Modernizing patriarchy

Vaughan, Mary Kay. “Modernizing Patriarchy: State Policies, Rural Households, and Women in Mexico, 1930-1940” in Dore and Molyneux, Hidden histories of gender and the state in Latin America. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.

Vaughan analyzes post-revolutionary state policies that were aimed to modernize family, not to emancipate women but to accommodate the household to the interests and ideology of national development. One of the features of 20th century state policies was they sought to rationalize the domestic, private sphere; so mothers had to be disciplined and educated in order to have a healthy family that would contribute to national progress. In the same way, school was the space for children to be indoctrinated on patriotism and modernity, preparing them to be good productive workers. Throughout these policies, women were viewed as conduits for national progress, not as subjects with their own interests outside the family or the nation (for instance, women's sexuality was contained in a rhetoric of population growth so that there is no space for a notion such as reproductive rights). Just like the Agrarian Reform in Chile, postrevolutionary policies in Mexico failed to address rural female headed households, and produced mixed and contradictory effects on gender relations. On the other hand, the state cannot be viewed as a monolithic entity, but it entails a range of varied and contradictory practices.

Comments

  1. JonJuly 30, 2009 at 5:36 PM

    I note that, at least according to your account, Vaughan ironically doesn't seem to give much space to the desires and responses on the part of women themselves, who may well have taken advantage of some of the contradictions that you mention. A good book on this period in Mexico is Patience Schell's Church and State Education in Revolutionary Mexico City.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Manuela Valle-CastroJuly 31, 2009 at 1:58 PM

    That is not what I meant at all. Vaughan does see the contradictory effects of post-revolutionary state policies for women, opening spaces and reformulating gender relationships in multiple directions, including some that did challenge patriarchal practices. Vaughan sees these policies as principally and strategically oriented towards the modernization of the patriarchal family, and introducing some accommodations on the latter for the project of nation-building and the reproduction of a modern national(ist) subjectivity.

    I will look into Schell's book however.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Feminisms and women's struggles in LA

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...
Read more

Queer Latinidad

Image
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 ...
Read more

A house is not always a home.

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...
Read more