Gender's Place

Gender's Place ~

Feminist Anthropologies of Latin America

Edited by Rosario Montoya, Lessie ]o Frazier, and ]anise Hurtig

* Rosa Acle (b. 1916, Rio de janeiro, Brazil, d. 1990, Montevidoo, Uruguay) studied with the Uruguayan painter Joaquin Torros-Garda (1874-1949) [the School of the South] and became a member of the Asociaci6n de Arte Constructivo which reproduced her works in its magazine "Circulo y Cuadrado." Her first solo exposition was in the Montevideo "Amigos de Arte" (1939) after which she traveled to Europe and Australia, remaining in Melbourne until returning to Uruguay 1947. At the time of her death, she was preparing what became her posthumous retrospective exposition in the Galeria Montevideo, Uruguay. This painting, Norte, is an architectonic cultural mapping of the Americas juxtaposing indigenist and modernist symbols to invert dominant cartographies of power in the region.

GENDER'S PLACE Copyright © Rosario Montoya, Lessie Jo Frazier, and janise Hurtig 2002

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

First published 2002 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world.

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin's Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-4039-6040-5 ISBN 978-1-137-12227-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-12227-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gender's Place: feminist anthropologies of Latin America/edited by Rosario Montoya, Lessie Jo Frazier, and Janise Hurtig.

p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Sex role-Latin America. 2. Women-Latin America-Social conditions. 3. Feminist anthropology-Latin America. 4. Feminist theory-Latin America. l Montoya, Rosario, 1960- II. Frazier, Lessie Jo, 1966-lll. Hurtig, janise.

HQ107S.SL29 G462 2002 305.42'098-dc21 200207 4942

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.

First edition: November, 2002 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Transferred to Digital Printing 2005

Contents~

Acknowledgements

Preface: Gender Que Pica un Poco Ruth Behar

Introduction: A Desalambrar: Unfencing Gender's Place in Research on Latin America ]anise Hurtig, Rosario Montoya, Lessie Jo Frazier

1. Gendered Knowledge in Particular Places

1. Debating Women: Gendered Lessons in a Venezuelan Classroom ]anise Hurtig

2. "To Act Like a Man": Masculinity, Resistance, and Authority in the Ecuadorian Andes Barry J Lyons

3. Women's Sexuality, Knowledge, and Agency in Rural Nicaragua Rosario Montoya

2. Gender's Place in Reproducing and Challenging Institutions and Ideologies

4. Forging Democracy and Locality: Democratization, Mental Health, and Reparations in Chile Lessie Jo Frazier

5. "What the Strong Owe to the Weak": Rationality, Domestic Violence, and Governmentality in Nineteenth-Century Mexico Ana Maria Alonso

Vll

IX

19

21

45

65

89

91

115

vt Contents

6. Placing Gender and Ethnicity on the Bodies of Indigenous Women and in the Work of Bolivian Intellectuals 135 Susan Paulson

7. The Racial-Moral Politics of Place: Mestizas and Intellectuals in Turn-of-the-Century Peru Marisol de Ia Cadena

3. Gender in Movement(s)

8. Engendering Leadership: Indigenous Women Leaders in the Ecuadorian Andes Emma Cervone (Translated by Emma Cervone and Deborah Cohen)

9. Latinas on the Border: The Common Ground of Economic Displacements and Breakthroughs Victor M Ortiz

10. "Making a Scene": Travestis and the Gendered Politics of Space in Porto Alegre, Brazil Charles H Klein

11. By Night, a Street Rite: "Public" Women of the Night on the Streets of Mexico City Marta Lamas (Translated by Lessie ]o Frazier)

4. Critical Commentaries

12. Against Marianismo Marysa Navarro

13. Understanding Gender in Latin America Sonia Montesino (Translated by Deborah Cohen and Lessie ]o Frazier)

14. Local/Global: A View from Geography Altha J Cravey

Postscript: Gender in Place and Culture June Nash

Notes on Contributors

Index

155

177

179

197

217

237

255

257

273

281

289

297

301

Acknowledgements ~

The editors would like to thank our Palgrave editQr, Kristi Long, who has offered enthusiastic support and critical feedback for this project, patiently guiding us through the publication process. For their insightful comments on the entire manuscript, we would like to thank Susan Paulson and Yvonne Reineke. We also thank Ileana Rodriguez for her creative and con­structive response to the Latin American Studies Association panel out of which this volume grew, and for her ongoing encouragement. For feedback on several of the papers, we are grateful to participants in the History/Latin American Studies Gender Workshop, University of Illinois at Chicago, directed by Mary Kay Vaughn (April1995). Partial funding for this project was provided by the University of Michigan Institute for Research on Women and Gender. This book could not have been completed without the technical support in editing, translating, formatting, and indexing we received from Tina Meltzer, Deborah Cohen, and Jodi Barns as well as the editorial assistance from Sonia Wilson, Roee Raz, and Annje Kern at Palgrave Macmillan. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the inspiration Daniel Viglietti's music and especially his song "A Desalambrar" con­tributed to this work. We thank Daniel for graciously allowing us to repro­duce portions of the text in our introduction.

Preface~

Gender Que Pica un Poco

Ruth Behar

Now, at the dawn of our new century, it's difficult to imagine a time when anthropologists didn't have the concept of gender. But it really wasn't all that long ago that we traveled around the world, seeing gender everywhere but not really seeing it because we didn't have a name for what we saw. Back then, we didn't even know that the anthropologist, no less than the inform­ant, was also gendered!

How quickly things can change. How quickly intellectual self-awareness can take root. These days an anthropological account that is totally oblivi­ous to gender is unthinkable. It would be possible to write a history of anthropology based entirely on the rupture berween the anthropology that was done before and after the concept of gender was adopted. Ever since anthropologists acquired the concept of gender following the feminist awakening of the 1970s, we have used it so widely and so rampantly that we are close to reaching a kind of paradigm fatigue about gender. What more can be said about this most basic and most necessary of analytical per­spectives? Is gender so self-evident to us at this point that we have, ironi­cally, come around full circle to our original blindness toward gender? Why should we care about gender anymore?

The volume before us argues that gender still has a central place in our research and writing, that we have not yet exhausted all of the possibilities for thinking through gender in anthropology. Its singular contribution is its eclectic willingness to combine symbolic and material approaches to gen­der, to see these rwo realms of human existence as interconnected. This vol­ume further argues that Latin America offers an especially exciting location both for reflecting on the place of gender and for doing gender as a form of critical practice. Seeing gender from the other side, from the vantage

x Preface

point of the "other America," is crucial, both because it challenges conven­tional and universalist assumptions about gender developed in Anglo­American scholarship and because the "other America" has been badly served by reductionistic views of how gender operates there.

After reading Gender's Place, you can say goodbye to "Marianismo" for­ever, with its image of the passive and subjugated Latin American woman whose agency is limited to the veneration of the Virgin Mary. You can also say goodbye, once and for all, to a host of other facile stereotypes about the place of gender across the border. In this volume, gender is never bland. Siempre pica un poco. Be careful. Gender's got spice here. And the reason is that gender matters in Latin America. It matters deeply, and the diverse group of observers of everyday gender relations included in this volume, who take us on a breathless journey from Venezuela to Ecuador to Nicaragua to Chile to Mexico to Peru to Bolivia to Brazil to the open wound of the U.S.-Mexico border, show us why and how in ways that are fresh and compelling. This relocation of gender happens in tandem with the placing of previously unseen and unheard protagonists on the stage of ethnography, protagonists who include rural Nicaraguan women, Andean women leaders, and Mexican "women of the night," as well as men strug­gling with the inherited notions of manhood, whether in the Ecuadorian Andes or the urban spaces occupied by Brazilian travestis. Ultimately, the various contributors to Gender's Place are working to desalambrar, to remove the fences around our preconceived notions of gender in Latin America, in hopes of revealing fresh possibilities for gendered interpreta­tions of social reality that will reinvigorate feminist ethnography.

Given the already wide scope of the book and the vast territory covered, to have also included a chapter on Cuba would have been demanding too much. But in Latin America there is no country that has made as much an impact on the rethinking of the complexities of gender as has Cuba since the revolution of 1959. Seeking to do away with the image of the island as a backyard, emasculated colony of the United States, Cuba sought to carry out a far-reaching feminist revolution within the revolution, legislating gender equality, educating women in the professions, teaching men about the need for them to share domestic responsibilities, and bringing women into the work force in large numbers through the institutionalization of child care. While many positive changes took place in Cuba, it was years before the ideal of the macho revolutionary hero could be deconstructed without fear, leading to the fierce repression of gay men in the early years of the revolution, and the rise of a double-day pattern of labor for women, working now full-time both in the home and in the public sphere.

Preface xi

Since the fall of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe, gender rela­tions have grown yet more contradictory, as Cuba searches for ways to maintain its revolution through the expansion of tourism, which in turn has led to the growth of both the female and male sex trade on the island. It is a painful moment in Cuba's revolutionary history, as utopian dreams fade and new dreams have yet to emerge. And this has profound repercus­sions for all of Latin America. For the "other America," Cuba offered a model of liberation in its brave and bold effort to build a socialist para­dise ninety miles away from the North American superpower, which finds the island's challenge to its hegemony so threatening that it continues to maintain an economic embargo against it.

But perhaps it is a good thing that Cuba isn't included as a subject of study in this book. Such an exclusion serves to remind those of us whose encounters with the island have turned us into Cuba addicts or cuban6lo­gos, who can't help making the case for Cuban exceptionalism, that revolu­tionary discourse and practice have sprouted many seeds in Latin America, from liberation theology to pedagogies of the oppressed to new song move­ments. After all, the very concept of desalambrar, of radical unfencing, that anchors this book comes from a Uruguayan singer.

The three editors of this book, Janise Hurtig, Rosario Montoya, and Lessie Jo Frazier were graduate students of anthropology at the University of Michigan and so I knew them all, more or less well, in their formative intel­lectual years as budding feminist ethnographers. I am moved that they hon­ored my presence in their lives, as the full-fledged scholars they are now, by asking me to write this preface.

They also knew me in the years when I was formulating my own posi­tion as a feminist ethnographer while researching and writing Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story (1993) and Women Writing Culture (1995), an anthology of feminist ethnographic writing, which I co-edited with Deborah Gordon, that began as a graduate course and conference held at the University of Michigan. I went to graduate school in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a period when feminist anthro­pology was a nascent subfield of our discipline and programs and depart­ments in women's studies didn't yet exist. As a beginning professor, I needed to scramble to teach myself about approaches to women and gen­der while simultaneously teaching my students. In contrast, the three edi­tors of this book received their graduate training in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when feminist anthropology was in its heyday and supported by the infrastructure of strong women's studies programs around the country, with

xu Preface

the University of Michigan leading the way in its commitment to women's studies.

Although we coincided at the University of Michigan and in various ways share a "Michigan approach" to the study of gender, the generational difference between us is dramatic and I think it accounts for the confidence and ease with which the editors approach the study of gender and pursue their feminist anthropologies. It is satisfYing to see them not needing to jus­tifY intellectually the importance of gender, not needing to remind their readers that feminist anthropology offers an emancipatory agenda that includes both women and men, not needing to worry about being called strident because they draw attention to the connections between gender, race, class, and state power.

The editors are, indeed, the beneficiaries of the feminist movement, which gave gender a place and a home in the academy, a place and a home increasingly under threat. The threat comes not only from feminist back­lashes of various sorts, within and beyond the academy, but from the very success that feminist mainstreaming has had in the world at large, which in some cases has led to the misuse and misappropriation of the concept of gender for the support of old oppressions packaged in new ways.

It is of key importance that scholars continue to work on articulating emancipatory agendas when they focus on gender. This book offers several such agendas and gives hope that scholarship, and feminist anthropologies in particular, can play an active part in positively transforming the everyday social construction of reality by helping us to see it in ways we had never seen it before.