From Sentimentality to Masculine Excess in Galician National Discourse

Abstract

This article studies the gendered meanings of Galician national discourse with particular focus on the notion of masculinity. The first part of the article analyzes cultural writings in the early stages of Galician regionalism and establishes how the metaphor of Galicia as feminine (and, as a consequence, of Galician manhood as marked with the notions of sentimentality and submissiveness) gradually became an important stumbling block for nationalism’s emergence as a viable political movement. In the second section, the author  studies how the early texts of Galician political nationalism reacted against such metaphors by means of a heightened masculinist discourse bent on recasting national insurgence as a question of virility. Finally, the author analyzes Ricardo Carvalho Calero’s Historia da literatura galega contemporánea (1963/1981) in line with this rhetoric of national virility and as an example of what the author will call the masculine excess present in the seminal texts of Galician cultural nationalism.