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Rural Women in Latin America: Directions for Future Research

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2022

Lynne Phillips
Lynne Phillips*
Affiliation:
University of Windsor, Ontario
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The issue to be addressed in this article is the limited exploration thus far of how rural women in Latin America themselves define and interpret the world around them and what meaning, if any, they attach to key terms employed by researchers concerned with development issues. A review of the literature reveals that despite the great strides made in the last two decades in understanding Latin American women as rural producers, research to date has dealt with the questions of gender ideology and identity in an extremely limited way. Two potential directions for future research will be suggested here: a critical reassessment of some of the analytical categories that have been taken as givens, and a focus on the social-political construction of gender identity and experience from the point of view of rural women. To explore the possibilities of these suggestions, the phrase “division of labor by sex” will be analyzed in light of recent anthropological and feminist contributions to other (primarily non-Latin American) areas of the literature. A second point that will be discussed is how life stories, when collected self-critically, can reveal the potential tension between the active negotiation of meaning by analysts and by the rural women they interview. I will argue that these new directions in research are essential if scholars are to appreciate varying interpretations of development.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 25 , Issue 3 , 1990 , pp. 89 - 107
Copyright
Copyright © 1990 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Juan Maiguashca, whose questions several years ago about some of these themes ultimately influenced the writing of this article. Thanks also to Linda Hubbel for her comments and to Deirdre Miental for encouraging me to go further in thinking about “new directions.” Last but not least, I would like to thank Carmen Diana Deere for her inspiration and support.

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