Mirrors, Lipstick, and Guns: Performing Revolutionary Masculinity in La mujer habitada

The following essay studies the relationship between the female body and the construction of masculinity in Gioconda Belli's La mujer habitada (1988). Taking into account theories of gender and Lacan's ideas of subject construction, the article analyses how Belli constructs the female protagonist through a series of reflections and the performativity of theatre to establish a masculine subject. The study is built on the postulates forwarded by Raewyn Connell and Judith Butler to show how the new Latin American woman in La mujer habitada is not always a product of female agency but instead of a mimetic process of local masculinities. I propose in these pages a reclassification of Latin American masculinity through the trope of revolutionary masculinity, which is a recurrent model in contemporary novels that undertake a challenging of patriarchal military governments in the twentieth century.