Sex, Skulls, and Citizens: Gender and Racial Science in Argentina (1860-1910) by Ashley Elizabeth Kerr (review)

I will begin this review of Sex, Skulls, and Citizens as I might normally end one, by stating who some of its potential readers are. I do so because it doubles as a disclosure and underscores how this book constitutes an important contribution to literary studies, visual culture, and the history of science in late nineteenth-century Latin America. Having seen Dr. Kerr present a portion of her then in-progress manuscript at a conference a few years ago, last fall I invited her to my undergraduate seminar on Latin American modernity and visual culture. She gave a lecture on photographs of displaced Tehuelches that Francisco "Perito" Moreno commissioned in the 1880s. These images are the object of study in "Displaying Gender: Indigenous Peoples in the Museo de la Plata," which is the third of the five main chapters of Sex, Skulls, and Citizens. It constitutes, in my mind, the centerpiece of a work that examines a corpus consisting mainly of fiction and anthropological writing, one that underscores the centrality and erasure of gender and sex (especially mestizaje) in the scientific discourses that underpinned the convulsive and often violent modernization of Argentina leading up to the 1910 centennial of independence. For my third- and fourth-year students, who had been studying fin de siglo museums and exhibitions, "Displaying Gender" was not only accessible, but a revelation, as its deft analysis of primary sources make apparent what Jacques Rancière calls an "obtuse reality, impeding meaning and history" (The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott, Verso, 2007, p. 12). In other words, at the same time that photography arranges Indigenous bodies in an enactment of state power, it also registers contradictions in official history. Among these, we glimpse—if partially—forms of agency that resist or defy the scientists' gaze.

The other four chapters of Sex, Skulls, and Citizens focus on writing, but, like the analysis of photography, their close readings similarly reveal the strong, if suppressed, presence of women in the interactions in the contact zone known as the desierto. Its first chapter, "Inappropriate Relations: Indigenous Private Lives as a Matter of Public Concern," examines the questions of Indigenous masculinity and family life through the texts of four writers who will reappear in later sections of the book: Lucio Mansilla, Ramón Lista, Francisco Moreno, and Estanislao Zeballos. Kerr is careful to note their varying attitudes with regards to these themes, but she demonstrates that the ostensibly scientific texts seeking to regulate sexual behaviors are, on some level, autobiographical works that attempt to legitimize their own fledgling authority. The omissions and blind-spots of this self-writing becomes the primary focus of the following chapter, "Sex and Specimen: Desiring Indigenous Bodies." Focusing here on Ramón Lista's scandalous relationship with a Tehuelche during his tenure as governor of the Santa Cruz province and Mansilla's accounts of his flirtations in Una excursión a los indios ranqueles, Kerr notes that the ambivalent desire for Indigenous women operates in these texts—and the broader culture discourse they inform—as synecdoche for the conquest of the desierto at large. While these texts are structured as the back-and-forth voyages of white, urban men, directed to their peers, they nonetheless signal the roles of Indigenous women in shaping frontier relations (both personal and political). This question of agency, implied in written accounts, becomes more apparent in the third chapter, as mentioned above. Chapter four, "Degenerates or New Beginnings: Theorizing Racial Mixture in Fiction," shifts from anthropology to literature, including novels by Zeballos and epic poems by Eduardo Holmberg and Juan Zorrilla de San Martín. These narrative works concern the colonial past and grapple with the question of national foundations in an allegorical mode, consistent with Doris Sommer's well-known argument. The final chapter, "Defiant Captives and Warrior Queens," interrogates Eduarda Mansilla's 1860 novel Lucía Miranda and two children's novels about Patagonia, penned by the...