Daniel Balderston and Donna Guy have undertaken a daunting and important task in editing an interdisciplinary collection of essays that employ sexuality as an analytical category in studies that roam throughout Latin America, from the late colonial and early national periods up to the present. The essays touch on everything from tango lyrics and soccer chants in Argentina, to the criminology of “sexual deviance” in Mexico, to Puerto Rican literature in the United States. The resulting volume at once underscores the possibilities and the difficulties of such a vast project.

One of the obvious obstacles to truly interdisciplinary work is the difficulty of integrating disparate and even antagonistic methodologies and theoretical frameworks. Unfortunately, Balderston and Guy’s five-page introduction leaves this important task to the reader. The book also lacks a concluding chapter to tie the essays together; so the collection ends up posing the question of how to integrate disciplines rather than answering it. Furthermore, while the historical work is fairly transparent, the literary and anthropological essays are more difficult to penetrate. They often assume theoretical knowledge—particularly from queer studies—that many scholars currently do not possess.

Some historians might find the styles used in academic writings of other disciplines distracting. For example, when Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano explains her application of butch-femme categories (developed studying lesbian relationships in the United States) to her analysis of the Mexican lesbian folksinger Chabela Vargas, she argues, “I will use them because as a bicultural Chicana living in the United States, my readings of lesbian texts and my own erotic positionings are informed by butch-femme as well as Mexican and Chicano/a cultural dynamics; besides, it’s my fantasy. I offer here a Chicana femme take on Chabela Vargas” (p. 36, emphasis in original).

Some of the literary and anthropological background may elude readers. For example, Eduardo P. Archetti’s interesting exploration of sexuality in tango lyrics and soccer chants does not include the text of any actual tango lyrics but instead footnotes another paper of his. Oscar Montero’s essay on modernismo also assumes familiarity with the texts he is studying, and he jumps straight to his exegesis. Such assumptions might be safe in a less ambitious collection, but this volume will undoubtedly attract readers from many different scholarly backgrounds.

The second problem the book faces, in addition to the difficulties of interdisciplinarity, is how to locate the study of sexuality specifically in Latin America. The conspicuous presence of Michel Foucault and, especially, George Chauncey in the footnotes raises the question of whether some of these studies were employing an essentialized rather than regionally specific notion of sexuality. For if we take seriously the idea that conceptions of sex and sexuality differ in (and within) Latin America from other parts of the world, then historical work on New York cannot stand as evidence for ideas about sexuality in Latin America. Several of the essays do not connect cultural developments to historical context, missing the opportunity to explore regional specifics. Further, the volume lacks any serious exploration of the sexualization or eroticization of Latin America as a region.

These two comments aside, I would recommend this volume as indispensable to anyone interested in the study of gender and sexuality in Latin America. It points the way to a nearly unexplored but exceedingly important aspect of Latin American studies. Several of the historical essays are excellent examples of this direction of inquiry, including Peter Beattie’s comparison of a Brazilian novel about sodomy in the military with military court records of the same, and Rob Buffington’s exploration of the presumed connection between criminal and sexual “deviance” from Porfirian to postrevolutionary Mexico. If accompanied by readings explicating the theoretical frameworks used in the collection, this book would also make excellent reading for a graduate or advanced undergraduate seminar.