SUNY series, Genders in the Global South

Challenges and reimagines transnational feminism by analyzing the concept of ummah, or community, in Muslim women's writing.

Examines the intersections of "Latino," "queer," and "American," to illustrate how the categories of class, race, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity are directly entangled with issues of citizenship and belonging. María-Amelia Viteri explores the multiple unfixed meanings that the term "Latino" takes on as this category is reappropriated and translated by LGBT "Latinos" in Washington, DC, San Salvador, and Quito. Using an anthropology-based, interdisciplinary approach, she exposes the creative ways in which migrants-including herself-subvert traditional readings based on country of origin, skin color, language, and immigrant status. A critical look at the multiple ways migrants view what it means to be American, Latino, and/or queer provides fertile ground for theoretical, methodological, and political debates on the importance of a queer transnational and immigration framework when analyzing citizenship and belonging. Desbordes (un/doing, overflowing borders) ethnographically addresses the limits and constraints of current paradigms within which sexuality and gender have been commonly analyzed as they intersect with race, class, ethnicity, immigration status, and citizenship. This book uses the concept of "queerness" as an analytical tool to problematize the notion of a seamless relationship between identity and practice.

Revisits a foundational moment in Argentine history to demonstrate how the crisis of modernity opened up new possibilities for imagining kinship otherwise. As Argentina rose to political and economic prominence at the turn of the twentieth century, debates about the family, as an ideological structure and set of lived relationships, took center stage in efforts to shape the modern nation. In Argentine Intimacies, Joseph M. Pierce draws on queer studies, Latin American studies, and literary and cultural studies to consider the significance of one family in particular during this period of intense social change: Carlos, Julia, Delfina, and Alejandro Bunge. One of Argentina's foremost intellectual and elite families, the Bunges have had a profound impact on Argentina's national culture and on Latin American understandings of education, race, gender, and sexual norms. They also left behind a vast archive of fiction, essays, scientific treatises, economic programs, and pedagogical texts, as well as diaries, memoirs, and photography. Argentine Intimacies explores the breadth of their writing to reflect on the intersections of intimacy, desire, and nationalism, and to expand our conception of queer kinship. Approaching kinship as an interface of relational dispositions, Pierce reveals the queerness at the heart of the modern family. Queerness emerges not as an alternative to traditional values so much as a defining feature of the state project of modernization.

Analyzes cultural materials that grapple with gender and blackness to revise traditional interpretations of Mexicanness. México's Nobodies examines two key figures in Mexican history that have remained anonymous despite their proliferation in the arts: the soldadera and the figure of the mulata. B. Christine Arce unravels the stunning paradox evident in the simultaneous erasure (in official circles) and ongoing fascination (in the popular imagination) with the nameless people who both define and fall outside of traditional norms of national identity. The book traces the legacy of these extraordinary figures in popular histories and legends, the Inquisition, ballads such as "La Adelita" and "La Cucaracha," iconic performers like Toña la Negra, and musical genres such as the son jarocho and danzón. This study is the first of its kind to draw attention to art's crucial role in bearing witness to the rich heritage of blacks and women in contemporary México.

Examines how contemporary Mexican literature uses humor to context heteronormativity.

Analyzes literary and cultural representations of iconic Mexican women to explore how these reimaginings can undermine or perpetuate gender norms in contemporary Mexico. In Troubled Memories, Oswaldo Estrada traces the literary and cultural representations of several iconic Mexican women produced in the midst of neoliberalism, gender debates, and the widespread commodification of cultural memory. He examines recent fictionalizations of Malinche, Hernán Cortés's indigenous translator during the Conquest of Mexico; Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the famous Baroque intellectual of New Spain; Leona Vicario, a supporter of the Mexican War of Independence; the soldaderas of the Mexican Revolution; and Frida Kahlo, the tormented painter of the twentieth century. Long associated with gendered archetypes and symbols, these women have achieved mythical status in Mexican culture and continue to play a complex role in Mexican literature. Focusing on contemporary novels, plays, and chronicles in connection to films, television series, and corridos of the Mexican Revolution, Estrada interrogates how and why authors repeatedly recreate the lives of these historical women from contemporary perspectives, often generating hybrid narratives that fuse history, memory, and fiction. In so doing, he reveals the innovative and sometimes troublesome ways in which authors can challenge or perpetuate gendered conventions of writing women's lives.

Provides sophisticated theoretical approaches to Latin American cinema and sexual culture. Despite All Adversities examines a representative selection of notable queer films by Spanish America's most important directors since the 1950s. Each chapter focuses on a single film and offers rich and thoughtful new interpretations by a prominent scholar. The book explores films from across the region, including Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's and Juan Carlos Tabío's Fresa y chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate, 1993), Marcelo Piñeyro's Plata quemada (Burnt Money, 2000), Barbet Schroeder's La Virgen de los Sicarios (Our Lady of the Assassins, 2000), Lucía Puenzo's XXY (XXY, 2007), Francisco J. Lombardi's No se lo digas a nadie (Don't Tell Anyone, 1998), Arturo Ripstein's El lugar sin límites (Hell Without Limits, 1978), among others. A survey of recent lesbian-themed Mexican films is also included. Andrés Lema-Hincapié is Associate Professor of Ibero-American Literatures and Cultures at the University of Colorado Denver. He is the coeditor (with Conxita Domènech) of Pedro Calderón de la Barca's La vida es sueño: Philosophical Crossroads, and the assistant editor of Burning Darkness: A Half Century of Spanish Cinema (edited by Joan Ramon Resina), also published by SUNY Press. Debra A. Castillo is Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow, Emerson Hinchliff Professor of Hispanic Studies, and Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. Her many books include Redreaming America: Toward a Bilingual American Culture, also published by SUNY Press.

Comparative, ethnographic study of women who migrate for marriage in rural north India.

Discusses how theories of queer performativity, as articulated within the US Academy, are unable to capture the whole of Latino American queer subjectivity and experience. The Avowal of Difference explores the potentialities and limitations that queer theory offers in the context of Latino American texts and subjects. Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui contrasts Latino American sexual genealogies with the Anglo-European "coming out" narrative-and interrogates the centrality of the "coming out" story as the regulating metaphor for gay, lesbian, or queer identities. In its place, the book looks at other strategies-from silence to circumlocution, from disavowal to indifference-to theorize queer subject formation in a Latino American cultural context. The analysis of texts by José Lezama Lima, Luis Zapata, Manuel Puig, Severo Sarduy, Junot Díaz, and others offers a comparative approach to understanding how queer sexualities are shaped and written in other cultural contexts. Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui is Associate Professor of American Studies and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. He is the author of Transvestism, Masculinity, and Latin American Literature: Genders Share Flesh.

Creates a new space for hybrid feminist analysis of Asian Muslim women's lives. Contesting Feminisms explores how Asian Muslim women make decisions on appropriating Islam and Islamic lifestyles through their own participation in the faith. The contributors highlight the fact that secularism has provided the space for some women to reclaim their religious identity and their own feminisms. Through compelling case studies and theoretical discussions, this volume challenges mainstream Western and national feminisms that presume homogeneity of Muslim women's lives to provide a deeper understanding of the multiple realities of feminism in Muslim communities.

Presents multifaceted aspects of Asian Muslim women's lives and agencies. This book resists the homogenization of Muslim women by detailing the diversity in their lives and by challenging the dominant paradigm of Arabized Islam as the sole interpreter of the faith. Though much has been written on the Middle East, there is a huge gap in research on Asia, which has two-thirds of the world's Muslim population. These essays reveal that the lives of Muslim women are impacted not only by Islam but also by local politics, class, religion, and ethnicity. Through ethnographic research and other methodologies, the contributors describe how economic globalization, construction of sexualities, and diasporic expectations shape women's lives. The book focuses on women's negotiations and resistances to global, national, and local patriarchies in an attempt to empower themselves.