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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... term residents of Arequipa lump them together as “Indians” and denounce them as unwelcome invaders.1 In Maca, a village of 1,500 one hundred miles away, women load baskets of fruit onto overcrowded buses. A thirst-quenching snack, the ...
... term interchangeably.3 On my way to the bus company, I see a woman selling tuna fruits on a crowded corner. The colors and forms of her bordados indicate that she hails from a rural Caylloma village. On a hot February afternoon, almost ...
... term to describe the hardscrabble existence of twenty-two million struggling souls. Although subsistence agriculture plays a crucial role for rural Peruvians, it coexists with capitalist extraction, multinational development, and a vast ...
... terms, most Cayllominas who wear polleras are farmers and herders. As they work in the fields, layers of clothes envelop them from neck to ankle. Their long full skirts blaze with hummingbirds and fuchsia blossoms. But the men working ...
... term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightly be said to originate or to end” (1990:33). The open ... terms “female” and “woman,” Butler insists, encourage us to analyze how “language itself produce[s] the fictive ...
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 | |