Re-Locating Gender in Latin America. A Review Essay

Extract

What role do specific geographic, political, and historical contexts play in how gendered identities and practices are mobilized to negotiate larger structures of inequality? Through innovative efforts to come to terms with the very contingent and situated nature of gender formation, four recent books reconfirm the important contributions of gender studies of Latin America to feminist studies in general. These texts apply unique methods of analysis to investigate gender's production in specific places and moments, thus producing new insights into how gender is articulated within particular translocal configurations of power. In particular, these texts ask: How does biography inform social activism against global neoliberal economic adjustments? How do discourses on sex provide the foundation for gendered forms of modern national culture and social control? How do local production strategies engender neoliberal labor in new ways? Through questions like these, the texts push us to consider gender not as a ubiquitous concept that can be taken for granted, but rather as a varied and relational process grounded in distinct material and historical conditions.