Scholarship on gender and nation-building in Latin America.

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 along into the modern period, but rather, elites refashioned and appropriated these notions to make them fit into national projects. The scholarship reviewed emphasizes hegemony rather than domination, where actors involved engage actively in negotiating and accommodating meanings.

Comments

  1. JonOctober 29, 2009 at 5:20 AM

    Hmm, this sounds like a fairly generic review of the literature--does it resonate with your own reading, though? And as for the notion of "challeng[ing] teleological narraives of linear progress for women," I wonder about the ways in which (for instance) upper-class women supported Pinochet, however reactionary he was in so many ways, because they felt there were more gains than losses in doing so.

    (This is a tangent, but there's a wonderful Lemebel story about upper-class women and Pinochet, which is called something like "Las joyas del general." Very short, but you must read it if you can.)

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