Masculinity and Sexuality in Modern Mexico

Edited by Victor M. Macias-Gonzalez (history and women's, gender, and sexuality studies, U. of Wisconsin-La Crosse) and Anne Rubenstein (history, York U., Toronto, CA), this anthology is a Latin-inflected look on masculinity and gender studies. Its Mexican outlook runs much deeper than the specific subjects of the essays, which all deal with masculinity and sexuality in modern and contemporary Mexico. The book is structured and written in a quite different way than most American books in gender studies. First, the text is accessible for general readers. The introduction, for instance, defines sex, gender, and sexual orientation, which not only orients inexperienced readers but makes explicit this anthology's particular outlook and definitions, an important task rarely done in gender studies books that depend on a readership of insiders with identical social politics. The editors are historians, and in a helpful introduction, they locate differences in Mexican concepts of gender study in a history where conservative views were rooted in nationalism or Freudianism, and most contemporary academic study of gender and sexuality in culture has been done by anthropologists. They point out this profession focuses both on how people experience everyday life, and on the difference between myth and everyday life (a distinction American gender studies still finds difficult in the study of masculinity). Most essays in this book focus on how ordinary people in contemporary Mexico negotiate the relationships between myth and everyday life in practice when the subject is what is masculine and feminine sexuality, and what behavior in general is expected of men. The authors are historians, Latin American studies scholars, and scholars of gender and ethnic studies. Part one of the book describes individual experiences, part two looks at representations in film and media and how people respond to them. The essays are uniformly informative and well written, and the book will be broadly interesting to general readers as well as useful for readers in history, gender or sexuality studies, anthropology, sociology, and Latin American cultures. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)