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1993 books match the query 'Latin America' and 5 start with q

cover of Queen for a Day: Transformistas, Beauty Queens, and the Performance of Femininity in Venezuela

Queen for a Day

Transformistas, Beauty Queens, and the Performance of Femininity in Venezuela

Marcia Ochoa

Duke University Press, 2014

Queen for a Day connects the logic of Venezuelan modernity with the production of a national femininity. In this ethnography, Marcia Ochoa considers how femininities are produced, performed, and consumed in the mass-media spectacles of international beauty pageants, on the runways of the Miss Venezuela contest, on the well-traveled Caracas avenue where transgender women (transformistas) project themselves into the urban imaginary, and on the bodies of both transformistas and beauty pageant contestants (misses). Placing transformistas and misses in the same analytic frame enables Ochoa to delve deeply into complex questions of media and spectacle, gender and sexuality, race and class, and self-fashioning and identity in Venezuela.

Beauty pageants play an outsized role in Venezuela. The country has won more international beauty contests than any other. The femininity performed by Venezuelan women in high-profile, widely viewed pageants defines a kind of national femininity. Ochoa argues that as transformistas and misses work to achieve the bodies, clothing and makeup styles, and postures and gestures of this national femininity, they come to embody Venezuelan modernity.

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cover of Queer Issues in Contemporary Latin American Cinema

Queer Issues in Contemporary Latin American Cinema

By David William Foster

University of Texas Press, 2003

Viewing contemporary Latin American films through the lens of queer studies reveals that many filmmakers are exploring issues of gender identity and sexual difference, as well as the homophobia that attempts to defeat any challenge to the heterosexual norms of patriarchal culture. In this study of queer issues in Latin American cinema, David William Foster offers highly perceptive queer readings of fourteen key films to demonstrate how these cultural products promote the principles of an antiheterosexist stance while they simultaneously disclose how homophobia enforces the norms of heterosexuality.

Foster examines each film in terms of the ideology of its narrative discourse, whether homoerotic desire or a critique of patriarchal heterosexism and its implications for Latin American social life and human rights. His analyses underscore the difficulties involved in constructing a coherent and convincing treatment of the complex issues involved in critiquing the patriarchy from perspectives associated with queer studies. The book will be essential reading for everyone working in queer studies and film studies.

The films discussed in this book are:

  • De eso no se habla (I Don't Want to Talk about It)
  • El lugar sin límites (The Place without Limits)
  • Aqueles dois (Those Two)
  • Convivencia (Living Together)
  • Conducta impropia (Improper Conduct)
  • The Disappearance of García Lorca
  • La Virgen de los Sicarios (Our Lady of the Assassins)
  • Doña Herlinda y su hijo (Doña Herlinda and Her Son)
  • No se lo digas a nadie (Don't Tell Anyone)
  • En el paraíso no existe el dolor (There Is No Suffering in Paradise)
  • A intrusa (The Interloper)
  • Plata quemada (Burnt Money)
  • Afrodita (Aphrodite)
  • Fresa y chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate)
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cover of Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings

Queer Migrations

Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings

Eithne Luibheid

University of Minnesota Press, 2005

Emmigration from Latin America and Asia has influenced every aspect of social, political, economic, and cultural life in the United States over the last quarter century. Within the vast scholarship on this wave of immigration, however, little attention has been paid to queer immigrants of color. Focusing particularly on migration from Mexico, Cuba, El Salvador, and the Philippines, Queer Migrations brings together scholars of immigration, citizenship, sexuality, race, and ethnicity to provide analyses of the norms, institutions, and discourses that affect queer immigrants of color, also providing ethnographic studies of how these newcomers have transformed established immigrant communities in Miami, San Francisco, and New York.
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cover of Queering the Public Sphere in Mexico and Brazil: Sexual Rights Movements in Emerging Democracies

Queering the Public Sphere in Mexico and Brazil

Sexual Rights Movements in Emerging Democracies

Rafael de la Dehesa

Duke University Press, 2010

Queering the Public Sphere in Mexico and Brazil is a groundbreaking comparative analysis of the historical development and contemporary dynamics of LGBT activism in Latin America’s two largest democracies. Rafael de la Dehesa focuses on the ways that LGBT activists have engaged with the state, particularly in alliance with political parties and through government health agencies in the wake of the AIDS crisis. He examines this engagement against the backdrop of the broader political transitions to democracy, the neoliberal transformation of state–civil society relations, and the gradual consolidation of sexual rights at the international level. His comparison highlights similarities between sexual rights movements in Mexico and Brazil, including a convergence on legislative priorities such as antidiscrimination laws and the legal recognition of same-sex couples. At the same time, de la Dehesa points to notable differences in the tactics deployed by activists and the coalitions brought to bear on the state.

De la Dehesa studied the archives of activists, social-movement organizations, political parties, religious institutions, legislatures, and state agencies, and he interviewed hundreds of individuals, not only LGBT activists, but also feminists, AIDS and human-rights activists, party militants, journalists, academics, and state officials. He marshals his prodigious research to reveal the interplay between evolving representative institutions and LGBT activists’ entry into the political public sphere in Latin America, offering a critical analysis of the possibilities opened by emerging democratic arrangements, as well as their limitations. At the same time, exploring activists’ engagement with the international arena, he offers new insights into the diffusion and expression of transnational norms inscribing sexual rights within a broader project of liberal modernity. Queering the Public Sphere in Mexico and Brazil is a landmark examination of LGBT political mobilization.

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cover of Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness, 1531-1813

Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe

The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness, 1531-1813

Jacques Lafaye

University of Chicago Press, 1987

"In this study of complex beliefs in which Aztec religion and Spanish Catholicism blend, Lafaye demonstrates the importance of religious beliefs in the formation of the Mexican nation. Far from being of only parochial interest, this volume is of great value to any historian of religions concerned with problems of nativism and syncretism."—Franke J. Neumann, Religious Studies Review
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