Politics of gender

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Politics of gender

• 12.11.2003

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Readings

• Duvalos, K. 2003. La Quinceañera Making Gender
  and Ethnic Identities. (In Gutmann, M. et al)
• Navarro, M 2002. Against Marianismo. In R.
  Montoya, L. Frazier, and J. Hurtig (eds) Genders
  Place Feminist Anthropologies of Latin America.
  New York Palgrave Macmillan.

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Gender as an object of anthropological study

• sex vs gender
• Sex - anatomical, biological and physiological
  characteristics of female and male bodies
• Gender - culturally specific symbolic
  articulation and elaboration of these
  differences.
• The concept of gender
• theoretical use in the early 1980s.
• an alternative to the emphasis on the problem of
  women in feminist anthropology

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Feminist anthropology I

• Boass students
• Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict
• Mead Male and Female and Sex and Temperament
• double male bias
• professional anthropologists tended to be male
• anthropologists tended to rely on male informants
  
• 1960s
• political unrest of the late 1960s
• Marxist approaches to inequality
• women as the second sex (Simone de Beauvoir)
• feminist anthropology - the 1970s
• to understand the roots of female subordination
• to fill the gaps in the anthropological
  literature resulting from male bias
• to establish an anthropology of women
• what women said and did
• greater weight to female domains and spheres of
  activity

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Feminist anthropology II

• Two different lines of argument
• 1) neither female oppression nor male dominance
  are universal
• 2) male dominance and female subordination are
  universal.

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Feminist anthropology III

• Female subordination not universal
• 1) E.g. Sacks, Leacock - followed Marx and
  especially Engels
• The Origin of the Family, Private Property and
  the State.
• Female subordination as a historically specific
  phenomenon
• linked to relations of production, private
  property, colonialism or capitalist economic
  relations.
• assumed the existence of proper egalitarian
  social order
• 2) E.g Friedl, Lamphere stress on individual
  transactions and interpersonal relations
• Assumed
• Gender differences
• division between domestic/female and public/male
  domains
• But
• does not automatically result in female
  subordination
• women
• no formal power and authority in the public or
  political sphere
• possess domestic power
• may determine male activity in the public sphere

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Feminist anthropology IV

• Female subordination is universal
• Due to universal dichotomies
• Public vs domestic (Rosaldo, 1974)
• Nature vs culture (Ortner 1974)
• Production vs reproduction (Edholm et al 1977).

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Feminist anthropology V

• 1) Rosaldo
• Women, Culture and Society (1974)
• public vs domestic sphere
• men vs women
• Domestic sphere systematically undervalued
• Hg societies division less marked
• Peasant and industrial societies division more
  marked

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Feminist anthropology V

• 2) Ortner (1974)
• nature vs culture
• women vs men
• Women - childbearing, lactation and socialization
  of children
• 3) Marxist feminists (Edholm et al, 1977)
• Reproduction vs production
• women vs men
• women excluded from relations of production

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Theorizing beyond dichotomies

• 1980s
• MacCormack and Strathern Nature, Culture and
  Gender (1980)
• universal dichotomies were rejected
• reflections of dominant Western discourse
• historically situated
• socially and culturally specific
• gender replaced women as a focus of academic
  enquiry
• Enabled to talk about difference without assuming
  universal male dominance and female subordination
• without relying upon Western dichotomies
• Postmodern theories
• The problem of universal dichotomies
• Insistence on using indigenous categories
• Strathern (1988)
• men and masculinity also under focus
• Loizos and Papataxiarchis Contested Identities
  (1991)

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Gender in Central America

• Powerful symbolic figures
• Virgen de Guadalupe vs Malinche
• Saint vs whore
• Scarcity of historical figures
• Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (1648 1695)
• set precedents for feminism in the 17th century
• "Respuesta" and poetry
• womens rights for education
• Frida Kahlo
• Violeta Chamorro
• President of Nicaragua 1990-97
• Machismo

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Women in Parliament

• Costa Rica 35.1
• Mexico 22.6 (L) /15.6 (U)
• Nicaragua 20.7
• Panama 9.9
• El Salvador 9.5
• Guatemala 8.8
• Honduras 5.5

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Female suffrage

• El Salvador 1939
• Guatemala 1945
• Panama 1945
• Costa Rica 1949
• Belize 1951
• Mexico 1953
• Honduras 1955
• Nicaragua - 1955

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Presentations

• Stephen, L. Women and Social Movements in Latin
  America Power from Below.
• Gutmann, M.C. 1996. The Meanings of Macho Being
  a Man in Mexico City. Berkeley University of
  California Press.
• Lancaster, R. 1994. Life Is Hard Machismo,
  Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua.
  Berkeley University of California Press.