Abstract
To overcome gender inequalities 1 , the production of knowledge for a critical understanding of men and masculinities in contemporary societies must be undertaken on a global scale. This process involves different things. On the one hand, it means getting to know individual and institutional practices, discourses, and ideologies that produce men and masculinities from different parts of the world. Additionally, it involves thinking about how local masculinities connect to social, economic, and political processes at both regional and global levels. On the other hand, studying global men and masculinities must also include a more robust exchange of knowledge between different parts of the world, including a variety of political, theoretical, and methodological traditions, in different formats of producing and using knowledge. This implies jointly rethinking the production of social knowledge to defeat the hegemony of knowledge formed in the global North (primarily the United States, Canada, and Western Europe), to include knowledge produced in the global South, i.e., the rest of the world. Holistic understandings of men and masculinities must be more globally engaged to produce more inclusive and democratic social sciences, which will require new and further connections between the North and the South (i.e., Bhambra 2014; Connell 2007; Go 2016; Patel 2010). This symposium responds to all these needs and hopes to promote a more global dialogue on the politics of men and masculinities. 1
The essays presented in this symposium provide theoretical, empirical, and social policy contributions to global knowledge concerning the situation of men and masculinities from the perspective of Latin America, but in global dialogue. The work builds on earlier work in the journal, such as the special issue organized by Matthew Guttmann (2001) including original work by Mara Viveros Vigoya, Claudia Fonseca, Xavier Andrade, Miguel Díaz Barriga, and Norma Fuller (Men and Masculinities 2001). Since that time, scholarship on men and masculinities throughout Latin America has grown substantially since that time. This symposium relates to that initial special issue and reflects some of the growth and diversity of scholarship on men and masculinities in Latin America today.
The eight works that comprise this special symposium have been revised from a collection of chapters published in a pathbreaking anthology, Masculinidades en América Latina: Veinte Años de Estudios y Políticas para la Igualdad de Género (Madrid, Valdés, and Celedón 2020). That project resulted from an international seminar, “20 Years of Studies of Men and Masculinities in Latin America: What We Have Done and Where We Are Going”, held at the headquarters of the UN Food and Agriculture (FAO) in Santiago, Chile in November 2018. The seminar aimed to assess and reflect on the work carried out in Latin America in the last 20 years since the first large Latin American conference took place at the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC) (see, i.e., Valdés and Olavarría 1998).
Critical studies of men and masculinities in Latin America began in the 1980s, although it was not fully formalised until the 1990s. The first books date from the early nineties (e.g., Nolasco 1993; Ramírez 1993), and the scholars’ main objective was to debate machismo as a characteristic feature of masculinity in Latin America. In the region, this field of research was driven by the international feminist agenda and the central role of some women (such as Teresita de Barbieri, Norma Fuller, Mara Viveros, Ondina Fachel, and Teresa Valdés), as well as some gay men’s and sexual dissidence movements. These scholars collectively promoted a research agenda aimed at understanding gender relations from the point of view of men and the maintenance of gender asymmetric power relations (e.g., Fuller 2001; Viveros, Olavarría and Fuller 2001; Olavarría 2001; Viveros 2002).
Today, critical studies on men and masculinities in Latin America is an active intellectual and political site. Scholars in the region regularly engage at the multiple conferences that review the results of empirical and theoretical studies. This means that a good deal of scholarship is being published in both Spanish and Portuguese – showing that the question of machismo has been successfully challenged, and examining the diverse lives of Latin American men, including their diverse relationships with women and sexual dissidences. This scholarship explores the multiple masculinities in the region and their relationships with long-standing socio-political and cultural processes. Various books (e.g., Olavarría 2017; Viveros 2018), anthologies (e.g., Fabbri 2021; Jaime 2023; Madrid, Valdés and Celedón 2020), and special issues in academic journals (e.g., Revista Hybris, 2021), along with a vast “grey” literature, detail different areas and dynamics of men and masculinities within the context of asymmetrical gender relations throughout Latin America. Therefore, the essays presented in this symposium should be understood as a small sample of the prolific and diverse production in this field throughout Latin America.
The articles that make up this symposium were written by authors from five Spanish-speaking Latin American countries: Chile (Olavarría, and Aguayo), Costa Rica (Menjívar), Colombia (Viveros, and Sánchez), Mexico (Ramírez and Gutiérrez, and Vargas), and Peru (Fuller). Because of this, we are publishing the essay titles and abstracts in both English and Spanish, alongside the full text of this symposium. The full symposium brings together scholars who could be called “classic” in critical studies on men and masculinities in the region (Fuller, Olavarría, Viveros, Ramírez) with younger scholars who have been revitalising the Latin American scene (Aguayo, Menjívar, Sánchez, Vargas). In addition to various countries and generations, the authors display a disciplinary diversity by presenting sociological, anthropological, and historical scholarly perspectives.
There are three types of essays included in the symposium: theoretical reflections, presentation of the results of empirical studies, and social policy analyses. The first two essays are theoretical. The Chilean sociologist José Olavarría and the Colombian anthropologist Mara Viveros contribute to the global theoretical reflection from two key concepts: gender orders and intersectionality. José Olavarría debates the processes of transformation in gender relations through which masculinities are created, questioning the notions of progressive and linear change. To do this, Olavarría discusses the ways that, in Latin America, four gender orders coexist and overlap with one another. He argues that understanding separate but interlocking gender orders helps us account for the durability of gender inequalities within the region. The Colombian anthropologist, Mara Viveros, examines how masculine norms, positions, and identities are relative and shaped by the interactions between class, colour, race, and region. She reminds us that masculinities have colours, which has implications for understanding the consolidation of the modern/colonial project in what she calls “Our America” (as opposed to the colonialist concept of “Latin America”). Thus, Viveros places the subject of power and oppression at the centre of the reflection on intersectionality, linking it to socio-historical processes and providing illustrations from her Colombian studies on imaginaries and representations about Black men, about the continuities and changes in “whiteness” and its relationship with sex/gender to legitimise white men's domination and privileges, and the role of masculinity in the continuum of violence.
The second group of essays report on recent empirical research. The first two address the issue of power from an intersectional perspective, from the point of view of how class elites and race relate to masculinities. The third addresses the changes and continuities in masculinities from a generational point of view. The first work is by the Costa Rican historian Mauricio Menjívar, who presents an analytical framework to explain his concept of “neocolonial masculinity”: the masculinity embodied by mestizo and white men who are State officials in their “contact” with indigenous peoples in Costa Rica’s southern Caribbean region, between 1870 and 1920. His theoretical contribution is based on the work of Raewyn Connell and Latin American decolonial authors such as Quijano and Lugones. The second empirical work is authored by the Colombian anthropologist Pilar Sánchez and analyses the mechanisms through which transnational corporations control the intimate lives of managers to preserve patriarchy within global capitalism. Based on ethnographic research in Colombia and Ecuador, Sánchez addresses the role of homosociality in defining power hierarchies to become a “good as manager.” Peruvian psychologist Norma Fuller, the author of the third essay, compares two generations of university student men in Lima, Peru in relation to the demands of women's and LGBTIQ + movements. Fuller examines the dynamics of change and continuity in masculinities, finding significant variations in different historical contexts and providing nuances for research based on the approach of inclusive masculinities. An essential element that Fuller highlights is the ambivalent character of millennial masculinities, different from the 90s generation.
The third group of essays discusses social policies oriented to transform men and masculinities. The first, written by the Chilean psychologist Francisco Aguayo, provides a regional overview of public gender policies in Latin America and their articulation with masculinities and the configurations of gender practices. He does this from the point of view of four areas: paternity, health, violence, and sexual diversity, and highlights some innovative initiatives that may introduce a trend towards change. However, he concludes that social policies in the region continue to reproduce men’s provider mandates, leading to the need to propose a new generation of social policies. This article is followed by two contributions on Mexico. The essay by Juan Carlos Ramírez Rodríguez and Norma Celina Gutiérrez-de-la-Torre addresses the role of the State in promoting cultural transformation towards gender equality, putting men at the centre of public policies and interventions. The authors propose a five-pronged agenda for Mexico to put men at the core of supporting gender equality—an agenda elaborated with a participatory methodology consisting of different research methods in different stages. The final essay, written by the Mexican sociologist Mauro Vargas, highlights the critical role of the private sector, namely companies and corporations, in reorganising care work so that it is not exclusively handled by the family. Vargas proposes modifying the sexual division of labour on which gender inequities are based to lead towards effective equality between women and men. He also describes the theoretical-practical approach developed by the NGO he directs, which provides the learning outcomes and interventional results of their work with the private sector in Mexico.
This small sample of critical works on men and masculinities in Latin America exhibits at least four contributions that should be of interest to and engage readers of Men and Masculinities in the global North. Firstly, the works offer a more structural vision of gender relations. The essays offer important lessons and insights on the relevance of historical contexts to understanding that identity does not float outside of social structures, but is an integral part of them. There is a historical explanation for this. Latin America is a living expression of colonialism, domination, politics and interpersonal violence, economic dependence, and the neoliberal order that has characterised the Western world and marked relations between the North and South, not only in economics and politics but also in the area of gender relations and knowledge creation.
Secondly, the essays account for multiple ways of being men and numerous patterns of masculinities beyond the idea of the Latin American macho. In this regard, the intersectional view is crucial in understanding men and contemporary masculinities in this region. Masculinities in Latin America are shaped by intertwining social class, race, ethnicity, generations, and regional variations within the framework of structures of asymmetrical social relations that condition social practices.
Thirdly, understanding how power and privilege operate is vital on one of the world's most unequal continents. Understanding the masculinities that are being produced in such contexts of power and privilege is of vital importance since recent electoral triumphs in the region (and worldwide) have repositioned conservative agendas of groups seeking renewed maintenance of their privileges when confronted with social protest and the advancement of the human rights agenda with explicit sexist, homophobic, and racist biases.
Fourthly and finally, the work presented here broadly address social change among men and among masculinities as part of shifting gender relations. The vision of change that these works address and illustrate, from the theoretical, empirical, and social policies, is a vision that is not naïve or lineal. Instead, this work recognises advances and setbacks, light and dark, continuities and changes, and variations with setbacks. However, these scholars also illustrate that change occurs at and between different levels, in the political action of different groups and players, and throughout people’s everyday lives in Latin American as well as elsewhere. Change is not something that occurs only at macro or institutional levels, but also at biographical levels.
The knowledge and experiences accumulated in more than 20 years of developing this area in Latin America account for the vast scholarly explorations and contributions about local realities that can contribute not only to debates on global gender diversity, but also to examinations of current constructions of masculinities and gender politics on a global scale. Knowledge interests from the global South can do more than expand theories of the global North, it should also be understood as contributing novel theoretical and empirical developments that address power dynamics and systems domination inhibiting gender equality more broadly. Putting these works at the disposal of the English-speaking community is an invitation to a dialogue and academic exchange where knowledge is built together. It, too, is an invitation to overcome the “exclusionary practices” that have weakened the heterogeneity of feminist scholarship on masculinities (e.g., Bridges 2019), which has had the collective consequence, to paraphrase Raewyn Connell, of an “incompleteness” of critical studies of men and masculinities and thus produced, among other things, universalistic claims and generalisations from Eurocentric work and perspectives (Connell 2007, 226). In short, we hope this symposium supports new forms of global and interdisciplinary dialogue, alongside political and cultural action transforming the exercise of power by men towards gender equality.