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>> 187 8 World History Meets History of Masculinity in Latin American Studies1 Ulrike Strasser and Heidi Tinsman World History & Masculinity in Latin American Studies A transnational turn is certainly afoot in the discipline of history. While world history as a field is hardly new, it has usually played second-fiddle to the histories of particular nation-states and the regions carved out by area studies. But recently almost every national history field and regional field has recognized the need for a gaze that looks across hallowed borders and oceans with fresh eyes.2 As the forces of globalization have simultaneously produced an astonishing degree of connection and an acute deepening of socioeconomic and political divisions, globalization’s casualties and challenges command urgent attention. Even historians, forever leery of the analytical sin of presentism, have felt compelled to enter en masse the debate about globalization and its discontents. Given how much scholarly discussion on the subject has been generated disproportionately within other fields and often without a nuanced historical sensibility, this is a welcome intervention indeed. But while historians as a group are only beginning to enter the fray, individual historians and various subfields of course are anything but new to discussions of inequality between peoples and uneven developments on a transregional or even global scale. This chapter concerns itself primarily with two particularly vibrant approaches: world history and historical studies of masculinity. Both have been profoundly committed to exploring issues of domination and difference, and they each have developed vital critical vocabulary for narrating their complex histories. At first glance, that would make the two fields seem like natural allies, or at least easy interlocutors, at this moment in time and in the profession’s history. But to the contrary, and somewhat paradoxically, there has been a vexed relationship between world historians and historians of masculinity (and of gender and sexuality more broadly). They have largely remained segregated in their own institutional and intellectual spaces, conferences, and journals. From there they have eyed one another with some degree of skepticism and occasionally outright suspicion. Even when their thematics do overlap, historians of gender and 188 > 189 commitment to challenging universal claims. For decades, its practitioners have been fine-tuning their critical tools to interrogate narratives that presumed to include all yet elided thorny issues of power, exclusion, and difference . Moving from 1970s social history and Marxist theory to cultural and literary analysis in the wake of the linguistic turn, historians of gender and sexuality have striven to produce ever more nuanced accounts of the dynamics of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity at the heart of all historical phenomena.6 There is no question that this scholarly emphasis has rendered what seemed like familiar stories of, say, state formation, industrialization, or nationalism newly complicated, and in so doing has deepened our understanding of these broader historical processes.7 But the focus on difference and the distrust of false universalisms has also made historians of gender and sexuality habitually suspicious of meganarratives of any kind. World history is without a doubt a new meganarrative—surely the most ambitious thus far proposed. It raises the specter of a pernicious iteration of universal history, particularly since world historians often rely on 1970s social theory—with its sweeping and purportedly universal narratives of how societies and social life have evolved and continue to evolve—that historians of gender and sexuality spent so much time deconstructing. Meanwhile, a growing number of scholars of gender and sexuality have in recent years themselves embarked on studies that look across different regions and areas of the world.8 This has implied abandoning the traditional framework of the nation, which the rich literature on gender and nationalism had already denaturalized from within but simultaneously and ironically also propped up as a privileged unit of analysis. While these scholars do look globally instead of nationally, however, they perform their work not under the sign of “world history” but of “transnational dynamics” (usually concrete instances of global interaction). Focused overwhelmingly on the twentieth century (especially the last half), this scholarship is more immediately attuned to postcolonialism and postmodernism, and from this vantage point is rather wary of the world history paradigm as mired in irredeemable Eurocentrism. Fears that world history is little more than a ruse to reassert the West’s myths about itself as the sole bearer of civilization and economic freedom loom large here, if sometimes in exaggerated and unfounded forms. Indeed, much of the new scholarship in world history...

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