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One of the important cultural responses to political and sociohistorical events in Latin America is a resurgence of urban photography, which typically blends high art and social documentary. But unlike other forms of cultural production in Latin America, photography has received relatively little sustained critical analysis. This pioneering book offers one of the first in-depth investigations of the complex and extensive history of gendered perspectives in Latin American photography through studies of works from Argentina, Mexico, and Guatemala.

David William Foster examines the work of photographers ranging from the internationally acclaimed artists Graciela Iturbide, Pedro Meyer, and Marcos López to significant photographers whose work is largely unknown to English-speaking audiences. He grounds his essays in four interlocking areas of research: the experience of human life in urban environments, the feminist matrix and gendered cultural production, Jewish cultural production, and the ideological principles of cultural works and the connections between the works and the sociopolitical and historical contexts in which they were created. Foster reveals how gender-marked photography has contributed to the discourse surrounding the project of redemocratization in Argentina and Guatemala, as well as how it has illuminated human rights abuses in both countries. He also traces photography’s contributions to the evolution away from the masculinist-dominated post–1910 Revolution ideology in Mexico. This research convincingly demonstrates that Latin American photography merits the high level of respect that is routinely accorded to more canonical forms of cultural production.

If a creative individual identifies as queer or trans, does that fact belong solely to the realm of biography, or does it pertain to their artistic achievement? In Queer and Trans Aesthetics, Lloyd Whitesell discusses literature, visual culture, audio-visual media, music, and performance from the 19th to the 21st century. Through this analysis, Whitesell develops a systematic framework to enrich our understanding of LGBTQ aesthetics and cultural production. He traces the history of queer aesthetic inquiry, develops a justification for a synthetic approach, identifies a fund of expressive strategies motivated by queer subjectivity, and highlights how such strategies create affinity across differences of gender, race, local context, and artistic media.

Rooted in a gender-inclusive theory of queer/trans subjectivity, the book draws on testimony from people of diverse backgrounds, genders, and races. Whitesell engages with debates in the existing scholarly literature while making connections between a wide range of artists: some from mainstream canons, some established subcultural figures, and others only now emerging as notable contributors to queer culture. The book explores five expressive archetypes or poses which have had profound significance in queer art traditions: the Monster, the Victim, the Trickster, the Dandy, and the Dreamer. Each offers a repertoire of creative responses to social oppression and configures queer subjective experience in a unique way. With its unique systematic approach, Queer and Trans Aesthetics enhances our knowledge of queer aesthetic traditions across genres and time.

One of the most obvious stylistic features of Athenian black-figure vase painting is the use of color to differentiate women from men. By comparing ancient art in Egypt and Greece, Tan Men/Pale Women uncovers the complex history behind the use of color to distinguish between genders, without focusing on race. Author Mary Ann Eaverly considers the significance of this overlooked aspect of ancient art as an indicator of underlying societal ideals about the role and status of women. Such a commonplace method of gender differentiation proved to be a complex and multivalent method for expressing ideas about the relationship between men and women, a method flexible enough to encompass differing worldviews of Pharaonic Egypt and Archaic Greece. Does the standard indoor/outdoor explanation—women are light because they stay indoors—hold true everywhere, or even, in fact, in Greece? How “natural” is color-based gender differentiation, and, more critically, what relationship does color-based gender differentiation have to views about women and the construction of gender identity in the ancient societies that use it?

The depiction of dark men and light women can, as in Egypt, symbolize reconcilable opposites and, as in Greece, seemingly irreconcilable opposites where women are regarded as a distinct species from men. Eaverly challenges traditional ideas about color and gender in ancient Greek painting, reveals an important strategy used by Egyptian artists to support pharaonic ideology and the role of women as complementary opposites to men, and demonstrates that rather than representing an actual difference, skin color marks a society’s ideological view of the varied roles of male and female.