On Don Juan and Beyond: Masculinity Studies in Modern Spain

Was Don Juan the embodiment of Spanish modern masculinity? The answer seems so self-evident that it makes the question rather irrelevant. Nonetheless, it is not as obvious as first meets the eye. Moreover, it is an old question – it has to do with the very advent of the character of Don Juan at the beginning of the seventeenth century – and was eloquently raised during the first half of the twentieth century, when the debate on masculinity became especially heated in Spain. In the prologue to his play Brother John, Miguel de Unamuno posed it in practically the same terms when wondering, ‘Is Don Juan perhaps pure masculinity?’ ¹ Although this question was somewhat rhetorical, it also included a doubt that Ortega y Gasset – one of the leading Spanish intellectuals – apparently believed to be unnecessary, for he called the character ‘an exemplary condensation of masculine experience’. ² His contemporary Ramón Pérez de Ayala corroborated this emphatically: ‘Don Juan is a universal man’. ³

Don Juan's universality seems to be beyond question considering the number of plays, musical compositions, novels, poems and films revolving around this character. Indeed, since his first embodiment in The Seducer of Seville and the Stone Guest, a work attributed to Tirso de Molina, and in Molière's Don Juan, the character features in the most important works not only in Spanish, but also European, culture: suffice to mention Mozart's Don Giovanni in the late eighteenth century and Byron's Don Juan and Kierkegaard's Diary of a Seducer in the following one. The nineteenth century also produced some of the most important Spanish representations of Don Juan, such as Espronceda's The Student of Salamanca and, above all, Zorrilla's Don Juan Tenorio, although the character's influence was also felt in the twentieth century, with such relevant works as Unamuno's aforementioned play and his novel Niebla. So many embodiments in such a variety of cultural contexts endorse the idea that, through his figure and adventures, the character of Don Juan represents hegemonic masculinity. And even more so bearing in mind that these embodiments were more plentiful in stylistic and cultural periods – Baroque, Romanticism and Modernism – when inquiries into gender relations were more intense.

Due to the importance of Don Juan – even in Europe and America – his absence in contemporary reflections on masculinity beyond the sphere of influence of Spanish culture is striking. It goes without saying that Don Juan is conspicuous by his absence in English-speaking masculinity studies, which is perhaps one of the most important differences with respect to those performed by Spanish or Latin American scholars. Those Anglophone works seem to accept ironically the results of the debate on Don Juan's nationality, emerging during the first third of the twentieth century. For Spanish intellectuals of the period, he was undoubtedly Spanish. Although some like Ortega jubilantly recognized this, others like Unamuno did so resignedly. And despite the fact that there was no consensus on the exact provenance of the fictional character, for Ortega y Gasset he was definitely from Seville. The idea, or so they believed, was to prevent the attempts being made in Italy to culturally appropriate the figure. And it would appear that they were successful because Don Juan appears in masculinity studies mostly carried out by Spanish authors or, when these are of a different nationality, their research refers to Spain or Latin America. It is as if Don Juan had never been in Italy, France, England or Denmark. Moreover, some Spanish authors – as will be seen below – also conceive the character as being a reluctant traveller, confining him not just to Spain, but simply to Castile.

In the overview of the Spanish literature on masculinities offered in these pages, therefore, the studies in which the figure of Don Juan appears will take pride of place. The creation and recreation of Don Juan, the criticism and defence of this character, and even the acceptance or not of his ‘Spanishness’ stand out in the Spanish historiography on masculinities and within debates on gender in contemporary Spanish history and can contribute to Anglophone studies. Obviously not everything has boiled down to studies of Don Juan: the links between masculinity and nation and the analysis of masculinities, corresponding to different periods of Spanish history, have also occupied a very important place. But if Spanish historiography can make a significant contribution to studies of a markedly Anglophone character, it would be on the basis of the figure of Don Juan. And this is due to a feature that can be traced back to his first embodiment at the dawn of modernity and which the aforementioned thinkers all recognized: Don Juan has been – and, it can be contended, still is – a stylization of modern masculinity.

His appearance in Spain is not because Spaniards are inveterate womanizers, just as that of Quixote does not mean that they are all Quixotes or Sanchos. Both works – Tirso's Don Juan and Cervantes’ Quixote – form part of early Spanish deliberations on modernity, while certain coincidences in their dissection of gender differences may also be detected. Indeed, according to this interpretation, the Spanish Baroque would have perceived some changes – going hand in glove with modernity – which would have been observed earlier and more keenly in Spain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Some of those changes were associated with gender relations during the decline of chivalrous ideals, which can be regarded as the subtext of Tirso's Don Juan; the gradual disappearance of those ideals is what drove Quixote to embark on his journey through La Mancha putting the world to rights. The fact that because he was considered to be a character of Spanish origin an attempt was subsequently made to perpetuate him as the embodiment of the nation is still a secondary issue which should not distract us from his main meaning as a critical reflection on masculinity.

Thus, the answer to the question posed at the beginning of this paper should be that Don Juan epitomized modern hegemonic masculinity and not only in Spain, but also in the Western world. This clearly implies accepting the mere existence of a hegemonic masculinity, something that is still the subject of much controversy. However, in so far as the concept of hegemonic masculinity has played a role in masculinity studies in Spain those studies should contribute to proposing its critical reconsideration. In this last task, Don Juan can render a service that perhaps other historiographies differing from that of Spain may recognize. This certainly is not a simple task. Spanish masculinity studies occupy a very marginal place with respect to the principal dialogues to be found in Anglophone works, and their development is still limited. This explains why there is no mention of Don Juan in Connell's Masculinities, ⁴ perhaps the most important book in the field of men's studies and an obligatory reference work for all researchers.

Nevertheless, the figure of Don Juan can help to overcome the shortcomings of the concept of hegemonic masculinity, as it has been developed by Connell and other scholars. ⁵ This concept is central to masculinity studies, although it is often employed as if it were a mere synonym of the dominant or normative kind. The concept of hegemonic masculinity is much more than that and has some far-reaching theoretical implications. Although it is impossible to summarize these implications in a few lines, it is indeed possible to refer to those areas to which Don Juan might make a significant contribution.

According to Connell, the concept of hegemonic masculinity attempts to explain the maintenance and stability of patriarchy – the regime that ensures the subordination of women to men – which derives from the hegemony of a specific type of masculinity. The aim here is to employ hegemonic masculinity and not, as might be the case, a hegemonic gender order, to explain male hegemony. In doing so, femininity – which assumes a marginal role – is ignored, while patriarchy depends upon the preponderance of a specific type of masculinity over others that play different roles, depending on their relationship with that masculinity accepted as hegemonic by all and sundry. Additionally, for this masculinity to fit with the maintenance of the entire social system, it is made to coincide with the behaviours displayed by men belonging to dominant social groups.

The application of the model has run up against a variety of problems, although an effort has been made to resolve these by a taxonomic extension that increases the number of masculinities that should be taken into account; Messerschmidt remarked: ‘hegemonic masculinity must be conceptualized wholly in plural terms’. ⁶ This kind of endeavour is condemned to failure, for the opposite path should be taken, namely, an effort should be made to limit the number of possible hegemonic masculinities. Don Juan as the incarnation of masculinity allows us to recognize the plurality of ways of being men, and to specify the definition of masculinity by pointing out its constituent elements, precisely those that construct sexual difference and explain the gender order. As Cixous said ‘take Don Juan and you have the whole masculine economy’. ⁷

If we develop a concept of masculinity shaped around Don Juan, it is possible to identify more easily three main elements: sexual access to the bodies of women; non-sexual access to the bodies of other men; and that which these two aspects would confirm for a male audience. ⁸ Masculinity demands sexual access to the female body and hence the importance of marriage, prostitution and heterosexuality for patriarchy. For masculinity, access to women's bodies highlights their difference and subordination. Access to the bodies of other men also indicates their subordination, establishing hierarchies among them, although this is mainly achieved in a non-sexual way through institutions that involve physical confrontation, such as warfare, duelling and sports. Male status demands their performance before a male audience whose members have the job of establishing who belongs to the male sphere. Whoever remains outside it is banished to the sphere of femininity.

Neither does masculinity on its own explain patriarchy, nor is it solely responsible for the construction of one of the poles of sexual difference, for it is in continuous tension with femininity, which is its opposite. The limits of masculinity are also established by femininity. By transforming the femininity constituting them, women also modify the space of masculinity and can also propose reinterpretations of the three aspects of masculinity. Masculinity thus results from gender conflict and displays a certain degree of independence from the socioeconomic contexts of men. Although, as shown by Don Juan himself, who was an aristocrat, social status and financial solvency favour the full development of the traits that masculinity demands from men.

The gender gap is not limited to the production of men and women but extends the status of masculinity and femininity to the social world as a whole. No aspect of social life is excluded from its affiliation to the male or female world. The division between male and female is associated with all other binary oppositions structuring the understanding of the world and which have been characteristic of Western thought practically since its birth. As Derrida noted, the regime of oppositions is the most characteristic element of the metaphysics distinguishing Western thought. ⁹

For an object of the social world to acquire a coherent meaning there should be a certain adjustment between the binary oppositions describing it. This adjustment is the task of politics understood in the broadest sense of the word, including social movements and organizations and all opinion leaders. Their work consists of linking the different oppositions, which signifies that the most disparate objects can appear as masculine and feminine: people and sexual practices, without doubt, but also nations and their military or economic performance, or their colonial expansion or dependence. Strange as it may seem, if a comb or hat can be masculine or feminine, it stands to reason that a political regime, like the Spanish Second Republic, or a military uprising, such as that which brought the curtain down on the former, can also be regarded as such. The gender meaning of any object, that of the fact that modern women do not usually wear hats and that of General Franco's coup d’état, for example, is always unstable because it is subject to a more or less acute reaction that makes change possible.

In Spain, the masculinity studies carried out to date have focused on those processes of affiliation of gender meanings to the most disparate realities: the behaviour of men and women during the interwar period, the colonial disaster of 1898, the Spanish Civil War and the Transition, among others. Some of these studies have resorted to Don Juan, while others have overlooked this figure. Their findings will be briefly presented in the following pages, while the conclusions will serve to take stock of the achievements to date and to encourage specialists to continue to analyze and criticize masculinity through the protean figure of the Don Juan, because this may lead to an improvement in the quality of future research.

Masculinity Studies in Spain

The advent and subsequent evolution of masculinity studies in Spain can be linked, as with other countries, to second-wave feminism. This proposition does not mean defending that, since the advent of feminism, those studies have developed following a more or less endogamous linear course. The influence of feminism should be understood above all as a force that has ebbed and flowed over time, which, since it has affected the gender order by disordering it, has all but continuously questioned masculinity, namely, the conditions of appearance of men.

Certainly, feminism had, and still has, a much more direct influence than that vague force mentioned above: it is not difficult to find it in the personal and intellectual development of the authors and authoresses appearing in these pages. It is even possible to detect it more clearly in Josep-Vicent Marqués, an author who could be readily understood as the precursor of masculinity studies in Spain. Certain parallels can be drawn between his beginnings and those of Connell, who is doubtless the most recognized author in this field of study. On different occasions, Connell has referred to the influence of his wife Pam Benton and other feminists on the initial impetus of his work. ¹⁰ Marqués did the same:

I fell in love with Celia Amorós when I was very young and we shared our readings and our observations on friends, relatives and enemies. Feminism is not something that has been invented by men, however clever we have thought ourselves to be. She read Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. And she talked to me about the former. ¹¹

Marqués would subsequently build his entire oeuvre on those foundations, which were identical to those on which feminism rested. In 1974, he published an article in the magazine Los Marginados, in which he declared, ‘It inaugurated reflection on men’, and in 1979 another entitled, ‘La alienación del varón’ (The alienation of men), for which he received a prestigious award. After writing his PhD thesis, ‘La construcción social del varón’ (The social construction of men), and studying at Oxford for a time, he began to collaborate with the newspaper El País, with a section in which he challenged the habitual conventions on masculinity and which, as he himself modestly admitted, was a ‘great success’. ¹² In 1991, perhaps as the culmination of his work in the previous decade, he published Curso elemental para varones sensibles y machistas recuperables (Basic course for sensitive men and recoverable male chauvinists), which ran into several editions. ¹³

During the 1980s, Marqués made challenging masculinity fashionable and helped pave the way for male activism in favour of gender equality, which led to the appearance of the first masculinity-study groups in Seville and Valencia – which had already appeared in the United States and Scandinavia in the 1970s. The Centre for the Study of the Male Condition (Centro de Estudios de la Condición Masculina), coordinated by Luis Bonino, was created in 1993 and is still functioning to this day. In 2001, the Men's Gender Equality Association (Asociación de Hombres por la Igualdad, AHIGE) was created. Following a period during which this activism diminished somewhat, it is currently experiencing a revival thanks to authors such as Ritxar Bacete, who has recently published Nuevos hombres buenos: la masculinidad en la era del feminismo (New good men: masculinity in the age of feminism), and Jokin Azpiazu Carballo with his Masculinidades y feminism (Masculinities and feminism). ¹⁴ As can be inferred from their titles, this revived activism has resulted from the new impulse of feminism since 2010, however much, as Azpiazu himself admits, his work dovetails with masculinity studies and is inspired yet again by Connell's oeuvre.

As with Connell, Marqués was a sociologist and, as in the rest of the world, masculinity studies in Spain have been clearly influenced by sociology. Anthropology, psychology, and cultural studies have also left their mark on them, to which should be added history, the main focus of this work. What is perhaps noteworthy, when compared to other cultural fields, is the vitality of the group organized around Angels Carabí – Construyendo nuevas masculinidades’ (Constructing new masculinities), of the University of Barcelona – to which Josep M. Armengol and a large number of researchers also belong. Its peculiarity lies in the fact that it specializes in English literature and is closely related to Michael Kimmel and the journal Men and Masculinities, of which the latter is the editor. The members of this group have published many works including Nuevas masculinidades (New masculinities, 2000), Las masculinidades a debate (Debating on masculinities, 2008) and Masculinidades alternativas (Alternative masculinities, 2015). Furthermore, among other remarkable activities, Armengol coordinated the book Queering Iberia. Iberian Masculinities at the Margins, ¹⁵ which includes some of the works presented at the international congress Beyond Don Juan: Rethinking Iberian Masculinities, held in New York in 2011, while the rest were published in a special number of the aforementioned journal. ¹⁶ It is also important to note the prolific activity of the research group led by Anastasia Téllez, working from a largely anthropological and sociological perspective, whose most recent works include the following: Deconstruyendo la masculinidad. Cultura, género e identidad (Deconstructing masculinity. Culture, gender and identity) and Masculinidades igualitarias y alternativas. Procesos, avances y reacciones (Equal and alternative masculinities. Processes, advances and reactions) both published in 2019, ¹⁷ in addition to a monograph, coordinated by Joan Sanfélix and Antonio López, appearing in the journal Asparkía also in 2019. ¹⁸

These publications, and other recent ones such as The Dynamics of Masculinity in Contemporary Spanish Culture, coordinated by Ryan and Corbalán in 2017, and the book entitled, Masculinidades disidentes (Dissident masculinities), edited by Rafael M. Mérida Jiménez in 2016, have led some researchers to recognize that masculinities studies in Spain have ‘grown in number over the last decade’. ¹⁹ For others, like Delgado Ontivero, this is an ‘emerging but still negligible approach’, ²⁰ which should come as no surprise above all when contrasting the Spanish production, or that referring to Spain, with the international literature. ²¹ In order to appreciate this more clearly, it should be recalled that back in 2012 McKinney was already claiming that ‘Spanish masculinity in general has been largely overlooked until recently’. ²²

As to history, Nerea Aresti has recently recognized, in line with the aforementioned authors, that ‘in the Spanish context, the incorporation of masculinities as an object of study into gender history is a recent phenomenon’. ²³ This implies that enormous progress has been made in the past 10 years, because in 2009 Cleminson and Vázquez García were still arguing that ‘much of the work on gender in the Spanish context mentions men, maleness and masculinity only in passing or not at all’. ²⁴ Suffice it to take note of the collective works and journal special issues published to date to perceive the scale of that progress. The books include La identidad masculina en los siglos XVIII y XIX (Masculine identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), Feminidades y masculinidades: Arquetipos y prácticas de género (Femininities and masculinities: gender archetypes and practices), ¿La España invertebrada? (The spineless Spain?), Hombres en peligro (Men in Danger), Feminidades y masculinidades en la historiografía de género (Femininities and Masculinities in the Historiography on Gender), and Mujeres, hombres y Catolicismo en la España contemporánea (Women, men and Catholicism in contemporary Spain). ²⁵ An important number of special issues have also been published, including Zurián's appearing in Área abierta in 2015, Aresti and Martykánová's in Cuadernos de Historia Contemporanea in 2017, and Torres Delgado's in Rubrica contemporánea in 2018. To these should be added Aguado and Yusta's special issue appearing in Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez in 2012 and Cenarro's in Historia y Política in 2017, as both include some or other paper on masculinities.

The Spanish Don Juan

If masculinity studies in Spain possess a distinctive trait, it is the prominence acquired by the figure of Don Juan. Indeed, and unlike what has been observed in the international context, this figure is omnipresent. Don Juan features in Aresti's Médicos, donjuanes y mujeres modernas (Physicians, Don Juans and modern women), ²⁶ a precursor to masculinity studies in Spain, and reappears in the latest work by Mary Nash, unquestionably the most well-known gender historian in the country. ²⁷ Between both there are a number of authors whose approaches to the Don Juan should be analyzed in some depth because they do not completely coincide and because they allow us to gain further insights into central aspects of masculinity studies in Spain.

It is possible to identify a first group of works that refer to Don Juan to discuss the gender order during the first decades of the twentieth century. During that time, but above all during the interwar period, the attempts at rebuilding the social order were approached in Spain as a dialogue on the gender order in which the diagnosis of masculinity was especially important. Although there was also a heated debate on femininity and, specifically, on the body, particularly that of modern women. This diagnosis of masculinity was made on the basis of Don Juan. Aresti has studied the huge significance that the views of Dr Marañón – an important intellectual figure in Spain in the interwar period – had in the debate as a whole. His strategy involved reversing the way of assessing the character, who ceased to represent the epitome of masculinity to become feminized: ‘The critique of Don Juan would be accomplished by feminizing the myth’. ²⁸ To this end, Marañón had to create a comprehensive ‘theoretical framework’, ²⁹ for he was obliged to challenge male culture as a whole in relation to women, spurning polygamy, debasing amorous conquests and even lambasting the physical attraction of Don Juan and his leisurely life. His proposal had enormous repercussions in Spain: ‘The references, copies, modified reproductions and different interpretations of the doctor's theory were very plentiful, especially in liberal and socialist media’. ³⁰

As can be deduced, the right-wing media's stance on the Don Juan was not so consistent, with Aresti dedicating a number of additional works to explaining why. ³¹ In sum, the different postures are due to the complex nature of the Don Juan who, on the one hand, represents the social and gender order by ensuring the dominance of men over women and, on the other, exemplifies social disorder, because he displays a sexuality that rides roughshod over social conventions. This explains why the Patriotic Union (Unión Patriótica, UP), the party created by Primo de Rivera, the leader of the Dictatorship (1923–1930), condemned Don Juan, claiming, ‘The audacity, disloyalty and permissiveness of Don Juan triumph until they are checked for good by the sword of a military man’. ³² By contrast, the leading fascist poet Ernesto Giménez Caballero extolled the figure. ³³

The debate on Don Juan involves not only scientific discourse, but also literary discourse: practically all of the great authors during this particularly fertile period for Spanish literature participated in it, including Ernesto Giménez Caballero. By contrasting his oeuvre with those of the right-wing author Ramiro de Maeztu and the liberal Salvador de Madariaga, Spanish cultural scholar Jo Labanyi developed a new approach to the meaning of the Don Juan during the period between 1920 and 1940. Her conclusions also take into consideration the European context: ‘Perhaps one of the most important points to emerge from this discussion is that the northern European idealization of Don Juan as a restless hero in search of an impossible ideal is not supported by the Spanish representation of him’. ³⁴

Without mentioning any names, Labanyi is referring to Søren Kierkegaard's Don Juan named Johannes. The Don Juan who Unamuno portrays in his novel Niebla has been identified with Johannes by several specialists. The gender meaning was, however, totally different. This is one of the conclusions at which José Javier Díaz Freire has arrived in his interpretation of the different Don Juans of Miguel de Unamuno. Nonetheless, his principal conclusion is that ‘Unamuno rejected Don Juan as a model of masculinity, while demonstrating the impossibility of this concept of man in the context of the period’. ³⁵ Unamuno's opinion was one of the most important of all those intervening in the debate, because he was the embodiment of the intellectual in Spain. Only Ortega y Gasset could compete with him for such an honour. In fact, Ortega distinguished himself for his firm defence of the Don Juan figure, which was in keeping with his attempt to recover the social order by rebuilding the gender order.

Ortega's defence of the Don Juan was accompanied by his criticism of romantic love as a form of relationship between the sexes. This issue of love, its gendered meaning and its relevance in relation to the Don Juan are the central themes of both Díaz Freire's ‘Amor cortés, relaciones de género y orden social en las primeras décadas del siglo XX’ (Courtly love, gender relations and social order in the first decades of the twentieth century) ³⁶ and Labanyi's aforementioned paper. The controversy over love is another one of the aspects of the debate on the Don Juan, for love and its paradigms, such as Tristan or Werther, appear as the figure's antitheses. Masculinity moves between two opposing ideals: Don Juan the libertine and Tristan (Werther) the lover who idealizes women, for which reason the masculinity of a specific age is the result of the struggle between both archetypes. This is why the debate on gender relations in the first decades of the twentieth century also revolved entirely around the principal reasons behind courtly love. Sure enough, this love, which has been transformed into the romantic kind, provides the code for a dialogue in which an important number of Spanish, and even European (suffice it to mention De Rougemont and C. S. Lewis), intellectuals intervened and in which not only the nature of the relations between men and women, but also the social order per se, were at stake.

Another dialogue on Don Juan can be found in the work of Mary Nash in her study of the 1960s, during the developmental stage of the Franco dictatorship. One of its features was the important growth of tourism in the coastal towns of the Mediterranean and, as a result, the arrival of a substantial number of young women from different Northern European countries – called, by synecdoche, ‘Swedes’ – who, since they possessed codes of femininity differing from those of the local women, altered the gender balance. Nash, who dedicates three interesting papers to the phenomenon's analysis, considers that it led to ‘the reinvention of a traditional model of Spanish masculinity: the figure of Don Juan’. ³⁷ The intention was to reinforce male predominance through the figure of this new serial philanderer, but the strategy was a failure: ‘… ironic approaches that poked fun at the figure of Don Juan [and] disavowed him as a legitimate representation of Spanish masculinity’. ³⁸

Nash thus stressed the idea of the link between Spanish masculinity and Don Juan, but with a view to highlighting the difficulties that such an identification involved. These difficulties stemmed from the same extreme and, by extension, critical nature of the character and provoked all the debates discussed above. Nevertheless, the continuity of Don Juan as the embodiment of masculinity in Spain appears to have been the departure point for many studies: ‘We need to look no farther than the films of Almodóvar to see Don Juan set on his head’, can be read in the special number of Men and Masculinities entitled, ‘Beyond Don Juan: Rethinking Iberian Masculinities’. ³⁹ The aim of the volume was to recover those masculinities that distanced themselves from the Don Juan ideal and which were supposed to be found in peripheral Spain – in the Basque Country, Galicia, Catalonia or Valencia – by means of a literary analysis. One example of this is the analysis of Tirant lo Blanch carried out by Montserrat Piera, who discovers in the hero a model of masculinity akin to the queer. ⁴⁰ Another, appearing in Chapter 2 of Queering Iberia, is the work of Begoña Regueiro-Salgado ⁴¹ on models of masculinity that also disassociate themselves from the philanderer and which are also to be found in the works of Rosalía de Castro and Antonio Trueba, two writers, one Galician and the other Basque, of the ‘Second Romanticism’.

As Aresti declares in the title of one of her papers, Don Juan has always been a ‘controversial symbol’ in Spain. It should be stated that this figure had been contentious both when representing masculinity and when embodying ‘Spanishness’, to wit, as regards both gender and nation. Although needless to say both dimensions are inextricably linked and can only be separated for analytical purposes. This author concludes by observing, ‘In 1940, Gregorio Marañón claimed that Don Juan had “fewer roots in Spain than in any other place on earth”’, ⁴² before recalling that for the Marañón ‘Spanishness’ was embodied by the main character of Calderón's drama The Physician of His Honour. Obviously, these opinions formed part of the intense debate on the Don Juan, in which his nationality played a fundamental role.

Masculinity and Nation

Beyond Don Juan, the relationship between masculinity and nation is one of the most recurrent aspects of masculinity studies in Spain. This claim may seem paradoxical, for very recently Ferran Archilés could still observe, ‘The dearth of analyses of the gender dimensions in Spanish literature devoted to the building of the contemporary Spanish national identity is surprising and certainly disappointing’. ⁴³ Sometime later, this was corroborated by another specialist in the history of nation-building when, in a review of the literature up until 2017, he confirmed that gender and nation-building scholars ‘have proved to be reluctant to cross paths’. ⁴⁴ This is certainly true when compared with other historiographies, although it should be noted that in the past few years abundant and fruitful efforts have been made in this field. Proof of this is the work of these same researchers.

As could not be otherwise, masculinity and nation-building studies in Spain dialogue with the works of the most well-known international specialists in the area: there are plenty of references primarily to the oeuvres of Nira Yuval-Davis, Joanne Nagel and Anne McClintock, who defend the idea that nations, and the nationalisms sustaining them, are built in terms of gender. In light of this, Yuval-Davis, the authoress of the now classic Gender and Nation, in which she remarked, ‘The aim of this book is to promote this analytical project of a gendered understanding of nations and nationalisms’, ⁴⁵ should be well satisfied for that objective can be understood to have been achieved. The same purpose, but this time referring exclusively to masculinity, can be found in Nagel's oeuvre. On the basis of McClintock's previous work, she declared categorically, ‘Masculinity and nationalism articulate well with one another, and the modern form of Western masculinity emerged at about the same time and place as modern nationalism’. ⁴⁶

Accordingly, Nagel called for them to be analyzed together, but to that end there was a need for a certain conceptual baggage that specialists in masculinity borrowed, however, from other authors. For example, Godoy Navarro and Peters have turned to the concept of gender politics, the latter specifying, ‘I understand “gender politics” in the sense of a hegemonic narrative about the national man and woman, represented as a metonymy of the nation as a whole’. ⁴⁷ But the most used concept is that of intersectionality. As is common knowledge, this is a theoretical and methodological paradigm that was first introduced by Kimberlé Crenshaw at the end of the 1980s as a tool for the civil rights struggle, but which has since been widely employed in different disciplines relating to gender and queer studies. ⁴⁸ Even Yuval-Davis – who did not explicitly use the concept of intersectionality in Gender and Nation – claimed years later that it was an area in which her work ‘must be situated’, before specifying, ‘The way I look at gender is already what you call an intersectional perspective’. ⁴⁹ Some masculinity scholars in Spain situate their work explicitly in this analytical framework: in the aforementioned dossier for Rubrica contemporánea, Torres Delgado situated it in an ‘intersectional perspective’, while Mónica Moreno Seco followed suit in a paper that will be addressed below. ⁵⁰ But many others have benefited from that perspective without referring to it by name and some have singled out interfaces with it, such as Zira Box in her study of the ‘dual homologies’ forming the discourse on masculinity and nation in Spanish Falangism. ⁵¹

With this inspiration, and obviously the rest of the baggage of gender history – although, above all, Scott's idea was that gender is a primary way of giving meaning to society as a whole – a series of aspects relating to Spanish nation-building have been addressed. Needless to say, these are diverse and should be considered in relation to the theory and methodology of masculinity studies.

An example of those studies can be found in the work of Marie Walin on the development of liberalism in Spain since the end of the eighteenth century up until the revolution in 1868, whose aim is ‘to show that the liberal social project contains a model of “hegemonic masculinity”’. ⁵² With the same aim of studying the relationship between masculinity and political ideas in nineteenth-century Spain, there are, among others, María Sierra's works on Romanticism, Florencia Peyrou's on democratic thought, Michel Iarocci's on masculinity as the basis of modern nations through the oeuvre of Galdós, ⁵³ plus the proposals of Xabier Andreu Miralles included in his book El descubrimiento de España (The discovery of Spain) and the contributions appearing in Izquierdas y derechas ante el espejo (Left and right before the looking glass), edited by Aurora Bosch and Ismael Sanz. ⁵⁴ But if there was a milestone during the nineteenth century on which both masculinity and nation-building studies have focused, then that was obviously 1898 and the crisis of the end of the century. Outstanding contributions in this regard include those of Richard Cleminson and Francisco Vázquez-García, Darina Martykánová and Nerea Aresti. In Chapter 5 of Los invisibles (The invisible ones) – a pioneering work in the field of masculinity studies in Spain, Cleminson and Vázquez-García observe that, according to the ‘regenerationist’ discourse, the crisis of the end of the century was ‘the result of a general process of devirilization and effeminization of the population. … The problem is always the loss of masculinity in men and not the masculinization of women’. ⁵⁵ This contrasts somewhat with the discourses of decline emerging in other European nations, like England, France and Germany, in the same period. Martykánová confirms this hypothesis, while observing the inability of ‘regenerationism’ to redefine the ‘prevailing notions of hegemonic masculinity in Spain’. ⁵⁶

Aresti also defends this position when claiming, ‘The crisis of national masculinity in Spain in the context of 1898 was more closely related to the status of the Spanish nation on the international stage … than to the threats posed by the changes in gender relations with women and femininity. ⁵⁷ Additionally, she devotes one of her works to describing that process of ‘belittlement of Spanish men’, which occurred chiefly in other European states and in the context of a general debasement of all Latin American countries, presenting it as something far removed from civilization and modernity. ⁵⁸ Akiko Tsuchiya deviates somewhat from that communion of opinions due to his insistence, on the basis of the oeuvre of Showalter, Felski and Feldman and an analysis of two novels by Clarín and Pardo Bazán, on the effects of the ‘new woman’ and the ‘dandy’ on the gender order. ⁵⁹

Closely related to the ‘disaster’ is, in the words of Torres Delgado, ‘The project of national regeneration that involved the colonization of Morocco’. And which implied a particular ordering of the metropolis and the colony alike in terms of gender; Spanish literature of the period tended to feminize Morocco in order that it should appear to be in need of protection, and to masculinize Spain, stressing the virility of its male population. According to Torres Delgado, ‘The image of the Moroccan man and the archetype of the Moroccan man served as a counter-image on the basis of which the Spanish identity itself was constructed, in an attempt to align the country with the civilized European world’. ⁶⁰ But that discourse was far from being unanimous in Spanish society, an aspect also studied by Christian von Tschilschke, who notes the ‘dichotomic conceptions of masculinity’ in the Spanish literature on the Rif War. ⁶¹

The processes of constructing and reconstructing national masculinity during the first decades of the twentieth century – which primarily revolved around the Don Juan figure – failed to propose, in the words of Aresti, ‘a shared model of hegemonic masculinity for the whole nation’; there were even specific proposals for constructing masculinities for particular regions, like the Basque Country and Catalonia. ⁶² Furthermore, and during the Republican period, the nation was not a ‘discursive axis’ of the redefinition ‘of gender ideals’, which was undertaken in liberal milieus. With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, ‘neither the Republicans nor the Nationalist rebels deployed a totally compact discourse capable of unequivocally defining national masculinity’. ⁶³ This does not mean to say that they did not have opposing projects. Quite the contrary, as Aresti observes, the conflict was, among other things, a confrontation over the solution that should be found for the gender order and also a ‘battle to define Spanish manhood’, which ended in a ‘harsh defense of the gender order’. ⁶⁴

That the war led to a ‘reaffirmation of masculinity’ by the supporters of the military coup was posited in a number of pioneering works by Mary Vincent, in an attempt to remedy the ‘relatively little attention paid to masculinity’ by gender war historians. According to Vincent, ‘At the end of the war, the images of virile fighters lost their sheen, although the general belief in male superiority prevailed’. ⁶⁵ In her opinion, in the subsequent construction of Francoist society, ‘the model of Falangist masculinity’ was never hegemonic, but ended up immersed in what she calls ‘common masculinities’. ⁶⁶ However, Ángel Alcalde maintains that ‘the amalgamation of fascist and traditionalist ideals in an ideal of specifically Francoist ex-combatant masculinity did not entail abandoning elements of a fascist nature sustained by the war experience’. ⁶⁷ In his opinion, it was necessary to wait until the 1960s for that model of masculinity to lose its hegemony. The changes occurring in this final stage of the dictatorship have also been researched by Inmaculada Cívico-Lyons, who does so through cinema, and by Mary T. Hartson who focuses on the singer and actor Manolo Escobar: ‘I contend that Manolo Escobar's star construct served to ease hegemonic masculinity's transition from the dictatorship model to that of the consumer culture that later prevailed in Spain’. ⁶⁸ Christopher Perriam also takes a cinematic approach to masculinity, in the democratic period, contending that the actor Imanol Arias has ‘covered the fullest imaginable range of male crisis in his career’. ⁶⁹

Masculinity and Modernity

The link between masculinity and nation in Spain, discussed in the previous section, has to do with a more far-reaching relationship between the gender order and modernity per se. Díaz Freire has studied this aspect, through the oeuvres of Unamuno and Ortega, in a paper whose aim is to highlight the link between the proposals for reconstructing masculinity – since the end of the nineteenth century up until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War – and the different projects for nation-building and redefining modernity as a whole. Unamuno's and Ortega's gender programmes involved different conceptions of modernity. So, while Ortega pursued a conservative rectification of modernity by re-establishing the gender differences that he believed were under threat, Unamuno attempted to exploit ‘the opportunities offered by the fin-de-siècle disorder to construct a more humane modernity’, which in turn implied a profound change in masculinity. ⁷⁰ This is why both writers were so deeply committed to Don Juan: either to change him or to praise him. They knew that debating about him was dealing with the gender order.

The transformation of masculinity should not be understood, however, as the result of impersonal forces, but as a product in which human intervention has played a fundamental role. A good example of this can be found in Aresti's Masculinidades en tela de juicio (Masculinities called into question), in which she analyses the different ways of understanding masculinity during the first decades of the twentieth century, but stressing that ‘women also participated in this struggle to define masculinity/masculinities’. Additionally, she notes that not only those women hailing from ‘academic and intellectual circles’ became involved, but also those ‘committed to improving their position in a relation of love and power with men’. ⁷¹

One of the characteristic phenomena of modernity, namely the process of secularization accompanying it, possesses a gender dimension that has had a decisive impact on masculinity. Mujeres, hombres y catolicismo (Women, men and Catholicism), edited by Inmaculada Blasco Herranz, includes papers by María Cruz Romeo Mateo, María Pilar Salomón Chéliz, Mónica Moreno Seco and herself, dealing with the relationship between masculinity and religion during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. ⁷² These works basically revolve around the ideas of the feminization and re-masculinization of religion, two aspects structuring the historiographical debate in Europe and America, with the participation of authors like Wermer, Van Osselaer and Pasture, among others. Natalia Núñez Bargueño also frames her work in those debates, while offering a good statement of the question. ⁷³ In the field of anthropology, Stanley Brandes had already included a chapter on the relationship between religion and masculinity and the issue of effeminacy in his book Metaphors of Masculinity.

Feminization has also been used as a strategy for excluding homosexuals from the realm of masculinity and, in turn, homosexuality appears in all of the processes of feminization pertaining to nation-building in Spain and in peripheral countries covered in this section. Revealing its mechanisms, rhythms and peculiarities has been one of the tasks undertaken by a substantial number of historians – and specialists in other fields – including, first and foremost, Cleminson and Vázquez García, and not only for their Los invisibles. A fundamental aspect of their work has been the analysis of the discursive construction of homosexuality – above all through the medical discourse, something that, as Vázquez García underscores, occurred belatedly in Spain – plus the link between homosexuality and Spanish decadence at the turn of the century, which Cleminson exemplifies with the figure of the ‘fairy’. ⁷⁴ Alberto Mira has also studied the relationship between the crisis at the end of the century and the disorder of masculinity – highlighting the figure of the ‘dandy’ – in a number of works analyzing homosexuality in Spain from a cultural perspective. His book De Sodoma a Chueca: una historia cultural de la homosexualidad en España en el siglo XX (From Sodom to Chueca: a cultural history of homosexuality in Spain in the twentieth century) stands out for its timespan. ⁷⁵ Dieter Ingenschay has also chosen the cultural perspective applied to both the Spanish and Latin American contexts, his studies encompassing above all the second half of the twentieth century up until the present day. ⁷⁶

For his part, Abel Díaz reconstructs ‘the meanings of homosexuality during early Francoism’ and its legal treatment by the regime, concluding that there was no easing of laws in this regard, but, quite the contrary, it was regulated more intensely as of the 1950s. These are just the initial conclusions of a work that seems to hold a lot of promise. ⁷⁷ In his voluminous work entitled, Los antisociales: historia de la homosexualidad en Barcelona y París, 1945–1975 (The antisocial ones: a history of homosexuality in Barcelona and Paris, 1945–1975), Geoffroy Huard performs a comparative analysis of homosexuality in both Spain and France in the second half of the twentieth century. After devoting the first chapters to explaining the heterosexual norm, in the second part he describes what he calls the ‘homosexual subcultures’ of Barcelona and Paris, before dedicating the last part to the homosexual revolution in the 1970s. ⁷⁸ He draws a parallel with the work of Brice Chamouleau, who in his book Tiran al maricón (They ditch the faggot) seeks to recover ‘the languages and practices that radical young gays invented as unrecognized and forgotten forms of participating in the democratic commons’, with the aim of recuperating a ‘generation turned spectral’ from a queer perspective. ⁷⁹

A large number of works address the importance of the body in the construction of sexual difference and, for the same reason, in the gender order from the nineteenth century up until the present day. They refer to both the form of the body and the use of it. In this regard, mention should go to the works of Collin McKinney on nineteenth-century conduct manuals and the ‘patterns of masculinity’ deriving from them, the importance of the colour black in male clothing in Spain – a fashion that spread to the rest of Europe – and the significance of beards: ‘Facial hair represented a key dividing line between femininity and hegemonic masculinity and was symptomatic of a broader effort to remasculinize Spanish men’. ⁸⁰ In relation to the same period, duelling has also been the object of interesting studies, like those carried out by Miguel Martorell, Leigh Mercer and Jordi Luengo. They all examine codes of honour and, therefore, the conceptions of masculinity that were at the root of such a socially relevant practice. Lastly, in this section dealing with the use of the body, the growing importance of sportsmen as ‘icons of masculinity’ should be noted. ⁸¹

Conclusions

Masculinity studies in Spain maintain a dialogue with the works of prominent international scholars, with Connell standing well above the rest. That theoretical dialogue is not so commonplace among historians but is indeed present in the works mentioned here and in others which, by oversight, might have been overlooked. Of all this theoretical baggage the most mentioned concept is that of hegemonic masculinity, which Connell coined in the 1980s and which has subsequently been reformulated in different ways; and it is still being reformulated, as can be seen in Messerschmidt's recent book Hegemonic Masculinity. ⁸² Sometimes historians do not mention it, although they bear it in mind, while on occasion they allude to the concept but using other names – such as dominant, normative or traditional masculinity – and at other times they frame their works fully within the concept.

For many of the researchers cited in these pages, Don Juan represented hegemonic masculinity. But far too often this assimilation has been made without previously clarifying the attributes of the Don Juan figure, presenting the characteristics of hegemonic masculinity, or demonstrating that both were equivalent. It is true that masculinity is ‘evasive’ and, as some hold, perhaps not even ‘a coherent object’. ⁸³ McKinney contended that the notion of hegemonic masculinity ‘has achieved such prominence in men's studies’, because of the difficulties that studying masculinity involves. ⁸⁴ Maybe that should also be applied to the Don Juan. But instead of burying the Don Juan in hegemonic masculinity or the latter in the former, we should exploit his qualities as a stylization of masculinity in order to contribute, through this figure, to the theoretical development of the notion of masculinity.

As observed at the beginning of this article, through the Don Juan figure it is possible to identify the three fundamental components of masculinity: sexual access to the bodies of women; non-sexual access to the bodies of other men; and that which these two aspects would confirm for a male audience.

In Spain, many masculinity studies that have broached the subject of the Don Juan have understood this figure as a space for debating on Spanish masculinity and whether it should be reformed or not. They have thus followed in the footsteps of illustrious thinkers like Ortega y Gasset and Unamuno. On doing so, they have been able to place the construction of the gender gap at the centre of the debate on the social order, which was especially heated during the interwar period. Consequently, the results of such research are particularly notable.

But the figure of the Don Juan is not without risks for researchers. The Don Juan is a critical reflection on masculinity – even though many men have understood the figure as a model or affirmation of their own masculinity; it is not a description of the masculinity of a specific territory, whether it be Castile, Spain or Latin America. Strictly speaking, to characterize Spanish masculinity as donjuanesque is no more than to characterize it as masculinity, although in the Don Juan masculine traits are much stronger and other masculinities reinterpret the character traits of the Don Juan in a more favourable light in the interests of women.

It should be recalled that there can be Don Juan masculinities in all countries and that this behaviour is no more Spanish than it is English or French. But the origin of the myth that facilitates its criticism and analysis is indeed Spanish. That Spanish masculinity, or that of one of the Spanish nationalities, is more or less closer to the most exaggerated versions of the Don Juan is the result of a social dialogue in which a large variety of factors intervene, but in which gender conflict plays a leading role. As the gender order is closely related to the social order, all the factors that stabilize or destabilize it are also contributing to redefining or not the limits of masculinity and femininity. For which reason it is possible to establish a link between masculinity and the nation or between masculinity and modernity, or what is the same, between masculinity and the entire civilizing project.

The many works that have examined the relationship between masculinity and the nation have managed to establish without a shadow of doubt the gender character of nation-building, which confirms the importance of gender for historical analysis. But to this should be added that it is not enough to declare that the disaster of 1898, the Rif War, the Civil War, Early Francoism, or any other moment during Spanish history has been defined in terms of gender, legitimated or discredited by an alleged presence or absence of masculinity. It is necessary to analyze that which allows for a specific event or series of events to be defined as masculine and, to that end, there is a need for a precise concept of masculinity, such as that offered by the figure of the Don Juan. The association between masculinity and war or between masculinity and colonial expansion may seem easy to establish, for, after all, it is referring to the hierarchies that men establish among themselves according to their ability to access the bodies of others through struggle – one of the main characteristics of the Don Juan. It is not so simple to establish a link between masculinity and fascism or impiety or between masculinity and the defence of the social order or revolution, but the Don Juan provides useful clues.

The association between binary oppositions that construct the social meaning and opposition of gender is, above and beyond the characteristics of any of them, the result of a social dialogue in which multiple factors intervene and many means are employed, but in which the body occupies a fundamental place. In the studies analyzed here, the body plays a particularly important role in the struggles of homosexual collectives against their exclusion, above all in the context of the Spanish Transition. The importance of their struggles for rolling back the limits of sexual and political freedom seems evident considering the research conducted hitherto. But it is more complicated to specify its relevance for defining the gender order. According to Connell, homosexuals form part of a masculinity subordinated to the hegemonic kind, and she gives them a fundamental role in the modification and, therefore, transformation of the gender order. What is the purpose of the struggles of homosexual collectives? Do they modify the definition of masculinity and femininity or widen the gender gap itself? The study of those collectives based on the concept of masculinity provided by the Don Juan can help to answer those questions and others that can doubtless be formulated.

The Don Juan, his different cultural embodiments, and the debates that he has generated have taken centre stage in masculinity studies in Spain and it is to be hoped that this figure will acquire greater relevance in other historiographies.