Gender, Sexuality, and Power in Latin America since Independence

William E. French, Katherine Elaine Bliss

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9780742581364
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: History Reference
• Index: History

Featuring 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 sexuality-rather than simply supplementing existing explanations of political, social, cultural, and economic phenomena-are 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, the authors challenge students as well as scholars to reconsider our understanding of the past through the lenses of gender and sexuality. Making the case for the centrality of gender and sexuality to any study of political and social relations, this volume also will help chart the future direction of research in Latin American history since Independence.

Table of contents

• William Beezley and Colin MacLachlan, Series Editors
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: Gender, Sexuality, and Power in Latin America since Independence
• 1 - Vicenta Ochoa, Dead Many Times: Gender, Politics, and a Death Sentence in Early Republican Caracas, Venezuela
• 2 - Madame Durocher’s Performance: Cross-Dressing, Midwifery, and Authority in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• 3 - Mismeasured Women: Gender and Social Science on the Eve of Female Suffrage in Cuba
• 4 - “Such a Strong Need”: Sexuality and Violence in Helem Prison
• 5 - “Gentlemanly Responsibility” and “Insults of a Woman”: Dueling and the Unwritten Rules of Public Life in Uruguay, 1860-1920
• 6 - Work, Sex, and Power in a Central American Export Economy at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
• 7 - Dangerous Driving: Adolescence, Sex, and the Gendered Experience of Public Space in Early-Twentieth-Century Mexico City
• 8 - Doctoring the National Body: Gender, Race, Eugenics, and the “Invert” in Urban Brazil, ca. 1920-1945
• 9 - Masculinity, Primitivism, and Power: Gaucho, Tango, and the Shaping of Argentine National Identity
• 10 - Gender, Sexuality, and Revolution: Making Histories and Cultural Politics in Nicaragua, 1979-2001
• 11 - Gendering the Space of Death: Memory, Democratization, and the Domestic
• Appendix: - Mexican Internet Sites for Gender and Sexuality
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Contributors