Roger N. Lancaster

Transgenderism in Latin America: Some Critical Introductory Remarks on Identities and Practices

This opening essay to a symposium on Transgenderism in Latin America reviews the six articles presented, and highlights the ways in which transgendered acts provide multiple meanings. Drawing heavily from Queer Theory, the article seeks to open a dialogue across these multiple and contested meanings by highlighting mutual themes concerned with heteronomative domination and subversion, the power relations within transsexual practices, and their linkages with identity and its discontents. The paper argues for more subtle and nuanced understandings of varying perspectives and practices, and further challenges any notion of a unitary identity. The author sees this work as part of an ongoing carnival to challenge and redraw fixed notions of identities and relationships.

Sexual positions: caveats and second thoughts on "categories".

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.

SEX, SCIENCE, AND PSEUDOSCIENCE IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE

Recent years have witnessed the resurgence of biological explanations for gender norms, sexual desires, and human nature in general. This article traces the course of genomania (the reduction of social traits to genetic causes) and evolutionary psychology (the justification for supposedly universal institutional arrangements via speculative evolutionary scenarios) from the early 1990s to the present, drawing out their connection to institutional shifts, social struggles, and a changing political economy. It underscores the irony of biological reductionisms triumph in the public sphere: Ideas about a “hardwired,” immutable human nature circulate at a decidedly odd moment in human history, a period marked by pitched struggles around the politics of sex and by dramatic changes in gender roles—a time, in short, when not much really seems certain about the nature of men, women, and others. Contemporary bioreductivism is thus analyzed as an instance of fetishistic or magical thinking and as the basis for the spread of ever more dangerous forms of irrationalism in American political culture. In this context, relations among science, critical science studies, and the serious public sphere are reexplored, and a few practical propositions are offered in conclusion. Some passages in this article appear, in various contexts, in Lancaster (2003) and in ‘The Place of Anthropology in a Public Culture Reshaped by Bioreductivism,’ an article given an initial test run by colleagues in Cultural Studies and Anthropology at George Mason University. It was subsequently presented at the 101st annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, 20–24 November 2002, as part of a panel on ‘The Force of a Thousand Nightmares: Global Inequalities and the American Scene.’ Versions were also presented to the Cultural Studies program at the University of California, Davis; to an audience at the Lavender Languages conference; to diverse audiences at Northwestern University; as part of a ‘Meet the Author’ plenary panel at the meetings of the Society for the Anthropology of North America; and as part of an Social Science Research Council (SSRC) web forum on race and genomics (see also Lancaster [2004, 2005]). I would like to thank colleagues and students in these forums for helpful feedback and encouragement. The editors and three anonymous reviewers at Identities provided encouragement and helpful suggestions. Lastly, thanks to all the usual suspects, for good conversation and good ideas: Denise Albanese, Samuel Colón, the late Dwight Conquergood, Marcial Godoy, Micaela di Leonardo, Bill Leap, Jonathan Marks, Jeff Maskovsky, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Paul Smith, Daniele Struppa, and Brett Williams.

Kids Gone Wild: From Rainbow Parties to Sexting, Understanding the Hype Over Teen Sex

ideological notions and influenced by the context in which it occurs’’ (p. 82). Unfortunately, the most serious limitation of this study is the lack of context provided for many of the findings. Bell describes her respondents primarily in terms of her groupings of high or low SES and their race, only rarely giving more details about the woman (such as her occupation, education, or family composition, including any children that women may have eventually borne or adopted). Similarly, Bell describes her use of quotations as ‘‘illustrative’’ (p. 145), but often neglects to report how many women share a characteristic or experience. For example, Angie, ‘‘a black woman of low SES,’’ says she does not know of any infertility support groups (p. 72); Bell does not specify how many other low-SES respondents were similarly unaware of such resources. Bell notes that some states mandate Medicaid coverage for infertility treatments (p. 5) but does not indicate whether or not her respondents lived in any of these places at the time of their involuntary childlessness. By not including this type of contextual information, Bell limits the reader’s ability to evaluate her claims, particularly her central thesis that the differences in women’s experiences result primarily from their class locations and not other factors. Similarly, Bell’s analyses are focused primarily on the underrepresented groups: black and white women of low SES. This strategy makes sense, given that most of the scholarship on infertility has focused on wealthy women. More exposition of high SES women’s experiences would have enhanced the comparison: for example, there are only five paragraphs (pp. 19–22) on highSES women’s motivations for mothering and more than twice as many on low-SES women’s motivations (pp. 16–19). Additional discussion could clarify the distinctions between the two groups. Finally, although Bell does devote considerable attention to the constraints low-SES women face, certain passages could be read as perpetuating damaging stereotypes about low-SES women. To give one example, she generalizes from a single quote (which, again, may or may not reflect a larger pattern) to conclude that ‘‘the women of low SES actively choose not to use contraception with the intent of conceiving a child, but they do not acknowledge it as a decision or plan because they view it as a natural part of intending to become pregnant’’ (p. 45). Here Bell reduces an extremely complicated set of conditions to the proposition that low SES-women who do not use contraception intend to conceive. This conclusion minimizes the barriers low-income and poor women face in securing adequate contraception and risks blaming them for their disproportionate share of induced abortions (Jones, Finer, and Singh 2010). The clarity of Bell’s thesis and the relative brevity of the book will make Misconception a particularly useful text in undergraduate courses on social class, reproduction, and family. Despite its limitations, Misconception will inspire new connections among the overly segregated subfields of reproductive health, and it advances our understanding of infertility.

What’s Biology Got to do With It?

Five experts, Dalton Conley, Roger N. Lancaster, Alondra Nelson, Kristen Springer, and Karl Bryant, debate the natural science turn in sociological research.