The Model Student: Masculinities and Marketplaces in Chile, 1965-2005

Abstract

This thesis examines the extent to which Chile's conception of itself as an international "model" of economic progress--particularly since the end of the Pinochet dictatorship, but also before and after it--is related to how a series of the country's writers and artists represented and questioned "models" of masculine identity and performance. José Donoso, Pedro Lemebel, Miguel Littin, Patricio Guzmán, Jorge Edwards, Alberto Fuguet, Carlos Leppe, Carlos Flores, Pablo Simonetti, and Roberto Bolaño deploy images of masculinity that intervene in--and alter--certain economic narratives conventionally understood to be structured around heterosexual, male protagonists. These narratives--all of which are built around the conventional wisdom that Chile's economy, independent of how it was run and when, has functioned as a model to others throughout the past fifty years--include the modernization efforts undertaken during Eduardo Frei Montalva presidency; the utopian, socialist aspirations of the Unidad Popular; the dictatorship's imposition of neoliberalism; and the discourses of "mourning" aimed to defy the economic premium placed on the present (to the detriment of remembering the past) throughout the "post-dictatorship" 1990s and 2000s. By showing how Chile's conception of itself as exceptional enough to be an economic model to others can lead to the construction of literary and artistic "models" and "anti-models" of masculine identity that interact with (and question) its economic rhetoric, this thesis will argue--in a novel appropriation of the rhetoric of exceptionalism--that another, unsuspected paradigmatic aspect of Chile lies in the deployment of gender and sexuality to question economic models in its cultural production.