Past Nalacs Events
Other Events
International Symposium on "Sex and Sexuality in Latin America and the Caribbean"
The keynote speakers are prof. dr. Peter Wade (University of Manchester) and dr. Amalia Cabezas (University of California Riverside).
Peter Wade is Professor in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. His interests centre on race and ethnicity in Latin America, with particular reference to black populations. He has done several spells of fieldwork in Colombia, looking at processes of racial discrimination, black cultural identities, and the black social movement and constitutional reform. He has also traced the social history of Colombian popular music in the twentieth century and its connections with ideas about nation and race.
More recently, he explored the construction of nature, biology, genetics and culture in ideas about race, as part of a large-scale project on the Public Understanding of Genetics (PUG), 2001-4, funded by the EU and involving seven research teams in different European countries.
He is currently working on themes of race and sexuality in Latin America. In 2006-7, he held a British Academy award which supported bi-lateral international seminars between Colombia (specifically the Universidad del Valle) and the UK (Manchester) which focused on this theme (and also involved Brazilian scholars). An edited volume arising from these seminars was published in Colombia in 2008 (see "Recent and forthcoming publications"). He is also currently writing a book on the topic of race and sex in Latin America.
He is planning research on the way concepts of race, ethnicity and nation enter into recent genomic research about the ancestry of Latin American populations and how findings from such research are received and interpreted in the public domain.
Amalia L. Cabezas is Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Her research interests include sex tourism, women’s human rights, the politics of gender, health, and women’s labor. She is the author of Economies of Desire: Sex and Tourism in Cuba and the Dominican Republic. Based on ten years of research, Economies of Desire is the first ethnographic study to examine the erotic underpinnings of transnational tourism. It offers startling insights into the commingling of sex, intimacy, and market forces in Cuba and the Dominican republic, two nations where tourism has had widespread effects. In her multi-layered analyses, amalia cabezas reconceptualizes our understandings of informal economies (particularly "affective economies"), "sex workers," and “sexual tourism,” and she helps us appreciate how money, sex and love are intertwined within the structure of globalizing capitalism. She is also co-editor of The Wages of Empire: Neoliberal Policies, Repression and Women’s Poverty.
Click here for the program.
Click here for the poster.
