This course examines the history of women, men, and gender in Latin America from the late-colonial era to the present. Observers have almost universally portrayed Latin-American societies in this period as dominated by machismo and gendered notions of honor that have relegated women to the kind of complementary, subordinate position suggested in a quip from a nineteenth-century Brazilian newspaper: "Woman is an adjective that must agree with the substantive man to exist grammatically in society." In our readings and discussions we will evaluate the consequences of such dominant visions-as well as the inadequacies of analyses based on them. Besides looking at machismo and its corollaries, we will explore how such codes have faced alternative readings by women and men and the challenges of subversive gender identities and sexualities. Topics will include the often conflicting marriage strategies of young men and women and their parents, domestic violence and men's real and attempted control over "their" women, the repercussions of women's changing participation in the industrializing and globalized economies of the late-twentieth century, the links between feminisms and gender politics in Latin America, and the problematic relationship between women's movements and progressive and revolutionary politics. Group C