Representations of Nation and Spanish Masculinity in Popular Romance Novels: The Alpha Male as “Other”

Abstract

The alpha hero embodies the hegemonic masculinity that has long dominated romance fiction. The portrayal of this male type is, however, problematized when he is an exotic foreigner, as his hyper-heterosexualized masculinity is often associated with the gender backwardness of his country. This article is concerned with popular romance novels set in Spain in the 1970s. It explores how British authors rely on gender and national clichés that construct an essentialized image of Spanish men. The primitive and instinctual masculinity attributed to them reveals these novels' complicity with the ideology of Britain's superiority.

Mourning and Sentimental Heroism in Maureen Child'sLost in Sensation

“…Jayashree Kamblé, Sarah S. G. Frantz, Veronica Kitchen, María del Mar Pérez‐Gil, and I have all recently studied the figure of the hero. These authors have studied a range of “types” of heroes, including the virgin hero (Allan, “Theorising” and “Theorising the Monstrous”), the military hero (Kamblé; Kitchen), the Arabic hero (Jarmakani; Teo), Spanish masculinity (Pérez‐Gil), and gay and queer heroes (Allan, Reading from Behind and Men, Masculinities, and Popular Romance ; Herendeen; Ross), while Sarah S. G. Frantz has focused on shifts in the hero in the genre (“Expressing Herself” and “I've Tried My Entire Life”). While much has been written about the hero, there are still absences in the scholarly record when thinking about and through the figure of the hero.…”