Anti-colonial Feminist Ramblings About Everything and Anything

Palaversich, Diana. “The Wounded Body of Proletarian Homosexuality in Pedro Lemebel's Loco afán”. Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 29, No. 2, 99-118 (2002). Pedro Lemebel's writings effectively challenge triumphant narratives about Chilean's economic model, pointing at the marginal subjects that inhabit the city. As well, it emphasizes the "transvestism" of Chilean identity, especially in terms of class and race. He also shatters any project of unitary or global "gay identity" by showing the multiplicity of particular lived experiences of "locas" and other queers marked not only by their sexuality but also by poverty, ethnicity, and AIDS. Moreover, Lemebel engages with three traditions and political projects —gay politics, the Left political agenda, and postmodernism— without being subsumed by any of them. Lemebel's resistance to the global anglo-centered gay identity project (which has also been adopted by Latin American homosexual groups

Lockhart, Melissa F. “Queer Representations in Latino Theatre”. Latin American Theatre Review, 1998. As "gay culture" becomes progressively more mainstream in North America, what can we consider "queer" in queer theatre? For Lockhart, when issues of class, race and culture are left untouched, then queer theatre looses all subversive potential. In turn, while queer culture has tended to move from margin to mainstream, " queer Latino theatre essentially becomes hyperqueer by enacting the multiplicities and contradictions of living within multiple marginal subjectivities". (68) Lockhart does not identify the term "queer" with gay, but rather with any "gender disruption". She locates the relevance of queer theatre in the potential for transforming the (self) representation of the Latino/a community and collective identities. The works analyzed by Lockhart emphasize stereotypes, hybridity and through the dynamics of "passing", th

Marrero, María Teresa. “Out of the Fringe? Out of the Closet: Latina/Latino Theatre and Performance in the 1990s”. TDR, Fall 2000, Vol. 44, No. 3, Pages 131-153. Marrero tries to reconstruct art histories of Latino performance in the 1990's, cautiously admitting this can only constitute a partial project. She argues that following Diana Taylor, we can assert that performance, both as art and political practice have the effect of transforming cultural repertoires, thus expanding possibilities for representation. Initially Latino/a theater was oriented towards the building of communities and much too often relegated issues of gender and sexuality, privileging and implicit male, heterosexual identity, while female roles were often limited to traditional and passive women. This prompted the emergence of new forms of theater and performance that subverted women's traditional identities, as well as made visible the diversity of sexual identities within Latino/a communities, which was

Sommer, Doris. “Love and Country in Latin America: An Allegorical Speculation”. Cultural Critique 16 (Autumn 1990), pp. 109–28. Through the analysis of national novels Sommer is set to tackle the relationship betweeen politics and erotics in Latin America. She argues that narratives of love have been central to the disciplining of subjects within national projects, marked by the conflicts and eventual coming together, reconciliation and amalgamation of different (class, race, region, religious, culture) sectors, producing the effect of: suggesting the productive (though transgressive and heroic) union of different actors in favor of a national project, and at the same time, creating the effect of (sexual, romantic or familial) intimacy among national subjects, resulting in a "passionate patriotism." While romantic love engenders the nation, nationalism is based on romantic love. She produces a dialogue between Foucault's "history of the bodies" and Anderson'

Saporta, Nancy; Marysa Navarro-Aranguren, Patricia Chuchryk and Sonia E. Alvarez “Feminisms in Latin America: From Bogota to San Bernardo”. Signs, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Winter, 1992), pp. 393-434. The University of Chicago Press. The authors take issue with the North-American assumption that Latin American women do not define themselves as feminists, or that feminism is not a priority or even relevant for women in Latin America. For this purpose, they trace the trajectory of the feminisms in the region through the Encuentros held biannually since 1981. They situate the emergence of contemporary feminisms as part of the broader women's movements in close connection to the Left in the context of the repressive regimes of the 1970's and '80s. There was a tendency then to reject the label "feminist" or to perceive feminism as another cultural imperialism from the North. This is explained here by the way it was stigmatized among male-dominated and sexists politics of the Lef

Archetti, Eduardo P. “Multiple Masculinities. The Worlds of Tango and Football in Argentina” in Sex and sexuality in Latin America Edited by Guy Balderston and Donna J. Guy (eds.) New York and London: New York University Press, 1997. Archetti considers tango lyrics and football fans chants as texts, and analyzes them as sites for the construction of masculinities in Argentina. He emphasizes that masculinities are multiple, heterogeneous and compete with each other. Lyrics in tango songs present a symbolic gendered world at odds with the traditional familiar order. The narrator is always a young man, nostalgic of the past, that aches to find romantic love, which is determined by women's individual choice rather than duty. Masculinity relies on the ability to obtain romantic love from a woman, rather than subordination and domination. In the world of football chants, an exclusively male symbolic space, masculinity is a sign of victory. Fans from opposite teams point at each others as

McGee Deutsch, Sandra. “Gender and Sociopolitical Change in Twentieth-Century Latin America”. The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 71, No. 2 (May, 1991). Duke University Press. McGee departs from Scott's statement that politics construct gender and gender constructs politics. She shows how traditional gender roles have been historically used as a paradigm of society. Likewise, power relationships of class and labor have been expressed in gendered terms. In this way, gender ideologies have often served to instill, legitimate, and to make seem "natural" values of industrial/capitalist societies under which the citizens are disciplined. Gender has allowed state discourse to project relationships from the familial to the national order (i.e., symbolizing state-citizens relationships as Father-children bonds). This, in turn, argues McGee, means that to transform social relationships and hierarchies we would need to re-imagine and reformulate the gender relationships,

Hutchison, Elizabeth Q., “Add gender and stir? Cooking up gendered histories of modern Latin America” Latin American Research Review, Vol. 38, No. 1 (2003), pp. 267-287. Hutchinson reviews some of the recent work on gender in Latin America and points at some of the most prominent features of it: A progressive engagement of historians with gender issues has meant, beyond studying women, raising new questions, opening up new research problems and looking for new sources. Recent research has proved how central issues of gender and sexuality have been to the articulation of both state power and subaltern agency in Latin America. The studies under review, all look at the specific ways that historical processes are "gendered." Some of them have challenged teleological narratives of linear progress for women, and present the postcolonial period as offering a contradictory scenario for women, with both gains and losses. For instance, how colonial gender ideas were not simply carried

Tinsman, Heidi. Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality and Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950-1973. (2002) Tinsman explores the ways that two decades of Agrarian Reform (1950-1973) shaped meanings about gender and sexuality in rural Chile, and more broadly reflects on the ways that gender and sexuality are mobilized to enable or oppose political projects. The Agrarian Reform was a contested negotiation between state discourses (which were in turn also contested within the state) and the actors that exercised their agency, accommodating and stretching these meanings for themselves. In their everyday lives, campesinos negotiated meanings over respectability and equality with their bosses, partners, and children. Patriarchy operates then as a series of multiple, local arrangements that make it heterogeneous and contradictory rather than a universal monolithic system of domination. Even though the Agrarian Reform operated directly on men as heads of households for

Rosemblatt, Karin Alejandra. Gendered Compromises. Political Cultures and the State in Chile, 1920-1950. Introduction pp. 1-25. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. This book revolves around the argument that the modernizing project in Chile during the first half of the twentieth-century was formulated as a gendered project, in which the state drew a line between respectable men (workers), respectable women (housewives and mothers), and the undisciplined "other". Moreover, they opposed rationality —linked to modern citizenship— to uncontained sexuality. This was in turn linked also to the racialized aspect of the national project: the whitening of the nation. Thus, trough the control over sexuality the racial boundaries of the nation were to be sustained. Rosemblatt analyses diverse sources, such as state documents and fiction, to document the project of the popular front (the center-left coalition that governed in Chile between the 1920's a

Power, Margaret. La Mujer de Derecha. El poder femenino y la lucha contra Salvador Allende, 1964-1973. Santiago: Ediciones de la Dirección de Bibliotecas, Archivos y Museos, 2008. Power analyzes the right-women's movement, its role in the opposition to Allende's socialist government in Chile (1970-1973) and in the military coup itself. Power makes a convincing argument that gender ideologies were put at play and performed dramatically during the military coup and the events that lead to it. Women presented themselves as the a-political mothers who were defending their private homes (family) and public home (the Fatherland, the nation) and the opposition to Allende exploited this idea. Women interpellated men in their (lack of) masculinity to defend women and children. They used their kitchen pans as symbols of female domesticity to protest the government, which they accused prevented them from fulfilling their natural roles properly. The public performance of conservative women

Fiol-Matta, Licia. A Queer Mother for the Nation. The State and Gabriela Mistral. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. This book is key to understand how intentional and deliberate was the deployment of modernizing nationalist narratives in Chile, and Gabriela Mistral's participation on them. It shows, furthermore, how Mistral was highly influential to the crafting of Chilean and Latin American gender and racial ideologies. Fiol-Matta's careful research verses on Mistral's relationship to the Chilean (and later Mexican and Latin American) state cultural politics and how she established a persona that played along with the state's gendered, raced, and sexualized deployments of "national culture." Mistral contributed to the creation of images of motherhood and nationalist womanhood while in her own life not adjusting to heterosexual patterns of sexual performance nor of national identity. The fact is that she consciously made her image to co

Kulick, Don. Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Kulick presents a detailed ethnographic work on travesti sex workers in Salvador, Brazil. He is interested in the ways that travestis understand and give meaning to their daily practices and identities. Kulick argues that studying the lives of travestis can tell us a lot "about the ways in which gender is imagined and configured in Brazilian society." (11) 1. Travestis in Kulick's research do not identify themselves as women, but as homosexual men who derive pleasure from looking like a woman and triggering (masculine) men's desire. They also do not label transsexuals as women, and refuse to give up their male genitalia as a source of sexual pleasure (I suspect that also as a source of sexual power). In this way, all the analysis that want to elevate travesti subjectivity as the ultimate post-modern condition of a non-identity

Prieur, Annick. Mema's house, Mexico City: on transvestites, queens, and machos. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Prieur's book is based on rich ethnographic evidence and contains her reflections on the role of homosocial and homoerotic male desire in the construction of masculinities in Mexico. She argues that homophobia, machismo and male bisexuality are all at the same time imbricated in the construction of masculinities: Prieur shows the concrete ways that masculinities are constituted in the stories of 'mayates', men whose bisexual practices do not make them think of their identities as "gays" or less masculine. Since these men can retain the power of labeling others (as homosexuals) they can get involved in bisexual relations without 'losing' their masculinity. Some authors (Carrier, Lancaster) have indicated that given the extension of male bisexuality it ought to be a largely tolerated practice in Latin America. Prieur introduces mor

Lind, Amy and Jessica Share. “Queering Development: Institutionalized Heterosexuality in Development Theory, Practice and Politics in Latin America”. Feminist futures : re-imagining women, culture and development edited by Kum-Kum Bhavnani, John Foran and Priya A. Kurian. London ; New York : Zed Books ; New York : Palgrave, 2003. This article argues for the need to challenge institutionalized heterosexism in development theories and practice. Along with this, addresses the uneasy relationship between heterosexual and queer feminists in Latin America, and the role of transnational networks of solidarity and activism, as well as globalized consumer culture in making some discourses of "gay rights" available in LA. Lind and Share analyze the dynamics of development "aid" and policies, most of which peaked in the 80's in the context of the AIDS pandemic. This allowed many gay groups to become "ONGized" and get funding for their activities. The groups stru

Nesvig, Martin. 2001 “The Complicated Terrain of Latin American Homosexuality”. Hispanic American Historical Review 81(3-4): 689-729. Nesvig argues that it is relevant to look at the sexual mores of the colonial period as many of these notions persisted into the modern period in Latin America. He notes that homosexuality was considered the ultimate sin against Nature, God, and the Crown. However, this did not stop the fact that it was a fairly common and semi- institutionalized practice. Because cities offered more opportunity for anonymity and for the development of a clandestine subculture with its own slang and codes it was rather an urban phenomenon. Reviews historiographies of homosexuality, informed by the paradigm of honor/shame, where sexuality is a key component. The metaphor of penetration is contained in the myth of La Malinche, makes being penetrated something that equates being colonized, degraded and defeated. Nesvig argues that scholarship on male homosexuality have been

Lopez-Vicuña, Ignacio. “Approaches to Sexuality in Latin America: Recent Scholarship on Gay and Lesbian Studies”. Latin American Research Review - Volume 39, Number 1, 2004, pp. 238-253 . University of Texas Press. This article reviews scholarship on gay and lesbian studies in Latin America. The growing body of research has been more marked by diversity and complexity than by confluence. Literary studies have started to "queer" the canon by reading texts through queer desire. Queer studies from the social sciences, have tended more to build bridges between homoerotic desire and narratives of nationhood, between discourses of national identity and sexuality. They pay attention to the interplay of power, desire and race, including the analysis of the construction of whiteness and masculinity in Vargas Llosa's work. The fact that many of the writers of the Latin American literary "boom" (1960's and 70's) rejected dominant masculinity and machismo does not m

Caulfield S. “The History of Gender in the Historiography of Latin America”. Hispanic American Historical Review, 2001 - Duke Univ Press. Pp. 449-490. Caulfield hace un intento por revisar lo que se ha escrito sobre género en Latino América. A partir de los años 80s comienza una serie de estudios inagurados por Asunción Lavrin que usan género como categoría central de análisis. Nota la falta de diálogo entre lo que se produce en el Norte y en el Sur sobre LA. Examina la historia de las corrientes políticas y académicas que han influenciado los análisis de género en la historiografía de LA (452). El peak de los estudios de género se producen en el contexto de las postdictaduras cuando hay recursos institucionales y respaldo internacional para una agenda global “de género”. La influencia del post-estructuralismo francés resulta en un énfasis en los discursos y las representaciones, las mentalidades, y de los estudios de la mujer se transita a los estudios sobre la feminidad y la mascul

Garretón, Manuel A. Incomplete democracy: political democratization in Chile and Latin America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. En este libro, Garretón sostiene que Chile comenzó su transición durante el plesbicito de 1988, que la democracia se consolidó con el primer gobierno democrático en 1990 (cuando se estableció que no se podía regresar a la dictadura militar) y que el problema es que la democracia chilena es hoy una democracia incompleta, mediocre, con enclaves autoritarios. Cuestiona la idea de la exitosa "doble transición chilena" —a la democracia y al libre mercado— pero se enoja con Moulian y con otros intelectuales de izquierda que niegan que haya habido transición democrática o alternativamente, que ésta haya terminado. Garretón cree que esto último negaría lo específico del concepto de transición y le quitaría sentido a su uso. Para Garretón el desafío es volver a reconstituir al Estado, los actores sociales y los partidos políticos como r

Thayer, Willy. La crisis no moderna de la universidad moderna (Epílogo del conflicto de las facultades). Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 1996. El argumento central de Thayer, en lo que concierne a mi tema, es que la transición es lo que ocurrió durante la dictadura, el tránsito desde el Estado moderno a la sociedad de mercado, donde el Estado deja de ser un referente de conducción ideológica del proyecto nacional. Este tránsito hace caer en crisis las categorías modernas de la política (Estado, Pueblo, progreso, etc.) que le servían de referente. El estado de ánimo de aburrimiento que acompaña la post-dictadura tiene que ver entonces con el fin de la épica y la proliferación inocua de las ideologías, ya no como confrontación de proyectos históricos, sino como un consumo cosmético dentro del menú neoliberal. El capitalismo tardío entonces, no requiere de una ideología ni de un orden político en particular.

Williams, Gareth. The Other Side of the Popular: Neoliberalism and Subalternity in Latin America. “Chapter 7: Operational Whitewash and the Negative Community”. Pp. 273-304. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. In Latin America, nationalist projects have been based on the establishment of normative identities and communities that indicate their limits in opposition to non-normative identities. Hegemony, thus, constitutes at the same time the grounds for subalternity (6). Subalternity is understood by Williams as "the often violent subject effect of national and post-national processes of social subordination, but also as the epistemological limit at which the nonhegemonic announces the limits of hegemonic thought and of hegemonic thinking". (10) Williams is looking for sites at the limits of current operations of whitewashing of both the relations between past and present violence and of heterogeneities collapsed under the idea of the national (such as the "chola" i

Velasco, Juan. “Performing Multiple Identities: Guillermo Gómez-Peña and His “Dangerous Border Crossings”. Latino/a Popular Culture edited by Michelle Habell-Pallan and Mary Romero. New York, London: New York University Press, 2002. Velasco looks at Gómez-Peña body of work which comprises performance and writing, and points at several issues raised by it: - commodification of indigenous identities - connections between the production of the 'authentic Other' and the new world order - performative nature of identity - colonial discourse as relying on a binary between colonizers and colonized identities - strategies by which colonized subjects can subvert this binary Anzaldúa has previously constructed the notion of the 'border' as a site for articulation of a 'new mestiza consciousness', a type of subjectivity that refuses to be on one side or the other. Gómez-Peña however, seems to be more skeptical about any 'positive model of cultural hybridity' since

Smith, Carol A. “Myths, Intellectuals, and Race/Class/Gender Distinctions in the Formation of Latin American Nations”. Journal of Latin American Anthropology . September 1996, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 148-169. Smith examines how "mestizaje" emerged linked to nationalist ideology but has also been appropriated in different ways by the identity politics of some "new social movements" in Latin America. The myth of mestizaje entails at the same time the illusion of homogeneity and the affirmation of internal racial hierarchies. Hegemonic national culture needs to be produced and controlled by state institutions. Mestizaje is presented as the "natural" or biological basis for the project of a national culture, and it is then a key ideological and mythical component of nation-building processes in LA. However, as subaltern subjects have more access to the means of production of images and discourses about them, they can manipulate these meanings. Smith is specially in

Levinson, Brett. “Dictatorship and Overexposure: Does Latin America Testify to More than One Market?” Discourse - 25.1&2, Winter & Spring 2003, pp. 98-118. Levinson argues the 1973 coup never ceased happening, it actually stroke with all its horror in the post-dictatorship, when the possibilities for articulating different political projects was radically closed, as the ideology of the free market was imposed as a consensus, and precisely, presented not as an ideology anymore, but as what just is , or "it goes without saying". To challenge this is actually not to make any sense. The coup really just hits with all its strength now, when the victims of state violence find there is no possible discourse available to account for the experiences. When violence is recognized, is done under the paradigm of measurability and trade, the exchange of crimes of one side in the market of forgiveness and forgetfulness of the transition. "Transition consequently commands a poet

Como el universo se empeña en ser paradójico y sorprendentemente absurdo, el tiempo y el espacio se doblan como un pañuelo y hoy el 11 de septiembre me encuentra reflexionando sobre la dictadura y la postdictadura en Estados Unidos, en la casa de mi tío que es veterano de los marines, con mi otra tía viuda de un detenido desaparecido y mi primo Roberto, que nació de esa relación pero no alcanzó a conocer a su papá. Mi tío Pedro está detenido desaparecido desde el 14 de Febrero de 1975, cuando tenía 22 años y además de estudiar Historia era dirigente del MIR. Yo tenía menos de un año cuando esto ocurrió y mi tía Lucía estaba entonces embarazada de 5 meses de mi primo Roberto. Esto ha sido una tragedia familiar de la cual se habla poco, y de a poco, al enterarme de más detalles, he comprendido por qué. En esa época (en la UP y al principio de la dictadura) varios de mis tíos, tías y mis papás militaban en el MIR. Mi primo Roberto es como mi hermano porque vivió con nosotros intermitentem

Richard, Nelly. Feminismo, género y diferencia (s). Colección Archivo Feminista. Santiago: Palinodia, 2008. Este libro contiene una serie de ensayos, algunos ya publicados antes pero aquí revisados y expandidos. A través de ellos, Richard establece los siguientes puntos: El feminismo puede ser visto tanto como un movimiento social; una teoría; o como una operación que problematiza las relaciones de poder desde "el signo mujer" como significante o metáfora de lo subordinado, lo marginal, lo no-hegémonico. En este sentido, el feminismo y "lo femenino" pueden ser formulados como una crítica a las tecnologías de la representación que postulan a la identidad como lineal, unitaria y fija. Ser mujer no coincide siempre en este sentido ni con "lo femenino" ni con lo feminista (en el caso de la literatura, por ejemplo). "Lo femenino" entonces sería un proceso de significación constante, siempre imbuido en una intertextualidad, que permite articular múltip

Bergman, Marcelo and Monica Szurmuk. “Gender, Citizenship, and Social Protest: The New Social Movements in Argentina”. The Latin American subaltern studies reader edited by Ileana Rodríguez. Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2001. This article deals with the case of the murder of a young, dark-skinned, working-class woman in Argentina —in which the son of a senator was involved— and the following movement of "marches of silence" that emerged to demand justice. The authors make the argument that in post-dictatorship Argentina, ideas and expectations about citizenship have changed, and that the way of doing politics has been profoundly impacted by the Madres as they inaugurated "public grieving and public suffering as political praxis" (391). While in other times this case would have been quickly dismissed as an individual crime, in this new context it became profoundly politicized, and triggered broader demands to change a corrupted political and economic system th

Radcliffe, Sarah and Sallie Westwood. “Gender, Racism and the Politics of Identities in Latin America”. “Viva”: women and popular protest in Latin America. Pp. 1-29. London; New York: Routledge, 1993. In this chapter, Radcliffe and Westwood make the following points: 1. Women's gender and political identities and practices have to be understood in their specific contexts, as they are ever shifting and multiple. 2. It is not possible (and also inaccurate and harmful) to talk about a unitary category of Latin American women, as one can speak of LA as a whole region only in conventional terms. If we do not acknowledge the fractures and multiple locations that women in LA, we contribute to silence and render invisible the women who are indeed oppressed by other women, i.e. working class, indigenous and other racialized women. It is also necessary to look beyond the commonplaces and stereotypes that exoticize LA, as this is part of a racist and eurocentric narrative. 3. "Gendered i

Stephen, Lynn. “The Construction of Indigenous Suspects: Militarization and the Gendered and Ethnic Dynamics of Human Rights Abuses in Southern Mexico”. Perspectives on Las Américas: a reader in culture, history and representation. Edited by Matthew Gutmann. Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2003. Stephen examines the gendered and sexualized patterns of militarization and torture in Oaxaca and Chiapas, and how in these processes, long held myths and stereotypes about women and indigenous peoples are mobilized in what she calls "the cultural packaging of violence", that is, the construction of subjects who can be targets of violence. She notes based on her ethnographic work that gender and ethnicity are critical for the construction of the worthless, subversive, dangerous subjects of violence (for the analysis of violence in Chile, we would need to add class as another critical factor, and the racialization of working-class subjects). She also points at the continuity of colonial

Stephenson, Marcia. “The Architectural Relationship between Gender, Race, and the Bolivian State”. The Latin American subaltern studies reader edited by Ileana Rodríguez. Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2001. This article tackles the relationship between narratives of nationhood in Bolivia, race, gender and space. It argues that the idea of Bolivia as a modern nation-state requires to put in place the ideology of mestizo identity (the progressive whitening of the population), the "othering" of indigenous populations, and a gendered and racialized conception of space to domesticate the heterogeneous social body. Taking as a start point the planning and development of rural houses, Stephenson analyzes the ideological implications of their spatial distribution: hegemonic discourses of modernity and citizenship carry gendered distinctions between the inside/domestic and the outside/public, as well as the demand for the acculturation of indigenous communities, who are expected

Nagel, Joane. “Masculinity and Nationalism: Gender and Sexuality in the Making of Nations”. Nations and Nationalism: A Reader. Edited by Philip Spencer and Howard Wollman. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Nagel examina la relación entre el nacionalismo y la construcción de la masculinidad hegemónica, particularmente en Estados Unidos; como el nacionalismo requiere de la exaltación de un cierto tipo de "hombría" y de feminidad; así como la sexualización de la guerra y del militarismo en general. En primer lugar, Nagel explora como la cultura del nacionalismo y el militarismo es inseparable de la cultura e ideología de la masculinidad hegemónica. En Estados Unidos, la masculinidad hegemónica se construye a través de las ideas de superioridad nacional y el imperialismo agresivo. Es más, las ideologías de la masculinidad, el colonialismo, nacionalismo, militarismo e imperialismo son inseparables entre sí y emergieron de manera conjunta a fines del siglo XIX. Temas c

Gutmann, M. “Gender Conventions” in The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City. By Matthew C. Gutmann. Pp. 1-10 Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Gutmann enfoca su trabajo etnográfico en los significados asociados a la masculinidad y la paternidad en ciudad de México. Uno de sus objetivos es cuestionar la premisa con que han operado hasta ahora los estudios etnográficos en asumir apriori una categoría homogénea del "hombre mexicano" que frecuentemente es caracterizado como macho-machista, violento, borracho y ausente de la crianza de los niños. De hecho, Gutmann está preocupado por la forma como las/os antropólogas/os han contribuido a fijar este estereotipo, haciendo notar que es imposible encontrar una identidad masculina unitaria debido a fracturas generacionales, de clase, región y etnicidad; y que los significados sobre qué significa "ser macho" han ido cambiando a través del tiempo. De hecho, a Gutmann le parece un poco problemático y raci

Melhuus, M. & Kristi Ann Stølen. Machos, Mistresses, Madonnas. Contesting the Power of Latin American Gender Imagery. London: Verso, 1996. Este volumen es una recopilación de estudios de casos hechos por antropólogos en Argentina, México, Peru, Ecuador, República Dominicana y presentados en una conferencia en Suecia sobre el poder de los imaginarios de género en LA. Aspectos en común entre estos artículos: influencia de Bourdieu y Foucault, esfuerzo por complejizar de las relaciones de poder de género más allá de las categorías de opresor vs. víctima, uso de la nociones de discurso, imaginarios, hegemonía para explicar y comprender las relaciones de género y de raza. A partir de esta lectura, se desprenden algunas ideas importantes: a) Los discursos y representaciones sobre las diferencias de género sirven para articular diferencias de clase y etnia, por ejemplo, la representación de la sexualidad femenina (mujer decente vs fácil) sirve para vehiculizar diferencias de clase y raza

Rodríguez, Juana María. Queer Latinidad. Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces. New York and London: New York University Press, 2003. Rodríguez emphasizes "place" and "space" as sites for the articulation of identities, and sees place as critical to understand performative practices of identity as situated. Inspired by Foucault's notions of regulatory practices and disciplinary discourses, as well as by Judith Butler's idea of gender as performative, she regards subjectivity more as a product of discursive practices rather than pre-existing them. Also quotes Alarcón's notion of "subject-in-process" to point at the paradoxical and contradictory character of identities. Every particular space contains pre-existing discourses and narratives in which subjectivity is embodied in a —culturally specific— intelligible way; however, there is no discourse of identity that can contain subjectivity, there is always an excess of the subject that resists to

Arrizon Alicia. Queering Mestizaje: Transculturation and Performance. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2006. On the other hand, Latinidad is a notion that is subjected to different power regimes than mestizaje, and that in the context of transculturation in LA, relates more to the Western/North fantasies and to the commodification and fetishization of racialized bodies. [I had done the experiment of googling for images of "latin american" versus "latina" women and had realized about this before too, on the first case I got Frida Kahlo, in the second, Salma Hayek, JLo, and a bunch of pop-up porn ads featuring Latinas]. However, Arrizon is interested in asking for example, how can Latinidad be linked to queer desire, and to understand how different cultural productions —from Hollywood movies to experimental performance— create particular genealogies, "marking counterhegemonic systems that reassert the possibilities of culture and ideology in representation

Taussig, Michael. “Culture of Terror--Space of Death. Roger Casement's Putumayo Report and the Explanation of Torture”. Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 26, No. 3. (Jul., 1984), pp. 467-497. In Michael Taussig's analysis of the Putumayo Report, the white employees of English owned rubber companies inflicted the most outrageous bodily punishments to the Indigenous population of the Huitotos in Colombia, including men, elder, women and children. And precisely, the discourse that legitimized this brutality was that the first represented civilization, while the latter where presented as savages and “cannibals”. Taussig argues that these practices of torture aimed at the establishment of a culture of terror and cannot be merely explained by the rational logic of capitalism (in which torture would be a way of obtaining free labour by disciplining a population). “...to offer one or all of the standard rational explanations of the culture of terror is [similarly] pointl

Arrizon Alicia. Queering Mestizaje: Transculturation and Performance. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2006. Queering relates to refusing or resistance to occupy or be identified with a single subject position. Queer subjects occupy an identity “in between” (hybrid), which is useful to de-essentialize identity. Mestizaje, as a postcolonial condition, has been both an ideology linked to nationalist narratives and to an (oppositional) identity linked to power struggles over representation, autonomy and authenticity in Latin America. On one hand, mestizaje provides a narrative that gives meaning and direction to colonial violence and processes of transculturation through the idealization of Spanish and Indigenous blood (note that the blood is the metaphor to talk about filiation and genealogies of race) and gives historical meaning to racialized bodies. This narrative represents the colonial encounter as a racialized and gendered romance between the male Spanish conquistador and

TRISTE FUNCIONARIO POLICIAL SAD POLICE FUNCTIONARY Mauricio Redolés y Son Ellos Mismos Album: Bello Barrio (1987) Que será de mi torturador? Que será de mi torturador? Habrá ganado un viaje a Panamá? o a EEUU agarro beca, quizás? o tal vez al final no pasó na' o tal vez al final no pasó na' Whatever happened to my torturer? Whatever happened to my torturer? Did he win a trip to Panama? or maybe grab a scholarship to the US? or maybe at the end nothing happened or maybe at the end nothing happened Se le habrá caído el pelo? con tanto golpe, se habrá puesto más feo? se le habrá caído un diente? con las cabras amarradas, seguirá tan caliente? I wonder if he lost his hair with so much beating up did he get uglier? I wonder if he lost a tooth? with the girls tied down, I wonder if he's still so horny Me pegaba en forma profesional quería algo confesional me pegaba en forma diligente ¡Confiesa que eres dirigente! He used to beat me up in a professional way he wanted something con