Gender and Sexuality in Latin America. PETE SIGAL: A special issue of Hispanic American Historical Review 81: 3-4 (August-November 2001).

Abstract

The Hispanic American Historical Review’s special issue on gender and sexuality is one of the most theoretically informed and methodologically diverse of any issue of the journal in recent memory. The editors are to be commended for putting together a collection of superb essays which truly represents the diversity of this rapidly changing and expanding field of scholarship. There is a preliminary historiographical article, four articles on Chile, two on Mexico, and a final article on the historiography and intellectual history of Latin American homosexuality. Three articles are historiographical, two are institutional histories (one of a Chilean welfare agency and the other of a Mexican insane asylum), one is a political history of anarchist groups, another is a social/cultural history of Chilean agrarian laborers, and one more is a microhistory of a famous Mexican criminal case. All of the authors make excellent use of their sources, as they have been influenced by recent movements which seek to analyze gender encoded meanings in all history.