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Showing posts from October 25, 2009

Tango and football in the construction of Argentinian masculinities

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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

Gender and politics in Latin America.

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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,