Gender and the State in Latin America and the Caribbean

Undergraduate

This seminar offers an introduction to historical constructions of gender identity and gendered polities in Latin America and the Caribbean from pre-colonial native societies into the twentieth century. We begin with an analysis of gender in the Inca empire and several lowland societies, focusing on spirituality, agriculture, and land tenure particularly. The arrival of Spanish colonialism brings tremendous and complex transformations to the societies that we consider; we analyze discourses of honor, as well as how various subjects navigated the violence and the transforming colonial state. Our readings turn to Caribbean slavery, where studies of gendered experiences of enslavement and resistance have grown considerably in recent decades. Building on these insights, we analyze the gendered experiences of abolition and inclusion into contentious new Latin American and Caribbean nations of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, we consider some of the most salient analyses of the growth of state power, including dictatorships, in multiple sites. Throughout we maintain an eye for principle questions about representation, reproduction, inclusion, political consciousness, sexuality, migration, kinship, and revolutionary struggle through a gendered lens. WR , HU T 1:30pm-3:25pm