Bildung, Masochism, and Contemporary Male Subjectivities in Daniel Galera’s Mãos de Cavalo

In this paper, I analyze Daniel Galera’s novel Mãos de Cavalo (2006) as a Bildungsroman, a genre that has become increasingly important for Brazilian literary criticism in the last 30 years. Through its protagonist, Hermano, the novel discusses the influence of gender, class, and mass media in the formation of young male subjects today. I also focus on a topic that has not been thoroughly analyzed: The main character’s masochistic tendencies. With theoretical concepts that include Mikhail Bakhtin and Franco Moretti’s critical readings of the Bildungsroman, recent approaches to the genre by contemporary Brazilian academics, and Sigmund Freud’s analysis of masochism, I contend that Galera produced a significant reflection on some of the darker and self-destructive aspects of class inequality and masculine formation in contemporary Brazil.