Peace Corps Fantasies: How Development Shaped the Global Sixties by Molly Geidel (review)
It would be difficult to imagine a monograph that deftly weaves together analyses of the Black Panthers, frontier nostalgia, and the politics of birth control in Bolivia, but somehow Molly Geidel manages to pull it off. Geidel reexamines the histories of development and modernization theory in the 1960s through the lens of gender and cultural studies. Using one of the quintessential development initiatives of the United States, the Peace Corps, as a connecting thread, Geidel explores the relationships between domestic debates and anxieties and how Americans imagined their roles abroad. She argues that American social scientists and politicians “articulated and assuaged their own anxieties about the affluent, atomizing, repressive society of the 1950s by creating intimate yet hierarchical masculine fantasy spaces of development” (xv).