Gender and History in Nineteenth-Century Latin america: The Didactic Discourses of Soledad Acosta de Samper
Faced with the task of articulating the relationships among national identity, citizenship, and the individual at a time when the idea of "nation" itself was still in flux, nineteenth-century Latin American authors frequently turned towards historiography and historical narratives as appropriate and useful vehicles for their statements about the process by which (semi)arbitrary geographical boundaries could come to signify nations with distinct identities. Many nineteenth-century authors decisively rejected the Spanish colonial past and envisioned the post-Independence period as a new epoch of history whose existence depended on the violent and complete break with Spain represented by the Wars of Independence (1810-1824).1 But other authors, while recognizing the importance of the rupture with Spain and with the colonial past, created historical narratives about the Conquest, about colonial Latin America, and about the Wars of Independence in order to justify their ideas about national identities, to comment upon contemporary political and social situations, and to elucidate the historical roots of current problems. They explored the past in order to make the present comprehensible to themselves and to their readers, who were meant to learn how to be exemplary citizens of the new Latin American nations through their consumption of these narratives. The historical novel afforded authors the opportunity to explore questions about nationality and identity in a popular format and to reach a wider potential audience. The deployment of the genre, however, was a problematic device for the majority of historical novelists in nineteenth-century Latin America, since they had to contend with a conflicted attitude towards
(Re)Producing Men: Homosociality in Nineteenth-Century Latin American National Narratives
In this dissertation I dispute the long-held critical tradition that national narratives are best understood by the means in which they allegorize the nation through the heteronormative construct of family. I employ feminist, gender, and queer theories, as inflected with postcolonial studies to read Latin American national narratives’ use of allegory—particularly the ways in which the objectification of the female body symbolically aids the cementing of male bonds and rivalries. The (re)production of masculinities through male-male desire and rivalry informs the social constructs of both national embodiment and idealized male citizenship whereas the female body remains subjugated and largely homogenous in its relationship to masculinity and male desire. Eve Sedgwick’s concept of the “homosocial” provides the central critical framework through which I dispute and destabilize heteronormative assumptions at the basis of national identity formations. My focus on how masculinities are negotiated through the objectified female body enables an understanding of gender performativities’ determinative importance to the hegemonic representations of other marked categories of identity and thus, the taxonomies of bodily discourse that inform them. My literary corpus consists of select nineteenth-century texts that monumentalize national mythos and/or display radical shifts pertinent to nationalism such as Mexico’s reformation period, the abolition of slavery in Brazil, or Argentina’s struggle beneath a authoritarian regime. I also look at contemporary renditions of nineteenth-century figures to extrapolate nationalism as a form of gender discourse whose origins are intertwined with the independence movements of the nineteenth century.
Affordable housing in London
Introduction. The Housing Situation in London. Housing, Land Use Planning, and the Government of London, a Brief History. Land Use Regulations. Positive Local Authority Powers in London. Sources of Affordable Housing: the Rented Sectors. Grants to Assist Access to Affordable Housing. Conclusions. Bibliography.