Add Gender and Stir?: Cooking up Gendered Histories of Modern Latin America

Abstract

As several recent overviews of the literature have noted, 1 published works on the history of gender and sexuality in Latin America have made attempts at review an increasingly challenging endeavor. For those [End Page 267] of us who cut our teeth as graduate students in the search for scarce historical scholarship on Latin American women in the early 1980s, the current interest in gender evidenced by university publishers, scholarly journals, conference panels, and course offerings represents an exciting development. 2 It is now possible—as Sueann Caulfield has recently demonstrated—to turn our attention in a sustained way to theoretical and comparative issues, drawing from this exercise a sense of the dramatic potential of gender analysis to transform Latin American history and a preliminary diagnosis of what remains to be done. 3 The present review builds on recent attempts to "take the pulse" of the burgeoning field of Latin American gendered history and points out how such studies have contributed to historiographical debates on the modern period. 4 [End Page 268]