A New World Engendered: Intersections. The Making of the Iberian Transatlantic Empires – XVI to XIX Centuries

This article approaches the intersections developed under the colonial Spanish empire among gender relations, feminine sexuality concepts, family honor and State regulation. The way the multiple moral, social, juridical and religious norms in relation to sexuality and relations between women and men interacted with the social/political inequalities in the Iberian colonial experience will be analyzed. The New World provides a particularly clear example of the dynamic intersections between contemporary ideas and ideals about sex/gender and race/ethnicity and social class that became manifest on the new identification systems, classification and social discrimination forged in the consolidation of the Iberian American colonial society. It also becomes an example of the consequences that the sexual morality and the prevailing gender stereotypes have had in all the aspects of women’s lives

En busca del paraíso perdido

Obra ressenyada: Ernst Bornemann. Das Patriarchat, Ursprung und Zukufh unseres Gesellschaftsystems. Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 1975

La mujer es puro cuento: la cultura del género La mujer es puro cuento: the culture of gender

El término género se tornó un atajo, en la década de los 1970s, para designar la construcción cultural y no las bases biológicas del tratamiento desigual entre hombres y mujeres, además de la dominación de las mujeres por los hombres. En las últimas tres décadas de teorización feminista ese vocablo se tornó tan ubícuo como ambíguo pero, sorprendentemente, no existe una historia semántica de sus orígenes, de sus significados, ni de los varios abordajes. En este artículo demuestro que sexólogos y psicólogos americanos introdujeron la palabra gênero en los años 1950s, con la intención de distinguir el sexo anatómico del género social. Esa construcción biomédica de género es relevante para entender las dificultades epistemológicas, en la teoría feminista, con la conección entre género y sexo. El artículo aborda tres questiones relacionadas entre sí: 1) la costumbre, entre académicas feministas, de asociar el término género a las diferencias sexuales; 2) el dualismo heterosexual que caracteriza la noción médica original de género social y que persiste en gran parte de la teoría feminista, hasta fines de los años 1980s; y 3) la indisputada dicotomía cartesiana entre naturaleza y cultura que permanece como un hilván en las controversias sobre sexo y género. Este artículo, inevitablemente, no es conclusivo. Como sugiero, avances de la biotecnología pueden abrir nuevos panoramas en relación al dilema antropológico fundamental de conciliar la cultura con la naturaleza.The term gender has become the feminist shorthand, in the 1970s, to signal the cultural construction rather than biological basis of women's unequal treatment and domination by men. In the past three decades the term has become as ubiquitous as ambiguous in feminist theorizing but, surprisingly, there is no semantic history of the origins, changing approaches and meanings of the concept. In this article I show that US sexologists and psychologists introduced gender in the 1950s in their endeavour to distinguish anatomical sex from social gender. This biomedical construction of gender is relevant for the epistemological difficulties in feminist theory with the link between gender and sex. In this article I address three related issues: 1) the habit among feminist scholars to explicitly or implicitly root gender in sex differences, 2) the heterosexual dualism that characterized the original medical notion of social gender and persists in much feminist theorizing until the late 1980s, and 3) the unquestioned cartesian dichotomy between nature and culture that runs like a red thread through the controversy over sex and gender. The article is inevitably open-ended. As I suggest, developments in biotechnology may open new vistas on what is the fundamental anthropological dilemma, namely, how to reconcile culture with nature

En busca del paraíso perdido

Obra ressenyada: Ernst Bornemann. Das Patriarchat, Ursprung und Zukufh unseres Gesellschaftsystems. Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 1975

“La Mujer es Puro Cuento”: The Culture of Gender

The term gender has become the feminist shorthand, in the 1970s, to signal the cultural construction rather than biological basis of women’s unequal treatment and domination by men. In the past three decades the term has become as ubiquitous as ambiguous in feminist theorizing but, surprisingly, there is no semantic history of the origins, changing approaches and meanings of the concept. In this article I show that US sexologists and psychologists introduced gender in the 1950s in their endeavour to distinguish anatomical sex from social gender. This biomedical construction of gender is relevant for the epistemological difficulties in feminist theory with the link between gender and sex. In this article I address three related issues: 1) the habit among feminist scholars to explicitly or implicitly root gender in sex differences, 2) the heterosexual dualism that characterized the original medical notion of social gender and persists in much feminist theorizing until the late 1980s, and 3) the unquestioned cartesian dichotomy between nature and culture that runs like a red thread through the controversy over sex and gender. The article is inevitably open-ended. As I suggest, developments in biotechnology may open new vistas on what is the fundamental anthropological dilemma, namely, how to reconcile culture with nature

A representação audiovisual das mulheres migradas The audiovisual representation of migrant women

Neste artigo analiso as representações sobre as mulheres migradas nos fundos audiovisuais de algumas entidades que trabalham com gênero e imigração em Barcelona. Por haver detectado nos audiovisuais analisados uma associação recorrente das mulheres migradas à pobreza, à criminalidade, à ignorância, à maternidade obrigatória e numerosa, à prostituição etc., busquei entender como tais representações tomam forma, estudando os elementos narrativos, estilísticos, visuais e verbais através dos quais se articulam essas imagens e discursos sobre as mulheres migradas.<br>In this paper I analyze the representations of the migrant women at the audiovisual founds in some of the organizations that work with gender and immigration in Barcelona. At the audiovisuals I have found a recurring association of the migrant women with poverty, criminality, ignorance, passivity, undocumentation, gender violence, compulsory and numerous motherhood, prostitution, etc. Thus, I tried to understand the ways in which these representations are shaped, studying the narrative, stylistic, visual and verbal elements through which these images and discourses of the migrant women are articulated