Gender, Sexuality, and Power in Latin America since Independence (review)

In the Introduction to Gender, Sexuality, and Power in Latin America Since Independence, editors William E. French and Katherine Elaine Bliss establish three main goals: Present cutting-edge research, demonstrate the many ways gender and sexuality have been "centrally implicated in the workings of power in Latin America," and engage in current interdisciplinary conversations in the field (4–5). They have achieved these goals and much more. Their outstanding twenty-five-page introduction explains in clear and comprehensible prose the difficult concepts (of theorists such as Joan Scott, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler) employed by contributors and the state of research in the field. It will serve as an invaluable tool for those of us who teach courses on Latin America.

Based on the work of Joan Scott that "everything is gendered" and that femininity and masculinity are not only "socially constructed and historically contingent" (2) but also mutually constructed as opposites, the volume's eleven chapters do a magnificent job of destabilizing binaries. Encompassing ten different countries and almost two hundred years of history, the authors approach the central focus, the relationship between gender, sexuality, and power, from a diversity of perspectives and methodologies. Examining the case of Vicenta Ochoa, a pregnant woman accused of murder in nineteenth century Venezuela, Arlene Díaz explores how, sitting in jail and expecting another child, Ochoa used her upcoming motherhood as a strategy to avoid execution. At the same time, Díaz reveals the double bind of strategic essentialism: While it can open up new spaces for women to intervene in political debates, it simultaneously furthers the male agenda by reinforcing the gender ideology of female domesticity. This continues to be a sticky issue for Latin Americans today, especially for women who enter or participate in politics based on their "nurturing" skills, such as Eva Perón or Violeta Barrios de Chamorro.

Lara Putnam's chapter brilliantly lays out the unequivocal relationship between gender, sexuality, and power in a Central American export economy. Surveying women's varied roles in the banana economy, she takes on the supposedly neutral concept of the enclave. Twenty thousand Jamaican workers, Chinese and Lebanese storekeepers, East Indian vegetable growers, and immigrants from highland Costa Rica created a dynamic labor market in Puerto Limón in the early twentieth century. Midwife Miss Mariah Gordon, Colombian storekeeper Amelia Esquivel, and other examples culled from judicial archives document women as an integral part of this early transnational society. Putnam's analysis deftly integrates class, race, sex, ethnicity, masculinity, and power as she describes the sad plight of young indigenous girls subject to rampant sexual abuse. Combining the analysis of "the role of service and succor within a particular economy—to place the reproductive work traditionally done by women alongside the productive work that both men and women have long done" (154), she demonstrates how the integration of gender and sexuality demands that we rethink basic concepts such as labor migration and the relations between enclaves and regional economies.

The chapters that focus on masculinity and the mutual construction of masculinity and femininity disrupt dualistic models by documenting the fluidity of sexuality and gender. Erica Windler presents a fascinating study of the cross-dressing "man-woman," Madame Durocher, a midwife who published in medical journals and who, in 1861, was the first woman to be inducted into the Brazilian Academy of Medicine. "Blending qualities" of opposite categories such as "traditional/modern, male/female, and foreign/native" (59), the French-born Durocher affords a marvelous example of gender and sexuality as fluid and performative. Pablo Piccato's study of Belem prison in Mexico City in the early twentieth century describes a wide spectrum of sexual activities and identities. For men, given the pervasive reality of same-sex relations, life in prison became "a constant defense of masculinity" (101) which resulted in frequent violence. Piccato argues that, for both men...