Gender as a Socially Constructed and “Structural” Category

• Author: Tamar Diana Wilson
• Published date: 01 March 2021
• Date: 01 March 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X19858995
• Subject Matter: Book Review

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X19858995

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 237, Vol. 48 No. 2, March 2021, 176–177

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X19858995

© 2019 Latin American Perspectives

176

Book Review

Gender as a Socially Constructed and

“Structural” Category

by

Tamar Diana Wilson

Florence E. Babb Women’s Place in the Andes: Engaging Decolonial Feminist Anthropology.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018.

Babb’s Women’s Place in the Andes is quasi-autobiographical: she traces modifications

in her thinking about the importance of gender as a structural category in the context

of developments in gender studies in Latin America since the 1970s. Presenting three

“commentaries” to six previously published articles, she examines the scholarly litera-

ture and the conference sessions that have moved gender studies toward a postcolonial

feminism—a feminism holding that gender and gender relations are necessary and

interacting categories allied with and related to the intersections of social class, race,

ethnicity, sexuality, locality, and nation. Babb’s fieldwork dealt especially with indige-

nous women in the Andes of Peru and their roles in development, the informal econ-

omy, and the tourist encounter. She is a long-time participating editor of Latin American

Perspectives and is renowned for her feminist writings.

With attention to thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, she argues, among other things,

that gender issues are ignored in much development planning, that gender relations in

precolonial times were complementary and egalitarian and in some cases remain so

today, and that indigenous women can use traditional cultural identities to gain pur-

chase in the marketplace and in tourism-related earnings.

In her first commentary she examines the male bias in the Peru-Cornell Vicos devel-

opment project that began in 1952, in which women were ignored, leading to even

greater inequalities between men and women than had existed under the previous

feudalistic arrangements on the Vicos estate. Men were given priority in the commer-

cialization of agriculture and production for exchange and women relegated to a purely

domestic sphere. Babb argues that although women’s position had been unenviable in

the past, they were further subordinated with the integration of the local economy into

capitalism. Her 1976 article met with resistance in the United States but when repub-

lished in Spanish in 1999 was well received by Peruvian feminists.

The second commentary introduces three of Babb’s articles published between 1984

and 2001, including one in a special issue on the political economy of women in the

Review of Radical Political Economics, and concerns the centrality of gender consider-

ations in analyses of the informal economy. Situating these articles in the context of the

writings of other scholars, she argues that market women engaged in petty commerce

perform productive roles in creating, transforming, and distributing goods and thus

can be considered petty commodity producers. She goes on to say that many market

women are commission sellers, depending on wholesalers for the products they sell,

Tamar Diana Wilson is an associate editor of Latin American Perspectives and the author of Economic

Life of Mexican Beach Vendors (2012).

858995LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X19858995Latin American PerspectivesWilson / BOOK REVIEW

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