Banana Republic no more

Putnam, Lara, “Work, Sex, and Power in a Central American Export Economy at the Turn of the Twentieth Century”, in Gender, Sexuality, and Power in Latin America Since Independence. William French and Katherine Elaine Bliss (eds.). Pp.133-162. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007.

Putnam uses gender to analyze the household arrangements and the informal service that sustains the whole export economy in Central America carried out by US corporations such as the United Fruit, as well as to look at the consequent gendered patterns of labor migration. Putnam suggests that when we expand our analysis to the ways that gender and sexuality are mobilized in discourse, we can understand how state power itself is constituted (134). In fact, Putnam suggests that political power unfolds through completely gendered and sexualized discourses and practices. This kind of analysis also insists on the complex and multilayered nature of power that surround enclave economies or export zones.

Comments

  1. JonSeptember 8, 2009 at 10:54 AM

    "political power unfolds through completely gendered and sexualized discourses and practices."

    Again, does it have to do this? If so, after all, it might be hard to imagine non-gendered discourses, as they will always be required for the unfolding and exercise of power.

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  2. Manuela Valle-CastroSeptember 9, 2009 at 3:26 PM

    According to Putnam and other authors (Scott, Radcliffe and Westwood, Richard, French) the exercise of political power requires gendered and sexualized discourses because gender/sexual difference is in fact the primary signifier of difference in Western modern cultures. This is the reason why gender and sexual metaphors are used to establish other hierarchies such as class and race. Thus, I would agree with the idea that there are no gender neutral or non-gendered discourses.

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