Gender in Latin America

Gender in Latin America is a comprehensive state-of-the-art review of gender in one of the world's most diverse and dynamic regions. The authors draw on a wide range of sources, including their own field research, to explore changes and continuities in gender roles, relations, and identities during the late twentieth century into the twenty-first. Debunking traditional universalizing stereotypes, diversity in gender is highlighted in relation to the cross-cutting influences of age, class, sexuality, ethnicity, rural-urban residence, and migrant status. Each of the book's thematic chapters--on politics, poverty, population, health, sexuality, families and households, employment, and migration--begins with an introduction to core issues and theoretical debates in the respective field. In the discussions which follow, up-to-date statistical evidence on Latin America is accompanied by detailed case studies that bring alive the richly varied experiences of women and men in a region undergoing profound, and frequently conflictive, transformation. The extensive bibliography reflects not only the critical contributions made by feminist scholarship in and on Latin America over the last three decades, but new bodies of literature on men and masculinities, fatherhood, and sexuality. Sylvia Chant is professor of development geography at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her recent books include Women-headed Households: Diversity and Dynamics in the Developing World (Macmillan) and Mainstreaming Men into Gender and Development (with Matthew Gutmann) (Oxfam). Nikki Craske is senior lecturer in politics and director of the Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Liverpool, and author of Women and Politics in Latin America (Rutgers University Press).