Warrior Women and Trans Warriors

Latin American literature has depicted warrior woman and trans warrior characters in armed conflicts, but literary critics have not paid much attention to their empowerment. They also have critiqued these characters using traditional gender binary concepts or have viewed their access to power as evil or abnormal. Warrior Women and Trans Warriors: Performing Masculinities in Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature introduces a new perspective by analyzing how one trans warrior and two warrior women from three canonical novels contest traditional codes of behavior and appearance. It examines Pintada in the Mexican novel Los de abajo (1915); doña Bárbara in the Venezuelan novel Doña Bárbara (1929); and Diadorim in the Brazilian novel Grande sertão: veredas (1956). Warrior Women and Trans Warriors focuses on how these three characters challenge conventional norms and empower themselves by giving orders, using weapons, fighting, competing with other characters, exposing traditional gender ideologies, and transgressing sartorial gender rules. Drawing on trans theory, intersectionality, gender performance theory, and masculinities studies, this book argues that performing masculinities allow these characters to occupy the place of the most-desired position of their contexts.

Carolina Castellanos Gonella is a professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Dickinson College. She received her PhD from Vanderbilt University. Her main areas of research are Brazilian and Mexican literatures and cultures. She has published articles in journals such as Latin American Research Review, Luso-Brazilian Review, Revista canadiense de estudios hispánicos, Chasqui, Literatura mexicana, Revista de estudios de género y sexualidades, and Journal of Lusophone Studies. She is currently researching how Latin American women drug traffickers are represented in literature and newspapers.