Gender’s Place: Feminist Anthropologies of Latin America

306 Pages·2002·30.529 MB·English

by  Rosario Montoya, Lessie Jo Frazier, Janise Hurtig (eds.)

Gender's Place

Gender's Place ~
Feminist Anthropologies of Latin America
Edited by
Rosario Montoya, Lessie ]o Frazier, and
]anise Hurtig
* Rosa Acle (b. 1916, Rio de janeiro, Brazil, d. 1990, Montevidoo, Uruguay)
studied with the Uruguayan painter Joaquin Torros-Garda (1874-1949) [the
School of the South] and became a member of the Asociaci6n de Arte
Constructivo which reproduced her works in its magazine "Circulo y Cuadrado."
Her first solo exposition was in the Montevideo "Amigos de Arte" (1939) after
which she traveled to Europe and Australia, remaining in Melbourne until
returning to Uruguay 1947. At the time of her death, she was preparing what
became her posthumous retrospective exposition in the Galeria Montevideo,
Uruguay. This painting, Norte, is an architectonic cultural mapping of the
Americas juxtaposing indigenist and modernist symbols to invert dominant
cartographies of power in the region.
GENDER'S PLACE
Copyright © Rosario Montoya, Lessie Jo Frazier, and janise Hurtig 2002
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced
in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the
case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published 2002 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS.
Companies and representatives throughout the world.
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the
Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin's Press, LLC and of Palgrave
Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the
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registered trademark in the European Union and other countries.
ISBN 978-I-4039-6040-5 ISBN 978-1-137-12227-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-12227-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gender's Place: feminist anthropologies of Latin America/edited by
Rosario Montoya, Lessie Jo Frazier, and Janise Hurtig.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Sex role-Latin America. 2. Women-Latin America-Social conditions.
3. Feminist anthropology-Latin America. 4. Feminist theory-Latin America.
l Montoya, Rosario, 1960-II. Frazier, Lessie Jo, 1966-lll. Hurtig, janise.
HQ107S.SL29 G462 2002
305.42'098-dc21 2002074 942
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: November, 2002
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Transferred to Digital Printing 2005
Contents~
Acknowledgements Vll
Preface: Gender Que Pica un Poco IX
Ruth Behar
Introduction: A Desalambrar: Unfencing Gender's Place
in Research on Latin America
]anise Hurtig, Rosario Montoya, Lessie Jo Frazier
1. Gendered Knowledge in Particular Places 19
1. Debating Women: Gendered Lessons in
a Venezuelan Classroom 21
]anise Hurtig
2. "To Act Like a Man": Masculinity, Resistance,
and Authority in the Ecuadorian Andes 45
Barry J Lyons
3. Women's Sexuality, Knowledge, and Agency
in Rural Nicaragua 65
Rosario Montoya
2. Gender's Place in Reproducing and Challenging
Institutions and Ideologies 89
4. Forging Democracy and Locality: Democratization,
Mental Health, and Reparations in Chile 91
Lessie Jo Frazier
5. "What the Strong Owe to the Weak":
Rationality, Domestic Violence, and Governmentality
in Nineteenth-Century Mexico 115
Ana Maria Alonso
vt Contents
6. Placing Gender and Ethnicity on the Bodies of
Indigenous Women and in the Work of Bolivian Intellectuals 135
Susan Paulson
7. The Racial-Moral Politics of Place: Mestizas
and Intellectuals in Turn-of-the-Century Peru 155
Marisol de Ia Cadena
3. Gender in Movement(s) 177
8. Engendering Leadership: Indigenous Women
Leaders in the Ecuadorian Andes 179
Emma Cervone (Translated by Emma Cervone and
Deborah Cohen)
9. Latinas on the Border: The Common Ground
of Economic Displacements and Breakthroughs 197
Victor M Ortiz
10. "Making a Scene": Travestis and the
Gendered Politics of Space in Porto Alegre, Brazil 217
Charles H Klein
11. By Night, a Street Rite: "Public"
Women of the Night on the Streets of Mexico City 237
Marta Lamas (Translated by Lessie ]o Frazier)
4. Critical Commentaries 255
12. Against Marianismo 257
Marysa Navarro
13. Understanding Gender in Latin America 273
Sonia Montesino (Translated by Deborah Cohen
and Lessie ]o Frazier)
14. Local/Global: A View from Geography 281
Altha J Cravey
Postscript: Gender in Place and Culture 289
June Nash
Notes on Contributors 297
Index 301
Acknowledgements
~
The editors would like to thank our Palgrave editQr, Kristi Long, who has
offered enthusiastic support and critical feedback for this project, patiently
guiding us through the publication process. For their insightful comments
on the entire manuscript, we would like to thank Susan Paulson and
Yvonne Reineke. We also thank Ileana Rodriguez for her creative and con
structive response to the Latin American Studies Association panel out of
which this volume grew, and for her ongoing encouragement. For feedback
on several of the papers, we are grateful to participants in the History/Latin
American Studies Gender Workshop, University of Illinois at Chicago,
directed by Mary Kay Vaughn (April1995). Partial funding for this project
was provided by the University of Michigan Institute for Research on
Women and Gender. This book could not have been completed without
the technical support in editing, translating, formatting, and indexing
we received from Tina Meltzer, Deborah Cohen, and Jodi Barns as well
as the editorial assistance from Sonia Wilson, Roee Raz, and Annje Kern at
Palgrave Macmillan. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the inspiration
Daniel Viglietti's music and especially his song "A Desalambrar" con
tributed to this work. We thank Daniel for graciously allowing us to repro
duce portions of the text in our introduction.

Preface~
Gender Que Pica un Poco
Ruth Behar
Now, at the dawn of our new century, it's difficult to imagine a time when
anthropologists didn't have the concept of gender. But it really wasn't all
that long ago that we traveled around the world, seeing gender everywhere
but not really seeing it because we didn't have a name for what we saw. Back
then, we didn't even know that the anthropologist, no less than the inform
ant, was also gendered!
How quickly things can change. How quickly intellectual self-awareness
can take root. These days an anthropological account that is totally oblivi
ous to gender is unthinkable. It would be possible to write a history of
anthropology based entirely on the rupture berween the anthropology that
was done before and after the concept of gender was adopted. Ever since
anthropologists acquired the concept of gender following the feminist
awakening of the 1970s, we have used it so widely and so rampantly that
we are close to reaching a kind of paradigm fatigue about gender. What
more can be said about this most basic and most necessary of analytical per
spectives? Is gender so self-evident to us at this point that we have, ironi
cally, come around full circle to our original blindness toward gender? Why
should we care about gender anymore?
The volume before us argues that gender still has a central place in our
research and writing, that we have not yet exhausted all of the possibilities
for thinking through gender in anthropology. Its singular contribution is its
eclectic willingness to combine symbolic and material approaches to gen
der, to see these rwo realms of human existence as interconnected. This vol
ume further argues that Latin America offers an especially exciting location
both for reflecting on the place of gender and for doing gender as a form
of critical practice. Seeing gender from the other side, from the vantage