Wounded Warriors: Corrective Castings in Male Activism

This chapter extends the focus on the rescued by analyzing casting in performances of suffering by and about some Honduran men in the Association of Returned Migrants with Disabilities who embarked on a collective journey back through Mexico and the United States to demand meetings with the presidents of both countries, highlight violations of the rights of migrants, and press for an end to what they view as a forced migration. We contrast the casting of the men by Univision in a news series as feminized father-victims unable to properly provide for their families in accordance with traditional masculine norms, with the men’s own self-casting as wounded soldiers in a war against the poor waged by the governments of Honduras, Mexico, and the United States. Though it continues to trade in displays of pain, their performance breaks out of melodrama in certain respects, reappropriates the stigma of “mutilation,” and casts the men in a dignified collective masculine subjectivity that resists conformity with neoliberal ideals of individual striving in competitive isolation.