Nov 12, 2013 - Women's History and the History of Gender in Mexico ... la mujer en la historia de México, another global vision of women in Mexican history.
Imagined Communities: Women's History and the History of Gender in Mexico María Teresa Fernández-Aceves
Journal of Women's History, Volume 19, Number 1, Spring 2007, pp. 200-205 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/jowh.2007.0010
For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jowh/summary/v019/19.1fernandez-aceves.html
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Imagined Communities: Women’s History and the History of Gender in Mexico María Teresa Fernández-Aceves
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he purpose of this paper is not to discuss all, or a large part, of what has been done in the Mexican women and gender historiography since the mid-1970s. My aim instead is to pinpoint the trends in the national academic culture, the most important developments of women’s and gender history, mainly in Mexico, recent publications, research policies, and finally, the difficulties in doing transnational history. In twentieth-century Mexico, trained historians from different academic settings—public and private universities as well as federal and state research centers—have applied diverse perspectives from Marxism to the diverse approaches of the Annales School. In the late 1960s, Luis González y González proposed the development of regional history and microhistory in his study of San José de Gracia, a rural town in western Mexico.1 For González, microhistory referred to the local historical experience that was representative of, or more importantly a contrasting variant of, national narratives. This perspective stimulated and consolidated regional studies of different states, localities, and the revolutionary experience. Recently, Mexican historiography has moved from structural to cultural analyses incorporating the new French cultural history, promoted by Roger Chartier and the proposals of Michel de Certeau about everyday life; the Italian school of microhistory led by Carlo Ginzburg; the German historical sociology of Norbert Elias; and Benedict Anderson’s study of nations and nationalism in Imagined Communities.2 However, social history, with its emphasis on structure and class analysis, remains important. Most Mexican historiography, however, has neglected women and gender. Those who do this work still comprise a small academic ghetto. During the second feminist wave in the 1970s and 1980s some feminist scholars emerged to work in periods from the colony through the Revolution of 1910. They have looked at issues of marriage, sexuality, labor, education, and politics. As elsewhere in the first stages of women’s history, Mexican historians have concentrated on demonstrating that women have been historical actors and have raised questions about the traditional periodization that leaves them out.3 In 1987, Julia Tuñón Pablos wrote Mujeres en la historia de México, the first comprehensive and synthetic narrative that incorporated women from Prehispanic times to the twentieth century.4 By using a traditional periodization, Tuñón plotted the different roles ascribed to women and the changing feminine representations and practices. At © 2007 Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 19 No. 1, 200–205.
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the same time, Carmen Ramos Escandón edited Presencia y transparencia: la mujer en la historia de México, another global vision of women in Mexican history. General bibliographies, like El álbum de la mujer, were compiled. In the 1980s, more extensive studies examined convents, sexuality, and education in colonial Mexico; women’s culture, roles, and representations; female labor force participation; women and the law in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; women and the Mexican Revolution; and the Mexican woman suffrage campaigns in the 1920s and 1950s.5 In the 1990s, as elsewhere, there has been a move from women’s history to gender history. However, a gender perspective in Mexico is still identified mostly with women. Women’s and gender history in Mexico have been recognized as historical fields, but the growing literature has not been incorporated into other, more mainstream historical approaches. Most of the time, these studies are read only by specialists on gender. In contrast to the Mexican and feminist historians, Mexicanist scholars from the Anglo world have drawn more upon the linguistic turn.6 Thus, their work is more embedded in feminist theory and poststructuralism. In the United States, these fields have not only been recognized but also incorporated into the academy. Unlike North American and British feminist scholars, Mexican feminist scholars tend to combine French social history perspectives—private life, everyday life, sexuality, and work—with Anglophone approaches to cultural history and discourse analysis. They cite Michèlle Perrot’s, Georges Duby’s, and Phillipe Ariès’s multivolume works on women’s and private life histories; French cultural history; Mexican and Italian microhistory; Norbert Elias’s configuration and civilizing processes concepts; and E. P. Thompson’s history from below.7 Joan Scott’s path-breaking article “Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis” has had a strong influence, most notably her arguments about “how politics constructs gender and gender constructs politics.”8 But her overall work has not been translated into Spanish and is not well known. There is not enough English-language feminist scholarship translated into Spanish to keep Mexican scholars informed of the trends in these fields. Nonetheless, Mexican scholars read new gender literature in English. Debate Feminista and La Ventana have made significant contributions by translating some of the most important leading discussions. It has been difficult to decode all the jargon used in gender studies; gender in Spanish does not refer to the social relationship of the sexes. Rather it has literary, class, and grammatical meanings.9 Another good example is “queer,” which in a rough translation could mean “rare,” but its use in Spanish has been debated in such recent and interesting works on queer representations and practices as that on Gabriela Mistral, a Chilean poetess and school policymaker in1920s
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Mexico.10 Some rough translations have provoked rejection, rather than more openness, in the mainstream academic community. In Mexico, there are nineteen different research centers and graduate programs offering women’s and gender studies. These reflect to some degree the institutionalization of gender studies due to women’s lobbying, networking, and conferences. However, very few are focused on historical study.11 There is no graduate program focusing exclusively on women’s history, nor is there a Mexican-based journal of women’s history. Recently, such journals such as Signos históricos (Historical Signs), Estudios del hombre (Men´s Studies), and Acervos: Boletín de los archivos y bibliotecas de Oaxaca (Records: Bulletin of Archives and Libraries from Oaxaca) have dedicated issues to women and gender.12 Since the 1980s, Mexican higher education has suffered from constant budget cuts due to the collapse of the economic system and the initiation of neoliberal policies. This has hampered research in social sciences. In general, Mexican academic institutions suffer from poverty. There is an unequal distribution of the educational budget. Most of Mexico City’s academic institutions tend to receive a significant amount of funding resources, leaving pennies to the other states. There is no money for professors to attend conferences, do their research, or even have access to such internet databases as Project Muse or JSTOR. Today, national research policy is dominated by a point of view that investigation should only be funded if it has an immediate impact on social and industrial policy. Thus, there is not an interest in historical studies as a whole. In the 2004 call for research proposals, the National Council on Science and Technology (CONACYT) stated that only senior professors who hold the higher levels (II and III) at the National Researchers System (SNI) could apply for funding for research. There is not a woman historian with the highest level at the SNI that is writing women’s and gender history. Most women historians are in level I and very few have been promoted to level II, but they are the ones who are doing women’s and gender history. Most the time, the committees on the field of history at the SNI, the Mexican Academy of Science, the Mexican Academy of History, and the Mexican Committee of Historical Science are controlled by historians who tend to write social history without attention to gender. In fact, in their different calls for grants, they do not recognize women’s and gender history as historical fields. Some of them reject North American training in history, in part because of the strong anti–North American sentiment and because of the emphasis on the linguistic turn. This complicates the incorporation of women’s and gender history into other mainstream historical approaches because they can be seen as an Anglo feminist scholarship influence.
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Despite these unfavorable conditions, in the 2000s, women’s and gender history have grown thanks to the theoretical, methodological, and empirical innovations of U.S., British, Latin American, and Mexican scholars and their efforts to build a transnational dialogue, as the Mexican women’s history and gender history network has done since 2000. These have not always been successful, but now we have more nuanced historical interpretations of diverse women from the Prehispanic period to the suffrage campaigns of the twentieth century. There has been a move from dichotomous analysis to study gender relations between men and women. Women’s and gender history have problematized conceptual categories about the nation, nation-state, nationalism, citizenship, gender, body, women, and masculinities. Now we know how women have contributed to nation-building in different periods; how the state and state agencies, legislation, and ideology have excluded women by using gender, ethnic, and racial arguments; and how twentieth-century Mexican national culture gendered the myths, traditions, icons, and symbols through which the nation has been imagined and glorified.13 Pioneering works have been done on masculinity and queerness.14 Still, we lack of more regional and national women’s and gender history to explore unstudied themes at different levels—local, global, micro, national, and transnational—in order to contextualize and understand the commonalities and peculiarities of Mexican women’s and gender history in a comparative perspective. We need more debates about how to intertwine gender, race, ethnicity, and class, how these categories complicate our historical narratives, and how they can illuminate the understanding of Mexican history at different moments and processes. As we contemplate transnational history, we still confront biases. Most Latin American and Mexican historians tend to read French and English literature. However, very few non-Mexicanist or non-Latino-Americanist scholars from the Anglo and European regions read the Spanish language studies produced in this region. In other words, there seems to be a Eurocentric/U.S.-centric tendency when it comes to gender history. Mexican historians should read U.S. and British historiography but the reverse is not expected. But some regional and biographical studies have reconstructed the networks of Mexican feminists with North American, Latin American, and Spanish feminists and the diaspora of emancipatory ideas.15 National history remains the defining framework. One way to build transnational histories and a dialogue with different scholars of diverse parts of the world, however, is to convert these fields into crossroads.
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Notes I would like to thank Mary Kay Vaughan and Betsy Sweet for their comments in formulating this article. 1 Luis González y González, Pueblo en vilo: Microhistoria de San José de Gracia (México: El Colegio de México, 1968). 2 Roger Chartier, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations, trans. Lidia G. Cochrane (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and Historical Method, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (New York: Urizen Books, 1978); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. and extended ed. (London: Verso, 1991). 3 Carmen Ramos-Escandón, Género e historia: la historiografía sobre la mujer (México City: Instituto Mora, and Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 1992). 4 Julia Tuñón Pablos, Mujeres en México: Una historia olvidada (México City: Planeta, 1987). 5 For excellent Mexican historiographical assessment, see Carmen RamosEscandón, “La historiografía sobre la mujer y el género en la historiografía mexicana reciente,” Boletín virtual del Centro de Estudios de Historia de la Mujer en América Latina 65, no. 4 (2005): 1–22; and Carmen Ramos-Escandón, “Quinientos años de olvido: historiografía e historia de la mujer en México,” Secuencia, nueva época 36 (1996): 121–50. 6 Sueann Caulfield, “The History of Gender in the Historiography of Latin America,” Hispanic American Historical Review 81, nos. 3–4 (2001): 451–90; and Mary Kay Vaughan, “Cultural Approaches to Peasant Politics in the Mexican Revolution,” Hispanic American Historical Review 79, no. 2 (1999): 269–308. 7 Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Knopf, 1962); Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, eds., A History of Private Life, 5 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987); Georges Duby, Michelle Perrot, and Pauline Schmitt Pantel, eds., A History of Women in the West, 5 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992–1994); and E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966).
Joan Wallach Scott, "Gender as a Category of Historical Analysis," in Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 46. 8
Marta Lamas, “Usos y dificultades y posibilidades de la categoría ‘género,’” in El género: la construcción cultural de la diferencia sexual, ed. Marta Lamas (México City: UNAM-PUEG, Grupo Editorial Miguel Angel Porrúa, 2000), 327–66. 9
10 Gabriela Cano, “Presentación,” Debate Feminista 29 (2004): 9–34; Licia FioalMatta, “‘Raras’ por mandato: la maestra, lo queer y el estado en Gabriela Mistral,”
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Debate Feminista 14, 29 (2004): 118–37. 11 Dora Cardaci, Mary Goldsmith, and Lorenia Parada-Ampudia, “Los programas y centros de estudios de la mujer y de género en México,” in Feminismo en México: Revisión histórico-crítica del siglo que termina, ed. Griselda Gutiérrez Castañeda (México City: UNAM-PUEG, 2002), 247–85; and Mary Goldsmith, “Feminismo e investigación social: Nadando en agues revueltas,” in Debates en torno a una metodología feminista, ed. Eli Bartra (México City: UNAM-PUEG, UAM, 2002), 35–62. 12 Francie R. Chassen-López, “Presentación: De la invisibilidad a la actuación histórica,” Acervos: Boletín de los archivos y bibliotecas de Oaxaca 27 (2004): 3. 13 María Teresa Fernández-Aceves, Carmen Ramos-Escandón, and Susie S. Porter, eds., Orden social e identidad de género. México, siglos XIX–XX (Guadalajara: CIESAS, Universidad de Guadalajara, 2006); Natividad Gutiérrez Chong, Mujeres y Nacionalismos en América Latina (México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2004); Elsa Muñiz, Cuerpo, representación, y poder: México en los albores de la reconstrucción nacional, 1920–1934 (Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Miguel Angel Porrúa, 2002); Carmen Ramos-Escandón, “Legislación y representación de género en la nación mexicana: la mujer y la familia en el discurso y la ley, 1870–1890,” in Voces disidentes: Debates contemporáneos en los estudios de género en México, ed. Patricia Ravelo Blancas (Mexico City: CIESAS, Grupo Editorial Migues Angel Porrúa, 2004), 93–112; Apen Ruiz Martínez, “Nacion y género en el México revolucionario: la India Bonita y Manuel Gamio,” Signos históricos 5 (2001): 55–86; Mary Kay Vaughan, Gabriela Cano, and Jocelyn Olcott, Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics and Power in Modern Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); and Mary Kay Vaughan and Steve Lewis, The Eagle and the Virgin: Identity and National Unity in Mexico, 1920–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 14 Víctor M. Macías-González, “The Lagartijo at the High Life: Masculine Consumption, Race, Nation, and Homosexuality in Porfirian Mexico,” in The Famous 41: Sexuality and Social Control in Mexico, 1901, ed. Michelle Rocio Nasser (London: Palgrave, 2003), 227–49; Guillermo Núñez Noriega, “Los ‘hombres’ y el conocimiento: Reflexiones epistemológicas para el estudio de ‘lost hombres’ como sujetos genéricos,” Desacatos 15–16 (2004): 13–32; and Pablo Piccato, “La política y la tecnología del honor: el duelo en México durante el profiriato y la revolución mexicana,” Anuario del Instituto de Estudios Históricos de la Universidad del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires (1999): 237–92.
Gabriela Cano, “Elena Arizmendi Mejía, antecedents oaxaqueños, estereotipos de género y narrativa nacionalista,” Acervos: Boletín de los archivos y bibliotecas de Oaxaca 27 (2004): 14–22; María Teresa Fernández-Aceves, “La lucha por el sufragio femenino en Jalisco, 1910–1958,” La Ventana 19 (2004): 132–51; Ana Lau J, “Expresiones políticas femeninas en el México del siglo XX: El Ateneo Mexicano de Mujeres y la Alianza de Mujeres de México, 1934–1935,” in Fernández-Aceves, Ramos-Escandón, and Porter, Orden social e identidad de género, 93–124; Isabela Morant, ed., Historia de las mujeres en España y América Latina, 4 vols. (Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, Grupo Anaya, 2005); and Carmen Ramos-Escandón, “The Narrative Voice in María Ríos Cárdenas’s La mujer mexicana es ciudadana,” in Disciplines on the Line: Feminist Research on Spanish America and U.S. Latina Women, ed. Joyce Tolliver (Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 2003), 167–87. 15
