Gender Politics in Latin America: Debates in Theory and Practice

Edited by Elizabeth Dore

This collection offers the best scholarly work emerging at the intersection of gender theory and Latin American studies. The essays analyze the gendered politics of state power, language, culture, history, social movements, human rights, and knowledge. Outstanding scholars and activists map the debates that have broken new and fertile ground in Latin American gender studies, criticizing short-comings and speculating on future directions. In their examination of everyday struggles over gender politics, the contributors illustrate the link between political action and conceptual debates. Innovative and challenging, this book will generate discussion in a wide range of fields.

Contents

• Introduction: Controversies in Gender Politics, by ELIZABETH DORE
• Women, Work, and Empowerment: Romanticizing the Reality, by SHARON McCLENAGHAN
• Nicaraguan Women: Legal, Political, and Social Spaces, by ANNA FERNANDEZ PONCELA
• Public and Private Spheres: the End of Dichotomy, by TESSA CUBITT AND HELEN GREENSLADE
• Engendering Human Rights, by ELIZABETH JELIN
• “Desde La Protesta a La Propuesta”:The Institutionalization of the Women’s Movement in Chile, by ANN MATEAR
• The Holy Family: Imagined Households in Latin American History, by ELIZABETH DORE
• The Charm of Family Patterns: Historical and Contemporary Change in Latin America, by RICARDO CICERCHIA
• Sex/Gender Arrangements and the Reproduction of Class in the Latin American Past, by MURIEL NAZZARI
• Reading Gender in History, by CARMEN RAMOS ESCANDON
• Problems of Definition in Theorizing Latin American Women’s Writing, by DEBORAH SHAW
• The Subversive Languages of Carmen Oll?: Irony and Imagination, by WILLIAM ROWE
• From the Margins to the Center: Recent Trends in Feminist Theory in the United States and Latin America, by JEAN FRANCO
• Gender Politics: Luisa Valenzuela’s “Cola De Lagartija”, by CLAUDINE POTVIN
• Conclusion: Post Binary Bliss: a New Materialist Synthesis?, by NANNEKE REDCLIFT

Elizabeth Dore is senior lecturer in Latin American history at the University of Portsmouth, UK. She is author of The Peruvian Mining Industry: Growth, Stagnation, and Crisis (1988) and co-editor of Historical Perspectives on Gender and the State in Latin America.