With attention to gender now firmly joining class and ethnicity as critical factors in the experience of Latin America, scholars have called for efforts to better understand how all three variables interact. The publication of Marcia Stephenson’s excellent book, Gender and Modernity in Andean Bolivia, is a substantial contribution to such efforts.
Stephenson begins with the assertion that modernization and miscegenation are inextricably linked and that “modernity tries to relocate subjects in terms of their cultural, racial, gendered and spatial identities.” She makes her case in a series of well-constructed arguments linking fashion, hygiene, education, and hunger, emphasizing the nation’s role in promoting modernity and the reformulation of and resistance to that project on the part of the indigenous population.
As a literary scholar, Stephenson brings the tools and language of postmodern literary criticism to bear on a range of studies. She offers original readings of literary and political...
