Espectacularidad y género: Dandis y actrices en las obras de Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera

The present work examines how Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera (1859-1895) shapes images of performing artists and the figure of the writer-dandy. Through analysis of his chronicles, short stories and novels dealing with images of European female artists, this study discusses how the blurred boundaries between the male self and the female others captured by this Mexican writer function as a strategy for appropriating a locus of enunciation of modernity, while destabilizing the demarcation between spectacle and spectator. The way Gutiérrez Nájera constructs pseudonyms, a procedure with which he appropriates the names of theatrical characters and female characteristics as luxurious materials, explicitly shows this vulnerable demarcation. The conceptual disturbance between the enunciator and the contents of modernity, the treatment of famous actresses and the adoption of the pose of dandy in his works allow Gutiérrez Nájera to articulate a modernity imported from the metropolis. His strategy allows him to articulate the image of a more modern subject in contrast with the intellectual elites of other discourses and bourgeois readers in Mexico.