Book Reviews editorial

Following the thematic focus of this Special Issue, the Book Reviews section features reviews of recent books that explore feminist struggles in Latin American contexts and communities. The works reviewed in this issue include books published in Spanish and Portuguese, as well as in English. In this way, we endeavor to make a broader range of Latin American feminist scholarship available to IFJP readers, in line with our ambition to foster a space for global feminist dialogue.

Marco Durazo's review essay “The Young Lords: Revolution, Feminism, and the Pursuit of Emancipatory Politics” discusses two books that both seek to account for the history of the Young Lords, a revolutionary movement inspired by the Black Panther Party, which emerged among Puerto Rican street gangs, students, and activists in cities in the United States in the 1960s. In his essay, Durazo traces the internal gender politics of this movement, demonstrating how the tension between an ideological commitment to gender equality and women's leadership on the one hand, and persistent sexism and machoism on the other, continued to haunt the Young Lords throughout the life span of the organization.

Like Durazo, Lorraine Bayard de Volo provides a historical perspective on women's struggles to negotiate male-dominated movements. The biography Celia Sánchez Manduley: The Life and Legacy of a Cuban Revolutionary by Tiffany A. Sippial focuses on a woman who was a central figure in the Cuban Revolution, but who continually needed to navigate gendered constraints and expectations in order to play that role. Discussing the tensions that this entailed for Sánchez Manduley, and how she has come to be described in conventional histories of the revolution, Bayard de Volo argues that there is much to learn from her life with relevance for understanding the gender politics of political leadership, revolution, and state building in Latin America and beyond.

While these first two contributions to the Book Reviews section examine feminist struggles within leftist movements through a historical lens, the second two align more closely with the theme of the Special Issue, addressing the relationship between feminism and conservative political forces in contemporary Latin America. Bajo el mismo cielo: las iglesias para la diversidad sexual y de género en un campo religioso conservador (broadly translated as Under the Same Sky: Churches for Sexual and Gender Diversity in a Conservative Religious Field) is a book written by Karina Bárcenas and published in Spanish in Mexico. In his review, Saúl Espino-Armendáriz describes how “churches for gender and sexual diversity” have emerged as an internal counter-force in a generally conservative religious landscape in Mexico, working for the inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) people. While the context and time period here are very different to those of the leftist revolutions in focus for the first two reviews, read alongside each other these contributions nevertheless show that there are similarities in terms of the challenges of navigating dominant gender norms and pushing for feminist change from within male-dominated movements.

The final contribution is Ananda Winter's review of the book Gênero, neoconservadorismo e democracia: disputas e retrocessos na América Latina (Gender, Neoconservatism and Democracy: Disputes and Setbacks in Latin America), published in Portuguese by Flávia Biroli, Maria das Dores Campos Machado, and Juan Marco Vaggione. This book's central concern is to theorize the relationship between gender and the current form of conservatism in Latin America. The book describes neoconservatism as a reaction to feminist and LGBTQI agendas, and conceptualizes its defining features and its expressions in campaigns against so-called “gender ideology”. As Winter argues, by identifying what is new in the current brand of conservatism, including its latest actors and repertoires, the book provides a fundamental contribution to feminist literature, and crucial analytical tools for resisting anti-feminist reactions and democratic backsliding, in Latin America and beyond.

These reviews are excellent examples of the kinds of scholarship that we discuss in this section, which focuses on books that explore feminist politics and gender relations in a global frame. We aim to include multi-disciplinary, cross-border, and critical feminist scholarship. The section includes three types of contributions: book reviews, review essays, and essays that rethink the canon of feminist scholarship. Book reviews engage with an individual, recently published piece of work, briefly describing its content and critically evaluating and locating its contributions to global feminist scholarship and to particular bodies of literature. Review essays discuss several texts on the same theme and bring them into conversation with each other, aiming either to explore a recent debate or emerging research field that has generated a range of new publications, or to survey the best of the literature covering a more established area of research. Essays that rethink the canon aim to re-evaluate the canon of feminist global political scholarship and its boundaries, and provide the opportunity to also engage with books that are not recently published. These essays may aim to critically rethink the established literature on a particular topic in light of recent events or new publications, or to engage with books that have been marginalized by existing disciplinary boundaries and explain why these ought to be essential reading for feminists working on global issues.

If you are interested in submitting a review essay or a review, please contact the Book Reviews Editors, Elisabeth Olivius, Ebru Demir, and Katrina Lee-Koo. Reviews and essays need to be written in English, but the texts they review do not.

For further information, please refer to the journal's FAQ page at https://www.ifjpglobal.org/submit-to-us/#anchor_book_reviews_shortcut.