Another excellent work that we have recently indexed at Southwest Humanities is Lisa DiGiovanni’s Militarized Masculinity in Spain and Chile: Remembering Violence through Film and Literature (University of Toronto Press, 2025). This incisive comparative study investigates how notions of masculinity shaped and sustained authoritarian power under Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet, revealing how gendered ideals of strength, discipline, and aggression became essential to maintaining political repression and normalizing violence in both countries. Drawing on literature and film, DiGiovanni uncovers how these cultural forms both reflected and reinforced the fusion of masculinity with militarism, producing a model of citizenship rooted in domination and fear. The book’s importance lies in its interdisciplinary approach, bridging gender studies, cultural history, and political analysis to illuminate the deep entanglement between patriarchy and authoritarianism. By foregrounding the cultural production that surrounded and legitimized state violence, DiGiovanni’s study expands our understanding of how dictatorships cultivate consent and identity through gendered power. It offers crucial insights for scholars of gender, visual culture, and political repression, showing how the legacies of militarized masculinity continue to inform contemporary structures of authority and violence. For more information, please see the publisher’s website here.
SOUTHWEST HUMANITIES 