Gender/Género in Latin America

Abstract

The term “gender” (género) is fundamental to understanding Latin American, Caribbean, and US Latina/o culture, politics, and society, even when the term itself is the site of debates, disagreements, and tensions. It has been deployed since the 1970s by feminists, scholars, activists, and others to analyze categories of differentiation based on sex (male/female, man/woman) and appearance or conducts (masculine/feminine), mostly challenging essentialist dualistic understandings that see fixed and immutable correspondences between bodies and behaviors. Leading scholars have argued for the need to analyze gender in a historically specific, localized, intersectional framework; in relation to other categories such as race, ethnicity, and class; and in relation to multiple types of sexuality and to sex and gender systems that can account for change and transformation, operating as a grid or spectrum rather than as two fixed poles.1 Gender analysis has been a key tool used to challenge the unequal status of women in society and the diverse types of exploitation and abuse on the grounds of a person’s sex (e.g., misogyny), as well as discrimination due to sexual orientation or gender expression, such as homophobia, lesbophobia, and transphobia.