarily through the ghost Santi and the feminine trail of blood constantly flowing from his head. The virile masculine may be loosely associated with the right-wing forces of the Spanish Civil War, while the monstrous is loosely associated with resistance to them, so that the eventual triumph of the monstrous undermines (if only briefly) the efforts of the right wing to posit masculinity as a political statement. Horror, however, is encapsulated in precisely the threat to beautiful virility as spectacle, as exemplified by Noriega's character: by presenting the male body as an object of admiration, potency and desire, the film feminises it and thus lays it open to the possibility of decay and abjection. Del Toro thus presents masculinity as unfixed, in inherent danger of collapsing in on itself and mutating into the monstrous abject. The male body comes to haunt itself, implying the ever present possibility of a return of the regressed.

This article examines the intersections between masculinity and history in Carlos Saura's 1970 film El jardn de las delicias/The Garden of Delights and Pedro Almodvar's 1997 film Carne trmula/Live Flesh. The backdrop of Saura's black tragicomedy of greed is the conflict between Spain's rapid industrial modernisation the milagro econmico that ushered Spain into a new era and the residual dictatorial structures of that time. Carne trmula's complex tale of love, betrayals and deceits is woven into Spain's contemporary national narrative: its transition from dictatorship to democracy. Set in Spain's vital historical periods and equally burdened by the weight of history, Carne trmula and El jardn de las delicias are further linked insofar as the directors of both films focus on the male (disabled) body and reflect upon prevailing Spanish political models through the tropes of manhood and masculinity. Saura's dystopic vision and Almodvar's political utopia are stories enacted by male characters who desire obsessively, suffer desperately, take bitter revenge and embrace violent forms of love. The films of Saura and Almodvar reveal the complexity and multiplicity of social, political and historical constructions of masculinity. Their exploration critiques masculinity and the male body and the ways in which these are produced, inscribed and contested. Both directors examine the historical construction of masculinity within the framework of modern Spanish political culture. The protagonists of El jardn de las delicias and Carne trmula are inseparably wedded to a shared national/collective history that in turn (de)forms them.

This article analyses filmic representations of race and foreignness in Spanish immigration films made in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It focuses on the position of male black immigrants as sexual subjects/objects and as members of ghettoised communities whose survival depends mainly on the masculine bonding they create within their diasporic communities and the romantic interactions they establish with (mostly female) Spanish nationals. The first part of the article concentrates on films such as Bwana (dir. Imanol Uribe, 1996); Taxi (dir. Carlos Saura, 1996); Sad (dir. Lloren Soler, 1999); Salvajes (dir. Carlos Molinero, 2001) or Ilegal (dir. Ignacio Vilar, 2003), where male black immigrants are represented as (in)visible racialised bodies and perceived either in terms of their exotic/erotic appearance, their voicelessness (due to lack of mastery of the Spanish language) and their sexual interactions with the national white female; or reduced to battered or drowned bodies made into anonymous and victimised spectacles by the media. The second half of this article analyses Poniente (dir. Chus Gutirrez, 2002) and El traje (dir. Alberto Rodrguez, 2002) as innovative and valuable contributions to the immigration genre and to interracial masculinity, insofar as they successfully problematise the alliance between marginal sectors of society and resist stereotypical representations of non-white foreign characters.

This essay explores several paradigms of representation of the male body in female-authored Spanish cinema. First, it concentrates on films that, through a didactic use of the male body, reveal women's sexual polycentredness. Male characters operate as the active counterpart for the inscription of sexual exchanges that dislocates penetration in favour of more polymorphous performances. Second, it analyses films that depict the ageing body. While the mature woman is put on display, the younger male counterpart becomes the essential instrument that substantiates her desirability. In turn, the myth that older men have undeniable sexual appeal is challenged by the representation of their sexually inadequacy. Third, it studies movies that take revenge, through symbolic acts of emasculation, against the perpetrators of phallic violence. And last, it analyses the male body as a woman's double in films that do not counter phallocentrism with gynocentrism.

Hombres de mrmol: Cdigos de representacin y estrategias de poder de la masculinidad, Jos Miguel Corts, (2004) Barcelona and Madrid: Egales, 247 pp., ISBN 84-95346-56-7 (pbk), 17.50

Running Scared: Masculinity and The Representation of the Male Body, new edition, Peter Lehman, (2007) Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 288 pp., ISBN 0-8143-3339-7 (pbk), 34.95