Gender and Sexuality in Latin America

Catalog description

This course examines how women and LGBTQ+ people in Latin America and the Caribbean have participated in national uprisings, revolutions, rebellions, and various feminist, anti-racist and social movements. Readings cover the incredible variety of women and LGBTQ+ people’s participation by examining their activism across time, space and political position. These include struggles to improve the quality of their own lives and the lives of others. However, to avoid romanticizing women’s and LGBTQ+ activism, the course also discusses actions on behalf of political projects designed to uphold the interests of the elite, including class, race, gender and sexual hierarchies. Women and LGBTQ+ people in Latin America and the Caribbean, as elsewhere, live complicated lives, have complicated political goals and commitments, and have different access to political, social, racial, and economic power depending upon their position within the class, sexual, racial, ethnic, religious, age, and gender hierarchies of their societies. Over the semester, we will analyze why women and LGBTQ+ people have been involved in political movements and feminist projects, the effects of activism on social positions and status within these societies, the changing relationship between men, women, and gender variant people across the Americas, contested understandings of gender, sexual, racial, and class relations, and the overall impact of these struggles on Latin American and Caribbean countries.