A Historiographical Revolution in Our Time

With this double issue we complete the third of HAHR's five-year tenure at Yale. One of our editorial team's initiatives has been to devote one special issue a year to provocative themes and new theoretical and methodological approaches. Each of these issues provides a forum for the dissemination of important work by established scholars and younger historians alike. Previous special issues have explored the significance of the so-called Spanish-American War of 1898 on the occasion of its centenary (1998), debated the importance of cultural studies approaches to Mexico's "new cultural history" (1999), and unveiled new research on the complex encounter set in motion by the Portuguese "discovery" of Brazil five hundred years ago (2000). During the final year of our editorship (2002), we plan to examine new approaches to the study of race and slavery in Latin America.

In the current issue, we explore a critical approach whose rapid development over the past two decades has revolutionized our field like no other: gender analysis. In her keynote essay, Sueann Caulfield reveals how far we've come: in the early 1970s, Latin American women's studies was an underdeveloped and rather isolated field, with little coherence and few practitioners, especially among historians. Thirty years later, the shift to an analysis of gender rather than of women, especially among scholars based in North America, has broadened the field to such an extent that it is no mean feat merely to take stock of the gains. The relational nature of gender as a concept implies an examination of men as well as women, raises important questions about the relationship between material and discursive dimensions of power, and about how gender articulates with other social categories such as class, race, ethnicity, and generation. In the process, gender analysis not only invites us to bring new questions to our data and explore new or woefully understudied problems (for example, homosexuality, bisexuality, and transsexuality) but also compels us to rewrite the history of more commonly studied issues and institutions (for example, the history of pervasive social concepts such as honor and shame; of labor, working-class protests, and social movements; crime and deviance; state formation and social reform; science and medicine). Caulfield writes, "Historians are asking quite a bit of gender: big questions such as how republican citizenship was constructed; how socialist or capitalist states achieve hegemony; why local communities respond to the call to war." It is not for nothing that we decided that gender and sexuality merited a double issue!

It is a testament to the vitality of this new body of work that we had no shortage of worthy candidates for this special issue. With the exception of the synthetic, framing pieces by Sueann Caulfield and Thomas Miller Klubock, all of the other essays came to us via the normal process of submission. Indeed, our editorial tenure has witnessed a marked increase in submissions on gender- and sexuality-related themes as well studies which, while not explicitly concerned with these issues, integrate gender analysis into their conceptual frameworks. Over the course of the last decade and a half, gender and sexuality have moved from the periphery to the center of our field's concerns, and this volume testifies to the increasingly sophisticated, interdisciplinary, and comparatively informed manner in which they have been studied.

The issue leads off with Caulfield's comprehensive essay on the history of gender in Latin American historiography. While she is not one of the field's pioneers, the fact that Caulfield is a "second generation" scholar, who finished her graduate work in modern Brazilian history in the 1990s, when the field experienced a veritable quantum leap, affords her a privileged position to comment on both the field's evolution and dynamic potential. Although this volume emphasizes writing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America, Caulfield's contribution (like Nesvig's closing essay) also surveys the burgeoning literature on the colonial period.

Building on the...