Books in the Latin American Gender and Sexualities series

This book analyzes the scope and dynamics of violence against women in Guatemala as well as how it is represented in the print media. It reveals the ways in which these reports reproduce narratives of terror that conceal the gendered nature of violence against women and reproduce dichotomous gendered narratives of "good" and "bad" girls.

It has been argued that the first presidential campaign of Michelle Bachelet in Chile and Cristina Fernndez de Kirchner in Argentina used a rhetoric of newness. Some political observers have said that as the ';first women' to successfully run for the highest office in these countries, they were presented as the new faces of democracy. These observers argued that gender was not a determining factor in their electoral success, but the focus on this ';first women' frame did generate heavily gendered criticisms of these two candidates. Negotiating Gendered Discourses addresses these views by asking how the gender factor is negotiated when women from the Southern Cone of Latin America run for high political office. In particular, Jane L. Christie examines how Bachelet and Fernndez positioned themselves in relation to the numerous women-led social movements, and in doing so, reveals points of intersection between these contemporary political discourses and existing sources of female authority when negotiating complicated ideological debates about human rights, the economy, and women's rights.

Unbecoming Female Monsters: Witches, Vampires, and Virgins is a multi-cultural and interdisciplinary work that traces the construct of female monsters as an embodiment of socio-cultural fears of female sexuality and reproductive powers. This book examines the female sexual maturation cycle and the various archetypes of female monsters associated with each stage of sexual development as seen in literature, art, film, television, and popular culture. Recommended for scholars of Latin American studies, literature, cultural studies, women and gender studies, popular culture, and film studies.

This book combines Latin American literature, cultural and gender studies, and history of science to consider the literary perspective of the discourse of natural history in women's travel narratives, shedding a new light on the implications of women's contributions to nineteenth and twentieth-century transatlantic intellectual currents.

Resistant Bodies in the Cultural Productions of Transnational Hispanic Caribbean Women: Reimagining Queer Identity examines the art created by several Caribbean women who use literature, film, graphic novels, music, testimonios, photographs, etc. to convey social justice, democracy, and new ways of re/imaging marginal identities. In using Chela Sandoval's theories on methodologies of the oppressed, Irune del Rio Gabiola argues how the tactics Sandoval offers can be productively applied to the cultural productions analyzed. The author explores how the protagonists of all the cultural productions this book focuses on developing tactics to create new possibilities and alternatives for self-fashioning. Particularly, del Rio Gabiola reconsiders concepts such as shame, failure, unbecoming, hermeneutics of love or flexible bodies as methodologies of the oppressed that propose decolonizing emancipatory techniques in a transnational arena.

This book analyzes experiences of upper-middle-class white men living in wealthy parts of Rio de Janeiro. The author investigates what it means to be classified as a white person and a man in a society that is known for its valorization of racial mixing and yet deeply structured by racism, class, and gender inequalities.