Anti-colonial Feminist Ramblings About Everything and Anything

Bergman, Marcelo and Monica Szurmuk. “Gender, Citizenship, and Social Protest: The New Social Movements in Argentina”. The Latin American subaltern studies reader edited by Ileana Rodríguez. Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2001. This article deals with the case of the murder of a young, dark-skinned, working-class woman in Argentina —in which the son of a senator was involved— and the following movement of "marches of silence" that emerged to demand justice. The authors make the argument that in post-dictatorship Argentina, ideas and expectations about citizenship have changed, and that the way of doing politics has been profoundly impacted by the Madres as they inaugurated "public grieving and public suffering as political praxis" (391). While in other times this case would have been quickly dismissed as an individual crime, in this new context it became profoundly politicized, and triggered broader demands to change a corrupted political and economic system th...

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...

Stephen, Lynn. “The Construction of Indigenous Suspects: Militarization and the Gendered and Ethnic Dynamics of Human Rights Abuses in Southern Mexico”. Perspectives on Las Américas: a reader in culture, history and representation. Edited by Matthew Gutmann. Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2003. Stephen examines the gendered and sexualized patterns of militarization and torture in Oaxaca and Chiapas, and how in these processes, long held myths and stereotypes about women and indigenous peoples are mobilized in what she calls "the cultural packaging of violence", that is, the construction of subjects who can be targets of violence. She notes based on her ethnographic work that gender and ethnicity are critical for the construction of the worthless, subversive, dangerous subjects of violence (for the analysis of violence in Chile, we would need to add class as another critical factor, and the racialization of working-class subjects). She also points at the continuity of colonial ...

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...

Nagel, Joane. “Masculinity and Nationalism: Gender and Sexuality in the Making of Nations”. Nations and Nationalism: A Reader. Edited by Philip Spencer and Howard Wollman. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Nagel examina la relación entre el nacionalismo y la construcción de la masculinidad hegemónica, particularmente en Estados Unidos; como el nacionalismo requiere de la exaltación de un cierto tipo de "hombría" y de feminidad; así como la sexualización de la guerra y del militarismo en general. En primer lugar, Nagel explora como la cultura del nacionalismo y el militarismo es inseparable de la cultura e ideología de la masculinidad hegemónica. En Estados Unidos, la masculinidad hegemónica se construye a través de las ideas de superioridad nacional y el imperialismo agresivo. Es más, las ideologías de la masculinidad, el colonialismo, nacionalismo, militarismo e imperialismo son inseparables entre sí y emergieron de manera conjunta a fines del siglo XIX. Temas c...

Gutmann, M. “Gender Conventions” in The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City. By Matthew C. Gutmann. Pp. 1-10 Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Gutmann enfoca su trabajo etnográfico en los significados asociados a la masculinidad y la paternidad en ciudad de México. Uno de sus objetivos es cuestionar la premisa con que han operado hasta ahora los estudios etnográficos en asumir apriori una categoría homogénea del "hombre mexicano" que frecuentemente es caracterizado como macho-machista, violento, borracho y ausente de la crianza de los niños. De hecho, Gutmann está preocupado por la forma como las/os antropólogas/os han contribuido a fijar este estereotipo, haciendo notar que es imposible encontrar una identidad masculina unitaria debido a fracturas generacionales, de clase, región y etnicidad; y que los significados sobre qué significa "ser macho" han ido cambiando a través del tiempo. De hecho, a Gutmann le parece un poco problemático y raci...

Melhuus, M. & Kristi Ann Stølen. Machos, Mistresses, Madonnas. Contesting the Power of Latin American Gender Imagery. London: Verso, 1996. Este volumen es una recopilación de estudios de casos hechos por antropólogos en Argentina, México, Peru, Ecuador, República Dominicana y presentados en una conferencia en Suecia sobre el poder de los imaginarios de género en LA. Aspectos en común entre estos artículos: influencia de Bourdieu y Foucault, esfuerzo por complejizar de las relaciones de poder de género más allá de las categorías de opresor vs. víctima, uso de la nociones de discurso, imaginarios, hegemonía para explicar y comprender las relaciones de género y de raza. A partir de esta lectura, se desprenden algunas ideas importantes: a) Los discursos y representaciones sobre las diferencias de género sirven para articular diferencias de clase y etnia, por ejemplo, la representación de la sexualidad femenina (mujer decente vs fácil) sirve para vehiculizar diferencias de clase y raza ...