Gender, Sexuality, and Power in Latin America since Independence (Jaguar Books on Latin America)

This exciting collection showcases many of the best young historians of Latin America. With wide-ranging essays covering much of the Americas―and framed by classic gender/sexuality concepts, discourse analysis, and queer theory―the volume provides groundbreaking new research on gender, sexuality, and power and shows why such studies must be central to all future histories of the region. (Matthew C. Gutmann, Brown University, author of The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City)

Highly recommended. All undergraduate libraries. (CHOICE)

An excellent approach to integrating gender and sexuality in the study of Latin American history. Challenging and stimulating essays focusing on the centrality of these variables in the study of Latin American history since independence. (Jose R. Gomez, Turabo University)

Editors William E. French and Katherine E. Bliss nicely bring together a wide range of essays that cover the early republican period to the early twenty-first century, touching down in Venezuela, Mexico, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and various points in Central America and the Caribbean. (The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Latin American History)

This is a terrific collection of new scholarship on sexuality and gender in Latin America. . . . Gender, Sexuality, and Power in Latin America since Independence stands out both for its extremely useful introduction and the truly new directions taken by the essays of the contributing scholars. . . . This collection is noteworthy and refreshing. . . . This well-rendered volume testifies to the vibrancy of the field and deserves wide attention. (Hispanic American Historical Review, February 2009)

I designed a course on gender and power in Latin America a number of years ago but grew discouraged teaching it because much of the available material was too difficult for my undergrads. I also had trouble finding a coherent progression of readings. But this book provides exactly that. The introductory essay in particular is enormously helpful in laying out the major theoretical issues in accessible language. We are able to keep referring back to it in each class. The reader has been a real success, one I?m sure I?ll use again! (Karen Robert, St. Thomas University)

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. Ideal for university courses on Latin America, French and Bliss have provided us with an engaging volume whose cutting edge research puts to rest any reader's lingering doubts as to the fundamental connection between gender and sexuality and the workings of power. (Francie Chassen-Lopez, January, 2010)

William E. French is associate professor in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia.
Katherine Elaine Bliss is visiting scholar and adjunct associate professor at the Center for Latin American Studies, Georgetown University.