Gender And Sexuality In Latin America

This book emphasizes the significance of affects, feelings and emotions in how we think about politics, gender and sexuality in Latin America. Considering the complex and even contradictory social processes that the region is experiencing today, many Latin American authors are turning to affect to find a key to understand our present situation, to revisit our history, and to imagine new possibilities for the future. This tendency has shown such a specificity and sometimes departure from northern productions that it compels us to focus more deeply on its own arguments, methods, and critical contributions. This volume features essays that explore the particularities of Latin American ways of thinking about affect and how they can shed new light into our understanding of, gender, sexuality and politics.

Organized around three central themes - control and repression; the politics and culture of resistance; and sexual transgression as affirmation of marginalized identity - this intriguing collection will challenge and inform conceptions of Latin American sexuality.

Integrates gender and sexuality into the main currents of historical interpretation concerning Latin America.

Despite the explosion of critical writing on gender and sexuality, relatively little work has focused on Latin America. Sex and Sexuality in Latin America: An Interdisciplinary Readerfills in this gap. Daniel Balderston and Donna J. Guy assert that the study of sexuality in Latin America requires a break with the dominant Anglo-European model of gender. To this end, the essays in the collection focus on the uncertain and contingent nature of sexual identity. Organized around three central themes--control and repression; the politics and culture of resistance; and sexual transgression as affirmation of marginalized identities--this intriguing collection will challenge and inform conceptions of Latin American gender and sexuality. Covering topics ranging from transvestism to the world of tango, and countries as diverse as Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, this volume takes an accessible, dynamic, and interdisciplinary approach to a highly theoretical topic. "Opens up new conceptual horizons for exploring gender and sexuality. . . . In stimulating readers to think 'outside the box' of established academic notions of sexuality and gender, Sex and Sexuality in Latin America illustrates the sometimes mind-boggling mission of iconoclastic scholarship. The well-written essays are thought-provoking analyses on the cutting edge of gender scholarship." —Latin American Research Review, vol. 36, no. 3, 2001

Translated and updated from the seminal Spanish text on legal decisions affecting gender and sexuality in Latin America, this English edition is the only law text to focus specifically on the rights of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and the transgender population in addition to women’s rights more broadly. The volume provides close analysis of some of the most important decisions made by Latin American national courts, as well as those made by international legal bodies, that affect the rights and interests of these groups. Specially selected for their depth of argument and value as exemplars, the studies of good legal practice chart the path of the region’s normative values of justice as they have evolved away from a partial, and patriarchal, exercise of the law. They show how cases with vastly differing contexts such as, property rights and domestic violence have resulted in a mixed body of Latin American law. Some decisions are protective of women’s and minority rights. Some assess the wider social impacts of case law in which recognition of the discrete legal identities within households challenges established precepts, including religious ones. Other cases have been chosen as cautionary examples of bad decision-making and for the poverty of their legal debate. Updated to include the latest relevant jurisprudence from across the continent, this book is an informed, cohesive and comprehensive guide to understanding women’s and gender-based rights in Latin America.​

Insurgent Skin: Body, Gender, and Sexuality in Latin American Cinema argues that twenty-first century Latin American cinema about lesbian, feminist, intersex, and transgender themes is revolutionary because it disrupts heteronormative and binary representation and explores new, queer signifying modes. Grounded in feminist and queer theory, Insurgent Skin conjugates film phenomenology and theories of affect and embodiment to analyze a spectrum of Latin American films. The first chapters explore queer signifying in Argentinean director Lucrecia Martel’s Salta trilogy and the lesbian utopia of Albertina Carri’s Las hijas del fuego (2018). Next, the book discusses the female body as uncanny absence in Tatiana Huezo’s documentary Tempestad (2016), a film about gendered violence in Mexico. Chapter Five focuses on intersex films and the establishing of queer solidarity and an intersex gaze. The last chapter examines transgender embodiment in the Chilean film Una mujer fantástica (2017) and Brazilian documentary Bixa Travesty (2018).

A comprehensive state-of-the-art review of gender in one of the world's most diverse and dynamic regions. The authors draw on a wide range of sources, including their own field research, to explore changes and continuities in gender roles, relations and identities during the late twentieth century into the twenty-first. Debunking traditional universalizing stereotypes, diversity in gender is highlighted in relation to the cross-cutting influences of age, class, sexuality, ethnicity, rural-urban residence, and migrant status.

The city of Buenos Aires has guaranteed all couples, regardless of gender, the right to register civil unions. Mexico City has approved the Cohabitation Law, which grants same-sex couples marital rights identical to those of common-law relationships between men and women. Yet, a gay man was murdered every two days in Latin America in 2005, and Brazil recently led the world in homophobic murders. These facts illustrate the wide disparity in the treatment and rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) populations across the region. The Politics of Sexuality in Latin America presents the first English-language reader on LGBT politics in Latin America. Representing a range of contemporary works by scholars, activists, analysts, and politicians, the chapters address LGBT issues in nations from Cuba to Argentina. In their many findings, two main themes emerge: the struggle for LGBT rights has made significant inroads in the first decade of the twenty-first century (though not in every domain or every region); and the advances made were slow in coming compared to other social movements. The articles uncover the many obstacles that LGBT activists face in establishing new laws and breaking down societal barriers. They identify perhaps the greatest roadblock in Latin American culture as an omnipresent system of "heteronormativity," wherein heterosexuality, patriarchalism, gender hierarchies, and economic structures are deeply rooted in nearly every level of society. Along these lines, the texts explore specific impediments, including family dependence, lack of public spaces, job opportunities, religious dictums, personal security, the complicated relationship between leftist political parties and LGBT movements in the region, and the ever-present "closets," which keep LGBT issues out of the public eye. The volume also looks to the future of LGBT activism in Latin America in areas such as globalization, changing demographics, the role of NGOs, and the rise of economic levels and education across societies, which may aid in a greater awareness of LGBT politics and issues. As the editors posit, to be democratic in the truest sense of the word, nations must recognize and address all segments of their populations.

With this special issue, the Hispanic American Historical Review explores the vital work in gender and sexuality by leading historians of Latin America. This collection offers readers a look at the current state of gender and sexuality studies--areas of enormous growth and excitement in Latin American scholarship--as well as the dynamic potential of the discipline's future. Sueann Caulfield, one of the most distinguished scholars of Latin American gender studies, leads off with an insightful historiographical analysis of the field. Building on the foundation laid by Caulfield, a forum of four younger scholars--Heidi Tinsman, Karin Rosemblatt, Elizabeth Hutchinson, and Thomas Klubock--examines the construction of gender and power in a variety of politically contested arenas, including agrarian reform, welfarism, and leftist activism. Focusing on twentieth-century Chile, the collection also includes essays by Pablo Piccato and Christina Rivera that analyze gender dynamics, class relations, and sexual violence in the context of the medical-legal state that emerged in early-twentieth-century Mexico. The issue concludes with Martin Nesvig's essay, which negotiates the complex terrain of Latin American homosexuality and bisexuality. This special issue will be a valuable resource for anyone teaching women's history, gender history, the history of sexuality, or any course on Latin American history with a focus on gender and sexuality. Contributors. Sueann Caulfield, Elizabeth Quay Hutchison, Gilbert M. Joseph, Thomas J. Klubock, Martin Nesvig, Pablo Piccato, Cristina Rivera Garza, Karin Rosemblatt, Heidi Tinsman

Seeking Rights from the Left offers a unique comparative assessment of left-leaning Latin American governments by examining their engagement with feminist, women's, and LGBT movements and issues. Focusing on the “Pink Tide” in eight national cases—Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Venezuela—the contributors evaluate how the Left addressed gender- and sexuality-based rights through the state. Most of these governments improved the basic conditions of poor women and their families. Many significantly advanced women's representation in national legislatures. Some legalized same-sex relationships and enabled their citizens to claim their own gender identity. They also opened opportunities for feminist and LGBT movements to press forward their demands. But at the same time, these governments have largely relied on heteropatriarchal relations of power, ignoring or rejecting the more challenging elements of a social agenda and engaging in strategic trade-offs among gender and sexual rights. Moreover, the comparative examination of such rights arenas reveals that the Left's more general political and economic projects have been profoundly, if at times unintentionally, informed by traditional understandings of gender and sexuality. Contributors: Sonia E. Alvarez, María Constanza Diaz, Rachel Elfenbein, Elisabeth Jay Friedman, Niki Johnson, Victoria Keller, Edurne Larracoechea Bohigas, Amy Lind, Marlise Matos, Shawnna Mullenax, Ana Laura Rodríguez Gustá, Diego Sempol, Constanza Tabbush, Gwynn Thomas, Catalina Trebisacce, Annie Wilkinson