Latin American Gender and Sexualities – serie

It has been argued that the first presidential campaign of Michelle Bachelet in Chile and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in Argentina used a rhetoric of newness. Some political observers have said that as the “first women” to successfully run for the highest office in these countries, they were presented as the new faces of democracy. These observers argued that gender was not a determining factor in their electoral success, but the focus on this “first women” frame did generate heavily gendered criticisms of these two candidates. Negotiating Gendered Discourses addresses these views by asking how the gender factor is negotiated when women from the Southern Cone of Latin America run for high political office. In particular, Jane L. Christie examines how Bachelet and Fernández positioned themselves in relation to the numerous women-led social movements, and in doing so, reveals points of intersection between these contemporary political discourses and existing sources of female authority when negotiating complicated ideological debates about human rights, the economy, and women’s rights.

Resistant Bodies in the Cultural Productions of Transnational Hispanic Caribbean Women: Reimagining Queer Identity examines the art created by several Caribbean women who use literature, film, graphic novels, music, testimonios, photographs, etc. to convey social justice, democracy, and new ways of re/imaging marginal identities. In using Chela Sandoval’s theories on methodologies of the oppressed, Irune del Rio Gabiola argues how the tactics Sandoval offers can be productively applied to the cultural productions analyzed. The author explores how the protagonists of all the cultural productions this book focuses on developing tactics to create new possibilities and alternatives for self-fashioning. Particularly, del Rio Gabiola reconsiders concepts such as shame, failure, unbecoming, hermeneutics of love or flexible bodies as methodologies of the oppressed that propose decolonizing emancipatory techniques in a transnational arena.

Unbecoming Female Monsters: Witches, Vampires, and Virgins is a multi-cultural and interdisciplinary work that traces the construct of female monsters as an embodiment of socio-cultural fears of female sexuality and reproductive powers. This book examines the female sexual maturation cycle and the various archetypes of female monsters associated with each stage of sexual development as seen in literature, art, film, television, and popular culture. Recommended for scholars of Latin American studies, literature, cultural studies, women and gender studies, popular culture, and film studies.

Unbecoming Female Monsters: Witches, Vampires, and Virgins is a multi-cultural and interdisciplinary work that traces the construct of female monsters as an embodiment of socio-cultural fears of female sexuality and reproductive powers. This book examines the female sexual maturation cycle and the various archetypes of female monsters associated with each stage of sexual development as seen in literature, art, film, television, and popular culture. Recommended for scholars of Latin American studies, literature, cultural studies, women and gender studies, popular culture, and film studies.

Writing Terror on the Bodies of Women: Media Coverage of Violence against Women in Guatemala analyzes the scope and dynamics of violence against women in Guatemala and how it is represented in the print media. Using nearly two thousand Guatemalan newspaper reports covering murders and assaults on women, this book contextualizes violence against women within the history of violence in Guatemala; gender ideologies and patriarchal social structures; and the contemporary demands of the women’s movement for social and legislative change. It shows that while some newspapers cover violence against women with investigative reports and editorials that use feminist analysis and language, these are overshadowed by the large number of individual reports that reproduce narratives of terror and conceal the gendered nature of violence against women by suggesting that “delinquents,” “gangs,” “unknown men,” and inexplicably violent husbands are the main culprits, while simultaneously upholding dichotomous gendered narratives of “good” and “bad” wives and daughters.

In this book based on the biographical accounts of upper-middle-class white men living in wealthy parts of Rio de Janeiro, Valeria Ribeiro Corossacz analyzes specific experiences of whiteness as they are produced at the intersection of multiple categories—in particular gender, class, and sexuality. White Middle-Class Men in Rio de Janeiro: The Making of a Dominant Subject investigates what it means to be classified as a white person and a man in a society that is known for its valorization of racial mixing and yet deeply structured by racism, class, and gender inequalities. By examining instances of silence and what is left unsaid as well as precise descriptions of power relations and violent episodes, this book encourages the reader to observe the condition of dominant subjects as a keystone of the reproduction of social discrimination.

Gender, Science, and Authority in Women’s Travel Writing: Literary Perspectives on the Discourse of Natural History analyzes the interrelations among authority, gender and the scientific discipline of natural history in the works of transatlantic women travelers from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Michelle Medeiros sheds new light on our understanding of the literary perspectives of the discourse of natural history and how these viewpoints had a surprising impact in areas that went beyond scientific fields. This book advances the study of travel writing and gender in new directions by bringing together Latin American, European, and American women travelers who actively engaged in natural history discussions in their writings. By demonstrating how these women were only able to participate in intellectual enterprises by embarking on transatlantic voyages, this book discloses how the work produced by these travelers challenged and reshaped dominant discourses, bringing a new point of view to nineteenth and twentieth-centuries studies in Latin American history, literature, cultural studies, and history of science. Moreover, this book analyzes to what extent the approaches employed by female travel writers who wanted to engage in the production of knowledge has evolved in that time period, and to what degree such changes could be considered positive and more productive.