Gender And The Boundaries Of Dress In Contemporary Peru

Set in Arequipa during Peru's recent years of crisis, this ethnography reveals how dress creates gendered bodies. It explores why people wear clothes, why people make art, and why those things matter in a war-torn land. Blenda Femenías argues that women's clothes are key symbols of gender identity and resistance to racism. Moving between metropolitan Arequipa and rural Caylloma Province, the central characters are the Quechua- and Spanish-speaking maize farmers and alpaca herders of the Colca Valley. Their identification as Indians, whites, and mestizos emerges through locally produced garments called bordados. Because the artists who create these beautiful objects are also producers who carve an economic foothold, family workshops are vital in a nation where jobs are as scarce as peace. But ambiguity permeates all practices shaping bordados' significance. Femenías traces contemporary political and ritual applications, not only Caylloma's long-standing and violent ethnic conflicts, to the historical importance of cloth since Inca times. This is the only book about expressive culture in an Andean nation that centers on gender. In this feminist contribution to ethnography, based on twenty years' experience with Peru, including two years of intensive fieldwork, Femenías reflects on the ways gender shapes relationships among subjects, research, and representation.

The people of Taquile Island on the Peruvian side of beautiful Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the Americas, are renowned for the hand-woven textiles that they both wear and sell to outsiders. One thousand seven hundred Quechua-speaking peasant farmers, who depend on potatoes and the fish from the lake, host the forty thousand tourists who visit their island each year. Yet only twenty-five years ago, few tourists had even heard of Taquile. In Weaving a Future: Tourism, Cloth, and Culture on an Andean Island, Elayne Zorn documents the remarkable transformation of the isolated rocky island into a community-controlled enterprise that now provides a model for indigenous communities worldwide. Over the course of three decades and nearly two years living on Taquile Island, Zorn, who is trained in both the arts and anthropology, learned to weave from Taquilean women. She also learned how gender structures both the traditional lifestyles and the changes that tourism and transnationalism have brought. In her comprehensive and accessible study, she reveals how Taquileans used their isolation, landownership, and communal organizations to negotiate the pitfalls of globalization and modernization and even to benefit from tourism. This multi-sited ethnography set in Peru, Washington, D.C., and New York City shows why and how cloth remains central to Andean society and how the marketing of textiles provided the experience and money for Taquilean initiatives in controlling tourism. The first book about tourism in South America that centers on traditional arts as well as community control, Weaving a Future will be of great interest to anthropologists and scholars and practitioners of tourism, grassroots development, and the fiber arts.

Each morning we establish an image and an identity for ourselves through the simple act of getting dressed. Why Women Wear What They Wear presents an intimate ethnography of clothing choice. The book uses real women's lives and clothing decisions - observed and discussed at the moment of getting dressed - to illustrate theories of clothing, the body and identity. Woodward pieces together what women actually think about clothing, dress and the body in a world where popular media and culture presents an increasingly extreme and distorted view of femininity and the ideal body. Immediately accessible to all those who have stood in front of a mirror and wondered 'does this make me look fat?', 'is this skirt really me?' or 'does this jacket match?', Why Women Wear What They Wear provides students of anthropology and fashion with a fresh perspective on the social issues and constraints we are all consciously or unconsciously negotiating when we get dressed.

The first collection of its kind, Provocations: A Transnational Reader in the History of Feminist Thought is historically organized and transnational in scope, highlighting key ideas, transformative moments, and feminist conversations across national and cultural borders. Emphasizing feminist cross-talk, transnational collaborations and influences, and cultural differences in context, this anthology heralds a new approach to studying feminist history. Provocations includes engaging, historically significant primary sources by writers of many nationalities in numerous genresÑfrom political manifestos to theoretical and cultural analysis to poetry and fiction. These texts range from those of classical antiquity to others composed during the Arab Spring and represent Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, Western Europe, and the United States. Each section begins with an introductory essay that presents central ideas and explores connections among readings, placing them in historical, national, and intellectual contexts and concluding with questions for discussion and reflection. Ê

This multidisciplinary--indeed, transdisciplinary--combination of archaeological, historical, and ethnographic research reveals how the Andean people of southern Peru's Colca Valley experienced and responded to successive waves of colonial rule by the Inka and Spanish empires from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. While most research splits the prehispanic and post-conquest eras into separate domains of study, Steven Wernke's perspective explicitly combines archaeological and documentary sources to bridge the Spanish conquest of the Andes. He integrates GIS-based spatial analyses of documentary sources with archaeological survey and the only excavations of an early Spanish doctrinal settlement in the highland Andes to present a local perspective on how new communities and landscapes emerged as part of a continuous process of adapting to consecutive imperial occupations. Wernke's findings show how Spanish ideals of urban order penetrated this rural provincial setting as early as the first generation after the conquest, as well as the ways the integration of Spanish ideals depended on their resonance with prehispanic Andean precedents. Through integration of empirical research and social theory, this volume contributes to current debates on colonial and postcolonial theory, historical anthropology, and the growing field of colonial archaeology. At ease whether examining religious practice at early Franciscan mission settlements or reconstructing prehispanic Andean land use, Wernke argues that we should avoid thinking of relations within the Inka and Spanish states as a dichotomy between colonizers and colonized; instead he traces how new kinds of communities and landscapes were co-produced at the local scale.

Combating abuse and violence in a South American capital

In Women’s Place in the Andes Florence E. Babb draws on four decades of anthropological research to reexamine the complex interworkings of gender, race, and indigeneity in Peru and beyond. She deftly interweaves five new analytical chapters with six of her previously published works that exemplify currents in feminist anthropology and activism. Babb argues that decolonizing feminism and engaging more fully with interlocutors from the South will lead to a deeper understanding of the iconic Andean women who are subjects of both national pride and everyday scorn. This book’s novel approach goes on to set forth a collaborative methodology for rethinking gender and race in the Americas.

While there exists a wide range of material covering violence against women, very little scholarly attention has been paid to international media treatments of gendered violence. This volume addresses the gap by providing a broad overview of contemporary representations of gendered violence, enabling comparison and contrast in forms of violence and constructions of gender across a wide range of political and geographic contexts. From nonfictional accounts of the mass rapes during the Rwandan genocide to the sexual objectification of women in Serbian media and depictions of prostitute murders in the Chinese media, this book provides an overview of media representations of gendered violence around the globe. In addition to documenting specific challenges and shortcomings of mainstream representations, chapters present insight into the various forms of resistance and hope that exist in each particular area, and analytical essays open up new lines of inquiry by offering an assessment of the uneven changes that feminist activism has enabled around the world. Suitable for students and scholars in women's studies, gender studies, media, sociology, and education, Local Violence, Global Media can be used as a supplementary text in courses on media violence, sociology of media, gendered violence in media, and international perspectives on women's studies.