In the last five years there has been a mini-explosion of anthropological and literary studies of same-sex eroticism in Latin America. In part this is due to the growing integration of gender into the categories and frameworks of analysis employed by scholars. New research has reached beyond the unilateral investigation of women in Latin American society and culture to examine both hetero- and homo-social interactions, multiple expressions of sexuality, and the ways in which notions of gender are mutable over time. Parker, whose Bodies, Pleasures, and Passions: Sexual Culture in Contemporary Brazil (1991) was one of the first books in English to address some of these questions, now offers in Beneath the Equator another valuable contribution to this trend by questioning time-honored myths about the Brazil’s sexual economy. Instead of reifying the exotic tropical “other,” this study carefully maps out the multiple manifestations of Brazilian homosexuality and the subcultures in...

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