Beginning in the 1990s, numerous studies of men and masculinities in Latin America began to make significant conceptual and substantive contributions to the field overall. Despite the vast area covered—with hundreds of millions of people, more than twenty countries and over 100 languages spoken—in the 1990s scholarly research on hombres and homens in Latin America became integrated into gender studies as a whole.
Scholarship on men and masculinities in Latin America was initiated and developed in good measure by feminist women as an outgrowth of their previous work in the 1970s on women’s oppression and feminist movements. In contrast to the English-speaking world, in Latin America the field was thus seen from the beginning as an integral part of gender studies and the struggle against gender inequalities. The study of masculinities in Latin America also emerged from practical efforts to understand and combat AIDS. In this respect, the study of AIDS illustrates another noteworthy feature of the study of masculinities in Latin America: that social problems and their solutions are of enduring significance in academic scholarship.
There is a tendency in research on masculinities in Latin America to oversimplify supposed common traits found among men generally in the region as a whole and to equate manliness with particular national or regional qualities, as if distinctions among men within the region mattered little and as if women were not also active participants in the creation and transformation of cultural traits in general. The tension between generalising for Latin American men overall and emphasising cultural diversity between men continues to provoke debate and controversy. Similarly, the impact on the region of gender stereotypes about the region that emanate elsewhere is a reflection of the conceptualisation outside Latin America of a solitary Latin American mestizo male. Other men—black and Indian men and men who have sex with other men, for example—have been largely ignored and/or misrepresented.
Many initial studies of masculinities in Latin America were conducted by anthropologists, historians, psychologists, sociologists and researchers in public health. Although some disciplines, area concentrations and interests have been better represented than others in the field, feminist studies on the relationship of men to gender inequality and attention to AIDS and same-sex sex have been consistent concerns within the emerging scholarship on men and masculinities throughout Latin America.
In the 1990s, several North Americans wrote excellent ethnographies and histories in Eng-lish of men and masculinities in Latin America. During the same period there was a simultaneous boom in research on this subject written in Spanish and Portuguese in Latin America. But very few of these Spanish and Portuguese studies were translated into English, and for this reason many English-only scholars have not had access to the investigations and conclusions of their Latin American colleagues.
By the end of the 1980s in social science scholarship in Latin America generally, renewed attention was paid to questions of daily life, emotions and feelings and gender relations. As the working class became less central to much scholarship on the region, the so-called new social movements—among them the feminist movement—opened the way for new theoretical conceptions and new social concerns.
Theories of hegemonic and marginal masculinities have been adapted to specific local conditions in studies throughout the region, and more recently concepts developed in queer theory have helped researchers frame certain aspects of their investigations relating to subordinate forms of masculinity. Among the important studies of masculinity and the body in Latin America have been those by Leal (1995) and Viveros (2002). Leal, for example, notes that gaucho identity is strongly linked to masculine identity and described cultural expressions of the former such as myths, enchantments and seduction magic, verbal duels and representations of death.
Among the areas of research that have been developed in the study of masculinity in Latin America, some of the most promising have focused on questions of family divisions of labour, parenting and housework; homosociality in friendship and social spaces; masculine identity construction; reproductive health issues concerning same-sex sex, active and passive sexuality, AIDS and male reproductive rights; ethnicity and masculinity among indigenous, Afro-Latino and mestizo populations; class and work; and the infamous matter of machismo (see Gutmann 1996, 2003).
With respect to ethnicity and race, for instance, in Latin American societies it has become necessary to think about the various ways in which masculine identities are constructed in various social sectors, ethnic groups and sociocultural contexts. Although still too few in number, studies already conducted on ethnicity, race and masculinity in Latin America have drawn important conclusions and indicate several new areas for future research regarding the importance of recognising multiple masculinities across ethnic and racial lines, as well as the fact that there are no essential ‘Latin’ masculinities that cross all these lines. Just as it is important to recognise multiple masculinities across ethnic and racial lines, it is also necessary to understand that there is no essential black, gaucho or indigenous masculinity in Latin America.
Of the many specific topics of significant discussion and disagreement in the study of men and masculinities in Latin America at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we would highlight three. One, as indicated above, is the subject of same-sex sex. By the late 1990s, most scholars carefully avoided simplistic employment of the term ‘homosexual’ to refer to men who have sex with other men in the region, and many began to question the dichotomous representation of active and passive participants in same-sex sex as poorly representative of the realities of these men’s lives. Work on Brazil and Mexico has been especially fruitful in developing these distinctions. Parker (1999) in Brazil and Núñez (1994) in Mexico have shown that the active—passive dichotomy with which previous scholars have characterised same-sex sex in those countries can miss as much as it captures with respect to changing norms and actual sexual practices.
Another topic of controversy in the region has related to understanding change and resilience, and more specifically how much men have changed in recent years. One area of research has been new forms of masculine domination and contradictions between modern discourses and so-called traditional practices. More generally, there has been considerable debate regarding diverse factors involved in change, such as political movements, modernisation efforts with respect to education, reproductive health and changing employment patterns.
Finally, in a general sense it is important to note certain general differences evident in studies conducted from, in contrast to those about, Latin America. Scholars from Latin America often are especially concerned with developing and adapting theories for the complex conditions pertaining in different parts of the region, and they have shown themselves more reticent to adopt wholesale theories of hegemonic masculinity, for example, that initially emerged from distinct Eur-opean and US historical and cultural contexts. It goes without saying that sweeping generalisations about ‘Latin American men’ or ‘Latin American machismo’, for example—stereotypes as often as not grounded in the colonial imaginary and European notions of modernity—are encountered far more in the studies written by scholars writing outside than by researchers writing from within the region.
The study of men as engendered and engendering beings in Latin America has since its onset adopted a more unambiguous critical feminist lens for understanding menas-men within general paradigms delineating power and inequality. The ‘me-tooism’ which developed in parallel in certain wings of men’s studies in North America and Europe has been far less influential in Latin America. With respect to announcements of the death of antiquated masculinity, one need not adopt the view that there is a new man who has surfaced from the Argentine pampas to the shallows of the Rio Grande River, nor claim that challenges to men and masculinity are novel phenomena of our contemporary age, in order to recognise that men and women throughout Latin America have been grappling with what seem to many to be new ideas and relationships related to their masculine identities.
Despite differences of class, ethnic group, region and generation, Latin America is still seen by many as constituting in some palpable sense a coherent area of historical and cultural commonalties with respect to certain aspects of gender and sexuality. That is, despite the real and unanimous acknowledgement of the profound impact of globalisation on sexualities throughout Latin America, there is still simultaneously the deep-seated sense that these global influences were still filtered through particular, local, Latin American contexts. For this reason, in order to understand men and masculinities in the region, we are compelled to seek more than simply the Latin versions of global trends and transformations.
Although we find pan-Latin frameworks altogether inaccurate, we are compelled nonetheless to ask how sexualities in Latin America are part of global processes of change, those transformations underway since the late twentieth century which carry profound implications for sexualities in the Latin Americas. Parker (1999) and Olavarría (2003), for example, demonstrate the relationship between changing masculinities and economic changes evident in neoliberal programmes on reproductive health, the growing number of women working outside the home for money, and the expansion of international sex markets.
Brennan (2004) documents how Europeans travel to the north coast of the Dominican Republic to live out their racialised fantasies among Dominican and Haitian women. Politically men and masculinities in Latin America have been affected in dramatic ways by feminist projects in the region and globally, by urban movements for social services in which women have often played a significant role and men have been challenged by women’s independence and initiative (see Fuller 2001; Gutmann 1996), by general trends towards democratisation that have raised new issues of cultural citizenship including with respect to gender differences (see Viveros 2002; Gutmann 2003), and by AIDS activism in many countries of the region, including the important correlation between social development and social networks for gay communities and the resulting reduction of risk in sexual behaviour (see Parker 1999).
Demographically, mass access to modern forms of contraception and the consequent fall in birth rates has tested gender/sexuality identities, behaviour and roles in intimate and associational ways, while the fact that girls’ attendance rates at school have risen more quickly than boys’ has had obvious implications in numerous ways, including the training and qualifications of women and men for various sectors of employment. The shift from more uniformly differentiated divisions of household labour in the countryside to situations which have given rise to greater fluidity in gender employment patterns as a result of modernisation and urbanisation has accordingly had dramatic consequences for men and women as they have become more thoroughly incorporated into wage labour relations.
Research is needed in several areas relating to men and masculinity in Latin America. As mentioned, the relationship between ethnicity, race and masculinity in the region is an important topic for future work. Another concerns various aspects of masculinity and violence, from state-sponsored wars to domestic abuse to questions of criminality. Despite recent work on reproductive health, additional studies on issues as diverse as AIDS and vasectomies are necessary. Although some histories of masculinity in Latin America have appeared in English, we need to better distinguish between genuinely more novel identities and social relations involving men and women and those sometimes too casually termed ‘traditional’. More generally, there is some urgency to bring gender analysis into areas of research involving men but in which men have not been treated as engendered and engendering beings themselves, such as the displaced of Colombia, Mexican migrants in the United States, and the political hierarchies throughout the continent.
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