Gender and the Boundaries of Dress in Contemporary PeruSet in Arequipa during Peru's recent years of crisis, this ethnography reveals how dress creates gendered bodies. It explores why people wear clothes, why people make art, and why those things matter in a war-torn land. Blenda Femenías argues that women's clothes are key symbols of gender identity and resistance to racism. Moving between metropolitan Arequipa and rural Caylloma Province, the central characters are the Quechua- and Spanish-speaking maize farmers and alpaca herders of the Colca Valley. Their identification as Indians, whites, and mestizos emerges through locally produced garments called bordados. Because the artists who create these beautiful objects are also producers who carve an economic foothold, family workshops are vital in a nation where jobs are as scarce as peace. But ambiguity permeates all practices shaping bordados' significance. Femenías traces contemporary political and ritual applications, not only Caylloma's long-standing and violent ethnic conflicts, to the historical importance of cloth since Inca times. This is the only book about expressive culture in an Andean nation that centers on gender. In this feminist contribution to ethnography, based on twenty years' experience with Peru, including two years of intensive fieldwork, Femenías reflects on the ways gender shapes relationships among subjects, research, and representation. |
From inside the book
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... Cayllominos (people from Caylloma). Gender and ethnicity, I believe, are the most powerful forces shaping identity as more people migrate to Arequipa and as Caylloma's regional and national importance fluctuates. Bordados provide an ...
... Cayllominos use in every phase of the life experience and have used for decades. To explore Cayllomino clothing use, production, and exchange, I needed to understand both the rural and the urban situations which they constantly ...
... Cayllominos' lives, even in the city, artistic production and handwork were conspicuously central. When I talked about “crafts” or knitted, people showed me textiles old and new. Cherished, woven heirlooms from Caylloma helped them feel ...
... Cayllominos, dedicating dozens of hours a week to embroidering beautiful clothes? After a bomb went off one night, how could people sew hummingbirds the next day? To what lengths would they go to put the war out of their minds? How ...
... Cayllominos' lives. That is how I came to view them as a genre, a unified form of cultural expression. Now I could understand how artisans were encoding important messages. Their work has been trivialized because they employ “a form ...
Contents
Traveling | |
Identity in a Region at | |
Visual Domain and Cultural Process | |
Representation and the Embodiment | |
Transvestism and Festivals as Performance | |
Ethnic Symbols and Gendered | |
Gender and Production in a Workshop | |
Exchange Identity and the Commoditization | |
Conclusion Why Women Wear Polleras | |
Bibliography | |
Index | |