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Sexual Positions: Caveats and Second Thoughts on “Categories”*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Roger N. Lancaster
Roger N. Lancaster*
Affiliation:
George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia
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Extract

I am deeply honored to be asked to address the Conference on Latin American History, especially on the topic of gay/lesbian studies. As a way of discussing gay studies in Latin America, let me reflect on my ethnographic research on gender and sexuality in Nicaragua. Because I am an anthropologist, I will focus on problems of ethnographic representation. But ultimately and, I think, logically, these problems open to historical questions as well. First, then, a brief reprise of my arguments about male same-sex relations, as developed in Life is Hard and elsewhere.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 54 , Issue 1 , July 1997 , pp. 1 - 16
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 1997

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Footnotes

*

Many thanks to Dennis Altman, Ruth Behar, Samuel Colón, Micaela di Leonardo, Martin Duberman, Jeff Escoffier, Licia Fiol-Matta, Jean Franco, Marcial Godoy, Ramón Gutiérrez, Matt Gutmann, Donna Guy, Robert Irwin, Luiz Mott, Richard Parker, Vincent Peloso, Jorge Salessi, Linda Seligmann, Brett Williams, Carter Wilson, and Patricia Zavella—for feedback, encouragement, and intellectual liveliness.

References

1 This talk, “On Gay Studies in Latin America,” was given as the luncheon address at the Conference on Latin American History during the 1997 meetings of the American Historical Association in New York City (January 3). A different version of this talk was also given at the conference on Crossing National and Sexual Borders: Queer Sexualities in Latin/o America, sponsored by the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS), The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and the Albert Schweitzer Program in the Humanities, New York University (3–5 October 1996). A few phrases and paragraphs appeared in my review essay, “On Homosexualities in Latin America (And Other Places),” American Ethnologist 24:1 (February, 1997), 193–202.

2 Lancaster, Roger N., “Comment on Arguelles and Rich,” Signs, 12 :1 (Autumn, 1986) 188–192;Google Scholar “Subject Honor and Object Shame: The Construction of Male Homosexuality and Stigma in Nicaragua,” Ethnology 27: 2 (April, 1988) 111–125; Life is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); “ ‘That We Should All Turn Queer?’ Homosexual Stigma in the Making of Manhood and the Breaking of a Revolution in Nicaragua,” In Parker, Richard, and Gagnon, John, eds., Conceiving Sexuality: Approaches to Sex Research in a Postmodern World (New York: Routledge, 1995).Google Scholar

3 See Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990) pp. 133–34Google Scholar, and various references in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993).

4 I hope I am not misunderstood as arguing that any kind of sex in any position either has or implies a necessary social or political content. There is nothing inherently debased—or even “passive”—about being penetrated. Rather, what I want to highlight is how sex acts acquire politics in a social medium—and how they then, tautologically, come to enact the power relations they signify.

5 On how identity might be seen as “spoiled,” see Goffman, Erving, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1959);Google Scholar on “masculinity in crisis,” see Berger, Maurice Wallis, Brian and Watson, Simon eds., Constructing Masculinity (New York: Routledge, 1995).Google Scholar

6 Altman, Dennis, Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation (New York: New York University Press, 1993 [1971]);Google Scholar Hocquenghem, Guy, Homosexual Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993 [1978]);Google Scholar Katz, Jonathan Ned, The Invention of Heterosexuality (New York: Dutton, 1995);Google Scholar Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990);Google Scholar Weeks, Jeffrey, Sexuality and Its Discontents: Meanings, Myths, and Modern Sexu-alities (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 For a very short working list, see, for example, Almaguer, Tomás, “Chicano Men: A Cartography of Homosexual Identity and Behavior,” In Abelove, Henry, Barale, Michèle Aina, and Halperin, David M., eds., The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 255–273;Google Scholar Balderston, Daniel, and Guy, Donna J., eds., Sex and Sexuality in Latin America (New York: New York University Press, 1997);Google Scholar Carrier, Joseph, De Los Otros: Intimacy and Homosexuality Among Mexican Men (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995);Google Scholar Gut-mann, Matthew, “Los hijos de Lewis: La sensibilidad antropológica y el caso de los pobres machos,” Alteridades (Mexico City) 4:7 (1994) pp. 9–19,Google Scholar and The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Lumsden, Ian, Machos, Maricones, and Gays: Cuba and Homosexuality (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996);Google Scholar Murray, Stephen O., (with additional contributions by Manuel, Arboleda G., et al.), Latin American Male Homosexualities (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995);Google Scholar Parker, Richard G., Bodies, Pleasures, and Passions: Sexual Culture in Contemporary Brazil (Boston: Beacon, 1991);Google Scholar Stern, Steve J., The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late Colonial Mexico (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995);Google Scholar Whisnant, David E., Rascally Signs in Sacred Places: The Politics of Culture in Nicaragua (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).Google Scholar

8 See Jean Franco’s telling discussions of Paz, and Lewis, , in Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).Google Scholar

9 Matthew Gutmann The Meanings of Macho; Rouse, Roger, “Review of Life is Hard,” Contemporary Sociology 23:1 (January, 1994), pp. 57–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 See Wolf’s, Eric, arguments in the Introduction to Europe and the People Without A History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).Google Scholar

11 Canclini, Néstor García, Transforming Modernity: Popular Cultures in Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993),Google Scholar and Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Benítez-Rojo, Antonio, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, Second Edition (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996 [1992]);Google Scholar Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, “Founding Statement,” Boundary 2 20:3 (1993), pp. 110–121.

12 Altman, Dennis, “Rupture or Continuity? The Internationalization of Gay Identities,” Social Text 14:3 (1996).Google Scholar See also Parker, Richar Beneath the Equator: Cultures of Desire, Male (Homo)sexuality, and the Emerging Gay Communities in Brazil (forthcoming, Routledge).Google Scholar

13 Boas, Franz, Race, Language, and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982 Google Scholar [1940]) and The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883–1911: A Franz Boas Reader, ed. by Stocking, George W. Jr. (New York: Basic Books, 1974).Google Scholar

14 On this general topic, see essays by Stoler, Somerville, Sen, Gal, Fausto-Sterling, Parker, Zavella, Schein, Abu-Lughod, Povinelli, Martin, and others, in Lancaster, Roger N., and di Leonardo, Micaela, eds. The Gender/Sexuality Reader: Culture, History, Political Economy (New York: Routledge, 1997).Google Scholar

15 To steal a conceit from Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 36.Google Scholar

16 Ruth Behar, personal communication.

17 Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction. (New York: Vintage Books, 1978 Google Scholar [1976]).

18 Geertz, Clifford, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), p. 77,Google Scholar 90.

19 Butler, Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter.

20 For my attempt at a very different opening on the question, see “Guto’s Performance: Notes on the Transvestism of Everyday Life,” in Balderston, Daniel, and Guy, Donna J., eds., Sex and Sexuality in Latin America (New York: New York University Press, 1997), pp. 9–32.Google Scholar

21 Richard Parker, Bodies, Pleasures, and Passions.