Teaching Gender Through Latin American, Latino, And Iberian Texts And Cultures eds. by Leila Gómez etal, and: Ser mujer y estar presente: disidencias de género en la literatura mexicana contemporánea by Oswaldo Estrada (review)

Teaching Gender Through Latin American, Latino, And Iberian Texts And Cultures, published in the “Teaching Gender Series” of Sense Publishers, brings together a vibrant collection of essays on approaches and experiences of teaching gender across a wide spectrum of classroom settings. The richness of this volume lies in the broad spectrum of voices and experiences collected, from teachers early in their careers to those with decades of experience, from public universities and private colleges, from classes in medieval literatures and culture to courses on teaching gender for the multicultural workplace and student experiences performing gender in the classroom and on the stage. Editor Leila Gómez posits the question of how we, as teachers, “reestablish the links between the ideals of feminism and feminist (and gender) discourse and praxis in our classrooms” (2). The volume’s contributors have taken up that challenge in frank, reflective, and ethically engaged ways.

Sara Castro-Klarén’s “Mobilizing Meanings: Questions for a Pedagogy of Women’s Writing,” starts the text, in a section entitled “Feminism in the Aftermath in Latin American, Iberian and Latino Studies,” in which she argues that in our discipline, as well as in our classrooms, we must “problematize the temporal line that continues to posit ‘Latin American Culture’ with an ‘origin’ in Medieval Spain” (7). Her arguments towards disposing of this fallacious “origin” are an appropriate opening to a volume that addresses the teaching of Latin American, Latino and Iberian texts and cultures in classrooms tied together by the particular assumptions of the North American academy, based on “presumptions of kinship due to the common use of Castilian” but including such vastly differing cultures and languages, as Quechua, Aymara, Guaraní, Galician, Catalan, Basque, Zapotec, and more. Castro-Klarén argues an acknowledgement of feminisms in the plural, which then requires a careful and considered theorizing of the question of positionality (30), at the same time that she points to the frequent absence of Latin American voices in feminist texts (26).

Indeed, some of the most interesting contributions to the volume are those most marked by their own positionality. Ellen Mayock rightly points out that how “we teach the gender question in our colleges and universities is heavily influenced by geographic region, institutional history, pre-existing curricula, and the intellectual interests of departments, students, and professors” (84). Her personal story from an experience in her second year of teaching at a small, southern, liberal arts institution in rural Virginia is as specific to that site as are Amanda Petersen’s experiences living and teaching gendered Mexican cultural icons in a “border classroom” at a private, Catholic institution just 25 miles from the Mexico-US border or Debra Castillo’s varied experiences with student performances of the same play in different locales. The various stories, pedagogical strategies, reading lists and even syllabi shared in the volume offer both a wealth of examples and a sense of camaraderie to other scholars teaching in this field. The volume is a valuable contribution to feminist pedagogy, a book to read, to share and to discuss with colleagues and students not only in Latin American, Latino and Iberian studies but throughout the humanities and social sciences at the post-secondary level.

Ser mujer y estar presente is an ambitious book, taking on a long list of Mexican women writers, with separate chapters on Nellie Campobello, Rosario Castellanos, Elena Poniatowska, Carmen Boullosa, Mónica Lavín, Margo Glantz, Rosa Beltrán, Cristina Rivera Garza and Guadalupe Nettel. Oswaldo Estrada argues that what unites these authors is not the...