Description
Book SynopsisFeaturing the original primary research of a number of leading scholars, this innovative volume integrates gender and sexuality into the main currents of historical interpretation concerning Latin America. The book argues that gender and sexualityrather than simply supplementing existing explanations of political, social, cultural, and economic phenomenaare central to understanding these processes. Focusing on subjects as varied as murder, motherhood and the death penalty in early Republican Venezuela, dueling in Uruguay, midwifery in Brazil, youth culture in Mexico, and revolution in Nicaragua, contributors explore the many ways that gender and sexuality have been essential to the operation of power in Latin America over the last two hundred years. The linked questions of agency, identity, the body, and ethnicity are woven throughout their analysis. By analyzing a rich array of medical, criminological, juridical, social scientific, and human rights discourses throughout Latin America,
Trade ReviewThis exciting collection showcases many of the best young historians of Latin America. With wide-ranging essays covering much of the Americas—and framed by classic gender/sexuality concepts, discourse analysis, and queer theory—the volume provides groundbreaking new research on gender, sexuality, and power and shows why such studies must be central to all future histories of the region. -- Matthew C. Gutmann, Brown University, author of The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City
Highly recommended. All undergraduate libraries. * CHOICE *
An excellent approach to integrating gender and sexuality in the study of Latin American history. Challenging and stimulating essays focusing on the centrality of these variables in the study of Latin American history since independence. -- Jose R. Gomez, Turabo University
Editors William E. French and Katherine E. Bliss nicely bring together a wide range of essays that cover the early republican period to the early twenty-first century, touching down in Venezuela, Mexico, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and various points in Central America and the Caribbean. * The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Latin American History *
This is a terrific collection of new scholarship on sexuality and gender in Latin America. . . . Gender, Sexuality, and Power in Latin America since Independence stands out both for its extremely useful introduction and the truly new directions taken by the essays of the contributing scholars. . . . This collection is noteworthy and refreshing. . . . This well-rendered volume testifies to the vibrancy of the field and deserves wide attention. * Hispanic American Historical Review, February 2009 *
I designed a course on gender and power in Latin America a number of years ago but grew discouraged teaching it because much of the available material was too difficult for my undergrads. I also had trouble finding a coherent progression of readings. But this book provides exactly that. The introductory essay in particular is enormously helpful in laying out the major theoretical issues in accessible language. We are able to keep referring back to it in each class. The reader has been a real success, one I?m sure I?ll use again! -- Karen Robert, St. Thomas University
The volume's eleven chapters do a magnificent job of destabilizing binaries. Encompassing ten different countries and almost two hundred years of history, the authors approach the central focus, the relationship between gender, sexuality, and power, from a diversity of perspectives and methodologies. Ideal for university courses on Latin America, French and Bliss have provided us with an engaging volume whose cutting edge research puts to rest any reader's lingering doubts as to the fundamental connection between gender and sexuality and the workings of power. -- Francie Chassen-Lopez, January, 2010
Table of ContentsChapter 1 Introduction: Gender, Sexuality and Power in Latin America since Independence Chapter 2 Vicenta Ochoa, Dead Many Times: Gender, Politics, and a Death Sentence in Early Republican Caracas, Venezuela Chapter 3 Madame Durocher's Performance: Cross-Dressing, Midwifery, and Authority in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Chapter 4 Mismeasured Women: Gender and Social Science on the Eve of Female Suffrage in Cuba Chapter 5 "Such a Strong Need": Sexuality and Violence in Belem Prison Chapter 6 "Gentlemanly Responsibility" and "Insults of a Woman": Dueling and the Unwritten Rules of Public Life in Uruguay, 1860-1920 Chapter 7 Work, Sex, and Power in a Central American Export Economy at the Turn of the Twentieth Century Chapter 8 Dangerous Driving: Adolescence, Sex, and the Gendered Experience of Public Space in Early-Twentieth-Century Mexico City Chapter 9 Doctoring the National Body: Gender, Race, Eugenics, and the "Invert" in Urban Brazil, ca. 1920-1945 Chapter 10 Masculinity, Primitivism, and Power: Gaucho, Tango, and the Shaping of Argentine National Identity Chapter 11 Gender, Sexuality, and Revolution: Making Histories and Cultural Politics in Nicaragua, 1979-2001 Chapter 12 Gendering the Space of Death: Memory, Democratization, and the Domestic Chapter 13 Appendix: Mexican Internet Sites for Gender and Sexuality
