What role do specific geographic, political, and historical contexts play in how gendered identities and practices are mobilized to negotiate larger structures of inequality? Through innovative efforts to come to terms with the very contingent and situated nature of gender formation, four recent books reconfirm the important contributions of gender studies of Latin America to feminist studies in general. These texts apply unique methods of analysis to investigate gender's production in specific places and moments, thus producing new insights into how gender is articulated within particular translocal configurations of power. In particular, these texts ask: How does biography inform social activism against global neoliberal economic adjustments? How do discourses on sex provide the foundation for gendered forms of modern national culture and social control? How do local production strategies engender neoliberal labor in new ways? Through questions like these, the texts push us to consider gender not as a ubiquitous concept that can be taken for granted, but rather as a varied and relational process grounded in distinct material and historical conditions.

These texts vary quite substantially in their composition, scope, and methodological approach; yet it is their breadth and diversity that allow us to discern from them important new dynamics in the way gender and power relations articulate in Latin America. For example, Genders in Production sheds light on the shifting, strategic nature of gender discourses and practices within a transnational production process that relies centrally on the notion of the quintessential female laborer, but which is increasingly characterized by a mixed-sex labor population. Contentious Lives examines how two women's search for recognition and dignity—and not spontaneous economic frustration per se—provokes and provides an interpretive frame for participation in “anti-adjustment” protests in Argentina. The Famous 41 analyzes the public scandal surrounding a 1901 transvestite ball in Mexico as a means of highlighting the role of homosexuality in the formation of masculinist modern national culture. Finally, the essays in Gender's Place scrutinize the specificity of gendered knowledge and practices across Latin America, with each essay actively working to promote the feminist project of transgressing disciplinary, regional, and analytical boundaries. Taken together, these texts highlight original approaches to the shifting social dynamics and analytical issues that undergird processes of gender formation in Latin America. By putting multiple theoretical standpoints and methodological strategies in conversation, they reveal a more situated and relational conceptualization of gender identity in the region. More importantly still, they demonstrate gender's centrality in the constitution and disruption of other categories of analysis, including class and race, local and global.

The best text with which to frame these unique approaches to gender is Gender's Place—a comprehensive volume of diverse essays that examines the different ways gender has been located in and articulated through distinct contexts in Latin America. The essays provide “thick” ethnographic descriptions of specific forms of knowledge, discourses, and social movements in places as diverse as the rural classroom, the nocturnal urban streets, the indigenous community, and the urban market. They also reexamine the importance of gender within particular historical moments and national political regimes. This breadth in geographical and temporal focus is justified by the book's underlying deconstructive project of desalambrar—tearing down fences. In practice, this means that the essays collectively showcase “the specificity of gender arrangements, ideologies and imageries in particular places” (p. 8), while also demonstrating how these “places” are constituted by social relations forged through distinct local histories, national traditions, and global structural positions. Victor Ortiz's essay is especially illuminating in this regard in that it showcases the growing economic and political opportunities that maquildoras—export-oriented assembly line factories located on the U.S.-Mexico border—have proffered for a small sector of professional Latina women in El Paso (198). Ortiz's analysis highlights the diversity of gender identities and ideologies circulating within this landscape by examining the importance of class in redefining the relationship between gender, labor, and globalization.

In addition to its efforts to detail gender specificity, Gender's Place also seeks to further the feminist project of decentering the production of knowledge by tearing down borders around regional literatures and scholarly disciplines. Consequently, critical commentaries by Ruth Behar and June Nash are put into conversation with essays by Latin American scholars like Marta Lamas in order to highlight distinct theoretical and substantive foci. While the volume's contributors are mainly anthropologists, many of the ethnographic essays build explicitly on critical feminist geography and historiography in order to destabilize the notion of stable or static places as the point of departure for analyses of subjectivity. For example, Lessie Jo Frazier's essay examines how grassroots activists and the Chilean state drew on competing and highly gendered discourses of locality and landscape in order to (dis)place the blame for state violence (111). In this way, the volume's contributors focus on particular places not only as context, but also as the subject of feminist analysis, demonstrating how the boundaries which apparently constitute them are transgressed by particular kinds of gendered knowledge and practice. All of the contributors explicitly draw on the notion of tearing down fences as a way of approaching the scope, the disciplinary lens, or the analytical categories central to their studies. This method produces a highly diversified volume, but one whose central contribution is the heterogeneous gendered formations it reveals.

The editors of Gender's Place further locate the subject of their analysis through an explicit focus on structures and institutions—rather than on individual identity per se—as the site and object of struggle (4). This emphasis on structures asks us to consider how particular material arrangements of power enable the visibility and legibility of specific types of gendered subjects and discourses. This tack reflects an effort to avoid reducing subjectivity to individual identity, seeking instead to situate the conditions of the emergence of particular types of agency and meaning (4). For example, Rosario Montoya's study of women's sexuality in rural Nicaragua examines the importance of the “house” (as opposed to the “street”) as a site of both symbolic and material importance for women's status (67). Instead of reproducing gendered assumptions about the private or public nature of the domestic realm, she demonstrates how women's socioeconomic position and behavior shapes the meanings of the “house” as a place for either concealing or legitimizing their extramarital sexual behavior. This kind of analysis avoids reifying institutions and ideologies as autonomous, coherent, and permanent structures of power by focusing on how gendered practices and knowledge alternately reinforce and/or challenge structures. The product of this approach is a relational configuration of gender born out of the tense negotiation between situated configurations of place and the translocal structures of power in which they are necessarily embedded.

Feminist analyses of women and labor in Latin America during the 1990s took as their primary concerns transformations within these global capitalist structures and particularly the double-bind they produced for women. On the one hand, the feminization of global labor in places like maquiladoras privileged women on the assumption of their naturally “docile, dexterous, submissive” qualities. Theoretically, this shift opened up new economic opportunities for women outside the home, often accompanied by a degree of increased mobility and freedom of social expression. However, women's privileged role in neoliberal economic transitions also brought incredible burdens. Increasingly, analyses of gender in Latin America brought us images of women struggling as heads-of-household in the absence of migrating male laborers, working to compensate for the negative impact of social service cuts on family welfare, or bearing the brunt of the male violence produced by rising poverty and unemployment.

Leslie Salzinger's Genders in Production provides an important intervention in feminist analyses of global political economy by examining how discourses of “the Third World woman” as the quintessential neoliberal laborer interface with the kinds of gendered processes at work in distinct assembly line contexts. Salzinger's revealing and reflexive ethnography of work in four different maquiladoras on Mexico's northern border during the 1990s allows us insight into the changing nature of assembly line production and the shifting role of gender within it. She explains how each of the factories actively mobilizes gender notions in order to produce specific kinds of labor relations, ideologies, and identities. For instance, Salzinger describes how in the Panoptimex factory, “the shop floor is designed to make workers visible such that adorned and manicured young women work under the vigilant and interested eyes of male supervisors. Flirtation and sexual competition become the currency through which shop-floor power relations are struggled over and fixed” (30). This type of production strategy is in direct contrast to the “teamwork” philosophy promoted at another factory, Particimex, which promotes active female laboring subjects, defined in opposition to the “traditional Mexican culture” outside of the factory (31). So, while gender may occupy a central role within transnational assembly line production, it is subject to particular formulations and practices that arise out of specific corporate and factory contexts.

The originality of Salzinger's analysis stems from her refusal to take for granted the preconstituted female subject of hegemonic neoliberal discourse—docile, dexterous, and submissive—in favor of a focus on how diverse gendered identities are produced on the assembly line floor according to distinct labor arrangements. To explain the variability of gender in production, Salzinger uses the notion of ‘productive femininity’ as a central organizing principle for her analysis. Her ethnographic descriptions thus provide portraits of factory strategies centered around what she calls “traditional femininity,” “subversive femininity,” and “traditional masculinity.” This approach to gender and labor is especially revelatory in light of shifts in maquiladora demographics during the 1990s when factories began to experience a shortage in female labor and an increase in male workers. In this context, feminized labor strategies have shown themselves to be alienating and counterproductive to an increasingly mixed-sex labor population. Salzinger's acute attention to embodied gendered performances—including styles of dress on the factory floor—and also to particular types of spatial configurations of labor—for example, the segregation of “heavy” masculine tasks from repetitive feminine ones—allows us to see how these diverse formulations of gendered production bear out within these changing demographic conditions.

Another way that Salzinger explains the diversity of assembly line production strategies is through an especially compelling analysis of the managers of the maquiladora plants. Rather than relying on abstract notions of “company ideology” as an explanatory variable, she examines how each manager's nationality and personal politics situate him within the world of transnational production and shape his production strategies. This focus allows us to see how local factors, such as managers, play a crucial role in determining what kinds of gendered meanings will shape particular factory relationships within a global production process. In many ways, it is these managers' individual perspectives and work strategies that have the most important impact on how workers are interpolated into the production process. Consequently, the focus on embodied managers, rather than shadowy, abstract corporations, provides an important qualification to analyses of global labor forms in that it allows us a closer look at how situated practices and identities are produced through larger political economic shifts. Salzinger's analysis of the factory as a pivotal place for producing specific kinds of gendered bodies and ideologies is thus an important contribution to studies of both gender and global political economy. It also provides an excellent case for comparative analyses of global capitalist production elsewhere, such as Asia.

Contentious Lives, by Javier Auyero, also raises important questions about the relationship between neoliberal socioeconomic formations and processes of subject formation, but approaches them from a very different angle. This book provides an interesting contrast to the two just described because it does not take gender as its main focus. Rather, Contentious Lives highlights the individual life histories and experience of two women as a window onto the larger social and political meaning of two “anti-adjustment” protests in Argentina during the 1990s. Auyero explores the interface between biography and protest in these women's narratives, seeking to examine “contentious politics as a lived experience” (205). This approach reveals the protests to be more than just a revolt against economic adjustment policies; instead, Auyero argues that they serve as a means of asserting demands for dignity and respect in the face of political and personal injustice.

The two protagonists are Laura, a leading picketer involved in the road barricade of the southern province of Nequén in June 1996, and Nana, a resident of the northwest Argentine city of Santiago del Estero where she participated in a protest that led to the looting of government buildings and officials' residences, on 6 December 1993. For both women, Auyero seeks to uncover how their personal trajectories brought them to their respective sites of protest and provided a means of interpreting that participation. He uses pieces of each woman's narrative, along with diary excerpts, newspaper stories, and recollections by other protestors to reenact the protests, the positions of the protagonists within them, and their collective meaning. Auyero situates these life histories against a backdrop of structural adjustment, including privatization of government industry and an end to essential welfare services. To most commentators, these painful economic transformations would appear to single-handedly explain the numerous civil outbursts that were subsequently dubbed “structural adjustment revolts.” However, Auyero goes beyond the apparently spontaneous, economically driven nature of these revolts in order to argue that the meaning and experience of these events for his female subjects (as well as for the others involved) must be understood as a culmination of collectively constructed yet also intimately personal factors.

Contentious Lives raises important questions about the intentions, perceptions, and emergent political identities of “average” participants in social movements. The study reminds us of the personal trajectories that lead people to become involved in political protests, as well as the very intimate issues that shape their experience and understanding of that participation. For example, Auyero emphasizes the centrality of Laura's history of domestic abuse and single-motherhood and of Nana's role as the local carnaval queen to each woman's biography and subsequent political actions. Because his female subjects experience and narrate their political activity in overtly gendered ways, Auyero's reflections on the relationship between oral history and politics would be enhanced by an explicit analysis of the role of gender in these narratives. The women's stories clearly confirm the feminist mantra of the personal as political; however, they also provide important insight into how deeply personal the political is. This insight pushes us to examine how the “lived experience” of politics is thus gendered in multiple, ambivalent ways. Ultimately, Auyero's subjects' narratives reinforce the idea that the collective, relational identities produced in the search for personal dignity and recognition are premised on gendered notions of both agency and politics.

The Famous 41 provides us with a different perspective on the relationship between the personal and the political through its discursive analysis of sexuality and identity in turn-of-the-century Mexico. Specifically, the book focuses on the 17 November 1901 public scandal surrounding a clandestine transvestite ball of forty-two men, half of whom were dressed as women. The name of the book commemorates the transgressive legacy of the notorious participants in this shocking event in which even president Porfirio Díaz' son-in-law was implicated but later stricken from the record (thus reducing the number from the original forty-two to the “famous 41”). The editors locate the incident within a growing public sexual curiosity in Mexico and demonstrate how the scandal produced for the first time the possibility of imagining a certain eroticism between men (3). Furthermore, they show how, through the condemnations and gossip that circulated following the event, the public was incited to develop a language about homosexuality as a problem to be addressed. The editors argue that this development was important not only as evidence of the birth of modern homosexuality in Mexico, but also as a crucial ingredient in the elaboration of a Mexican revolutionary national culture based on masculine virility. Essentially, in arousing the possibility of new types of sexual desire, the event also produced the justification for new kinds of social control around sexuality that were central to Mexico's modernity.

The Famous 41 elaborates this argument in two distinct sections. The first is dedicated entirely to the reproduction (in both English and Spanish) of a history of the 17 November event. This includes newspaper articles on the subject, selections from Eduardo Castrejón's 1906 novel The 41, and critical analyses by Carlos Monsiváis and Robert McKee Irwin. In addition to their valuable historical information, these reproductions provide the reader with the very language and images that the editors argue served as the basis for the modern discourse on homosexuality. Through both the Castrejón novel and the newspaper articles we see how these depictions of the event worked collectively to generate a new language of eroticism and homophobia, morality and modernity. Furthermore, through the political cartoons of José Guadalupe Posada, the book demonstrates how the emergent discourse of homosexuality and male effeminacy provided a vehicle for the modern working class political critiques of such diverse phenomena as corruption and North American imperialism.

The second half of The Famous 41 is composed of articles that explore in depth the repercussions of the Famous 41 event (and even the number 41 itself) within Mexican national discourses of sexuality and social control. These essays are centrally concerned with the issue of place, examining how distinct institutional spaces and ideological formations further promulgated modern notions of masculinity and modernity in Mexico. For example, Victor Macías-González's essay provides an enlightening analysis of the legitimate social spaces for dandyism, highlighting the role of cosmopolitanism and conspicuous consumption within Porfiriato modernization (228). Other essays analyze spaces where sexual and social abnormality and deviance were located and subjected to specific social controls—the prison or the mental asylum. As a whole, these essays challenge the tendency of hegemonic national discourse to locate deviance and abnormal sexual desires within individual bodies or specific social groups, and look instead at how particular kinds of places, events, and social policies incited the emergence of new kinds of subjects, including both the homosexual and the modern Mexican. In this way, the book reiterates the transgressive spirit and the situated theories of gender formation promoted by Gender's Place. Perhaps more importantly still, The Famous 41 queers Mexican national culture by displacing the submissive, spiritual female of marianismo—the Cult of the Virgin Mary—as the foil against which the modern macho archetype emerged, and emphasizes instead the role of homoerotic identities, practices, and desires in his composition.¹

Taken as a whole, the four texts reviewed here provide us with a glimpse of important shifts in both the form and content of gender analyses of Latin America. Rather than assuming universal gender formations composed of static masculine and feminine prototypes, these analyses examine how particular local configurations of power shape and are in turn shaped by diverse gendered identities and practices. Through their varied lenses and sites, these texts demonstrate the centrality, and yet variability, of gender as a constitutive force in both hegemonic and subversive discourses of difference. In this way, they highlight the importance of gender as both a productive and disruptive force within local-global power relations. From very distinct angles, each of these texts pushes us to re-examine the dynamic, mutually-constitutive relationships between places, people, and power, and the crucial role of gender in their definition.