Crafting Gender: Women and Folk Art in Latin America and the Caribbean

by Eli Bartra (Editor)

This volume initiates a gender-based framework for analyzing the folk art of Latin America and the Caribbean. Defined here broadly as the "art of the people" and as having a primarily decorative, rather than utilitarian, purpose, folk art is not solely the province of women, but folk art by women in Latin America has received little sustained attention. Crafting Gender begins to redress this gap in scholarship. From a feminist perspective, the contributors examine not only twentieth-century and contemporary art by women, but also its production, distribution, and consumption. Exploring the roles of women as artists and consumers in specific cultural contexts, they look at a range of artistic forms across Latin America, including Panamanian molas (blouses), Andean weavings, Mexican ceramics, and Mayan hipiles (dresses). Art historians, anthropologists, and sociologists from Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States discuss artwork from Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Suriname, and Puerto Rico, and many of their essays focus on indigenous artists. They highlight the complex webs of social relations from which folk art emerges. For instance, while several pieces describe the similar creative and technical processes of indigenous pottery-making communities of the Amazon and of mestiza potters in Mexico and Colombia, they also reveal the widely varying functions of the ceramics and meanings of the iconography. Integrating the social, historical, political, geographical, and economic factors that shape folk art in Latin America and the Caribbean, Crafting Gender sheds much-needed light on a rich body of art and the women who create it.
Contributors
Eli Bartra
Ronald J. Duncan
Dolores Juliano
Betty LaDuke
Lourdes Rejón Patrón
Sally Price
María de Jesús Rodríguez-Shadow
Mari Lyn Salvador
Norma Valle
Dorothea Scott Whitten

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Eli Bartra (Ciudad de México, 6 de septiembre de 1947) es una filósofa, pionera en la investigación sobre mujeres y arte popular en distintas partes del mundo, pero particularmente en México. Es hija de refugiados catalanes en México, Anna Murià y Agustí Bartra, escritores.

Desde 1977 es profesora en la Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco (UAM-X), profesora Distinguida desde 2017 y miembro del Sistema Nacional de Investigadores (SNI) Nivel III.​ En 1982 fue cofundadora del área Mujer, Identidad y Poder, del Departamento de Política y Cultura de la Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco (UAM-X), Coordinadora de la Maestría en Estudios de la Mujer en 1989 y Coordinadora del Doctorado en Estudios Feministas en la misma universidad desde 2017 hasta 2019. Es una investigadora de las artes visuales de las mujeres en México con una mirada feminista. Ha escrito múltiples libros, artículos y capítulos de libros. Ha ido como profesora invitada a distintos países como el Reino Unido, España, Brasil, Argentina, Japón y los Estados Unidos. Su contribución ha sido mencionada en la revista Proceso, Jump Cut. A Review of Contemporary Media y en el libro Ideas Feministas Latinoamericanas de Francesca Gargallo donde la autora le dedica unas páginas a su carrera como filósofa feminista y como una discípula de la filósofa Graciela Hierro.5

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eli_Bartra