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Rating: 
Summary: A raid that lives on in Mexican culture, making "41" a slur
Review: Derived from a conference held at Tulane University on the centennial of the 1901 drag ball raided by Mexico City police, the book includes (in both Spanish and English) a substantial part of a naturalist novel by Eduardo Castrejon, _Los 41_ that describes preparations for the ball, the ball, and the Yucatan exile of the unlucky cross-dressed males, the famous Posada cartoons, the reports from a range of newspapers, four chapters analyzing the scandal and concerns about the compromised masculinity of the Porifirian elite, a chapter trying to impose the author's view on what the gender systems of Mexican prisons should have been (rejecting what evidence is available). a very detailed analysis of one case study of a woman incarcerated in a Mexican asylum, and an essay on the popular poet Amando Nervo's "sentimental womanliness." The last two chapters are not related to the bust of the (in)"famous 41," and the last one does not specify when Nervo wrote what Sylvia Molloy chooses to discuss. Although insightful, her chapter is unhistorical in being unmoored from dates of composition or publication. The chapters by Robert Buffington on the denigration of the elite's masculinity in newspapers aimed at the Mexican working class and by Victor Macias-Gonzales on the quest of the would-be fashionable to look whiter (i.e., less Indian, more Parisian) are focused on general cultural conceptions rather than on chronological developments, but provide dates for the reader (Buffington being more compunctious about this). Both chapters include reproductions of cartoons and advertisements from Mexican publications of the era. Their authors and the authors of the two chapters discussing the scandal and its published representations (Carlos Monsivais and Robert Irwin) are also sensitive to and insightful about the class and racial/ethnic dynamics, placing the bust of the 41 in the context of undercutting the legitimacy of the unmanly, Francophilic,_refinadito_ (hyper-refined) elite. Although I'd have wished for systematic comparison to other homosexual "scandals" of the late-19th and early-20th centuries (and, like the authors, to know what those swept up for breaking no laws thought of their treatment and press coverage of the ball and raid), there is a great deal of fascinating early-20th-century material and of stimulating early-21st-century analysis in this volume.
Rating:
Summary: A raid that lives on in Mexican culture, making "41" a slur
Review: Derived from a conference held at Tulane University on the centennial of the 1901 drag ball raided by Mexico City police, the book includes (in both Spanish and English) a substantial part of a naturalist novel by Eduardo Castrejon, _Los 41_ that describes preparations for the ball, the ball, and the Yucatan exile of the unlucky cross-dressed males, the famous Posada cartoons, the reports from a range of newspapers, four chapters analyzing the scandal and concerns about the compromised masculinity of the Porifirian elite, a chapter trying to impose the author's view on what the gender systems of Mexican prisons should have been (rejecting what evidence is available). a very detailed analysis of one case study of a woman incarcerated in a Mexican asylum, and an essay on the popular poet Amando Nervo's "sentimental womanliness." The last two chapters are not related to the bust of the (in)"famous 41," and the last one does not specify when Nervo wrote what Sylvia Molloy chooses to discuss. Although insightful, her chapter is unhistorical in being unmoored from dates of composition or publication. The chapters by Robert Buffington on the denigration of the elite's masculinity in newspapers aimed at the Mexican working class and by Victor Macias-Gonzales on the quest of the would-be fashionable to look whiter (i.e., less Indian, more Parisian) are focused on general cultural conceptions rather than on chronological developments, but provide dates for the reader (Buffington being more compunctious about this). Both chapters include reproductions of cartoons and advertisements from Mexican publications of the era. Their authors and the authors of the two chapters discussing the scandal and its published representations (Carlos Monsivais and Robert Irwin) are also sensitive to and insightful about the class and racial/ethnic dynamics, placing the bust of the 41 in the context of undercutting the legitimacy of the unmanly, Francophilic,_refinadito_ (hyper-refined) elite. Although I'd have wished for systematic comparison to other homosexual "scandals" of the late-19th and early-20th centuries (and, like the authors, to know what those swept up for breaking no laws thought of their treatment and press coverage of the ball and raid), there is a great deal of fascinating early-20th-century material and of stimulating early-21st-century analysis in this volume.
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