Masculinities and Femininities in Latin America's Uneven Development

"Susan Paulson’s exciting and original text challenges the current thinking about gender in social sciences. Her unique contribution to gender scholarship is not only the focus on men and masculinity but also the ability to intersect socioeconomic gender differences with the concept of territoriality. In the three case studies and her insightful analytical chapters, Paulson poses critical questions about men and masculinity in Latin America in order to ask how individuals and communities strive to produce territories that provide sustainable communities, economies and ecologies. The book is a theoretical triumph that provides new ways to see and understand ongoing processes of gender relations in the sociocultural and biophysical spaces of Latin America’s continuing uneven development."

-Wendy Harcourt, Associate Professor in Critical Development and Feminist Studies, International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam (ISS/EUR), The Netherlands

"This book provides a welcome ‘correction’ to the woman-centered bias in the field of gender and development. Paulson demonstrates how analyses which focus solely on women not only miss half the story, but are also unsatisfactory without attention to the complex ways that gender intersects with class, race and ethnicity, and space, among other factors. Case studies drawn from Mexico, Chile and Bolivia well illustrate her main point, that gender arrangements and dynamics influence the evolution of institutions and environments. By analyzing how gender systems impact upon and are impacted by broader processes of socioeconomic and cultural change she illustrates how these dynamics can sometimes produce greater gender equity while at the same time exacerbating other forms of inequality, and vice versa. This book should be required reading in gender and development courses; it should also serve as a stimulating complementa