Gender as a category for historical analysis



French, William E. and Katherine Elaine Bliss “Introduction: Gender, Sexuality, and Power in Latin America Since Independence.” In Gender, Sexuality, and Power in Latin America Since Independence. William French and Katherine Elaine Bliss (eds.). Pp.1-30. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007.

The authors take on the usefulness of the category of gender for historical analysis as inaugurated by Scott in her paradigmatic article from 1986. This entails understanding gender as a discursive site where power/knowledge is articulated; for instance, the language of citizenship and national identity is gendered, thus it is relevant for historians to explore both 'popular' and state-promoted meanings around gender and sexuality. The authors also discuss the potential risks —many described by Scott herself— that the shift from women to gender imply, like taking the masculine/feminine binary for granted instead of looking at the specific ways that this binary is constructed and used. They also signal the contributions of Foucault and Queer Theories in pointing at the regulatory power of discourses, and to the ways that our understanding of bodies as sexualized (and racialized) is mediated by historically situated discourses. Furthermore, the body also is used as a metaphor for society or the nation. Finally, they emphasize the intersectionality and the relevance of destabilizing fixed categories of identity, not for the sake of an academic exercise, but as a way to develop politics that can address the complexities of processes of identification and subjectivity production.

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