Harrington Distinguished Professor
Email: fbabb(@)unc.edu
Phone: (919) 962-1242
Fax: (919) 962-1613
Office: 407 Alumni Hall
Area of Interest:
Cultural/economic/feminist anthropology; gender, race, and sexuality; critical development studies; urbanization in the global South; tourism studies; Latin American studies; Central Andes, Central America.
Education:
PhD, State University of New York at Buffalo
Fieldwork Experience:
Peru, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Southern Mexico
Recent Research:
I am a cultural anthropologist specializing in gender and sexuality as well as race and class in changing contexts in Latin America. I came to Carolina in fall 2014 after teaching previously at Colgate University, the University of Iowa, and the University of Florida. My courses in Anthropology and Latin American Studies include such subject areas as the anthropology of gender and sexuality; Latin American cultural politics; feminist ethnography; travel and tourism; and decolonizing methodologies. I am active in the Anthropology Department’s Concentration in Race, Difference, and Power, serving as Co-Chair during the past several years.
My latest two book projects consider gender and race in Andean Peru, based on my decades of research in the region. Women’s Place in the Andes: Engaging Decolonial Feminist Anthropology (U of California Press, 2018) examines feminist debates centering Andean women from the 1970s forward–debates in which I myself engaged and now reconsider in the critical context of decolonial projects in feminist and world anthropologies. In this book, I put my past writings in conversation with those of others in order to reopen questions of durable inequalities, even as Peru’s and other Latin American economies are said to be undergoing notable modernization and development.
I am now at work on a companion book, Scaling Differences: Place, Race, and Gender in Andean Peru, that is a multi-sited ethnography based on recent research I have conducted in an indigenous rural community, a small Andean city, and among Andean migrants living in Lima. I am particularly interested in the ways in which racialized and gendered geographies shape women’s and men’s experiences in these diverse settings. My aim is to move beyond entrenched views of Andean peoples as either mired in tradition or rushing to embrace new opportunities to engage with neoliberal capitalism. My research has instead discovered more complex women and men who sometimes have good reason to resist change and other times find ways to turn difficult circumstances to their personal or collective advantage. In these social landscapes, and mobilities across them, gender and race relations are frequently the fraught ground where intense struggles are waged.
Selected Publications:
Books
2012 Después de la Revolución: Género y Cultura Política en Nicaragua Neoliberal. Translation of 2001 book with new preface. Managua, Nicaragua: Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamérica.
2008 Entre la chacra y la olla: Cultura, economía política y las vendedoras de mercado en el Perú. Translation of 1998 book, with new preface. Lima, Peru: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos.
Edited Journals
2011 Special issue of Voices 11(1), (journal of the Association for Feminist Anthropology) in honor of Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, guest editor.
2008 Special issue of Latin American Perspectives 35(4), Youth and Cultural Politics in Latin America, first co-editor, with Jon Wolseth.
2005 Special issue of Critique of Anthropology 25(3), Autonomy in an Age of Globalization: The Vision of June Nash, first co-editor, with Lynn Stephen.
2002 Special issue of Latin American Perspectives 29(2), Gender and Same-Sex Desire, second co-editor, with James N. Green.
Journal articles
2017 “Commentary” on Lynn Stephen’s article, “Bearing Witness: Testimony in Latin
American Anthropology and Related Fields,” Journal of Latin American and Caribbean
Anthropology 22(1):110-112.
2012 “Theorizing Gender, Race, and Cultural Tourism in Latin America: A View from Peru and Mexico,” special issue on Race, Gender, Ethnicity, and Sexuality in Latin American Tourism, Latin American Perspectives 39(6):36-50.
2011 “Che, Chevys, and Hemingway’s Daiquiris: Cuban Tourism in a Time of Globalization,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 30(1):50-63, issue on Island Tourism in the Americas.
2010 “Sex and Sentiment in Cuban Tourism,” Caribbean Studies 38(2):93-115, issue in honor of Helen I. Safa, co-edited by A. Lynn Bolles and Kevin A. Yelvington.
2004 “Recycled Sandalistas: From Revolution to Resorts in the New Nicaragua,” American Anthropologist 106(3):541-555.
2003 “Out in Nicaragua: Local and Transnational Desires After the Revolution,” Cultural Anthropology 18(3):304-328.
2001 “Nicaraguan Narratives of Development, Nationhood, and the Body,” Journal of Latin American Anthropology 6(1):84-119.
Book chapters
2018 “Sexuality and Gender,” in The Andean World. Edited by Linda J. Seligmann and Kathleen Fine-Dare. Routledge Worlds series. Routledge Press. In press.
2017 “Desigualdades entrelazadas: repensando la raza, el género y el indigenismo en el Perú andino,” in Racismo y lenguaje. Edited by Virginia Zavala and Michele Back. Lima, Peru: PUCP Press (Fondo Editorial PUCP).
2016 “Latin American Travel: The Other Side of Tourism Encounters,” in Global Latin America. Edited by Matthew Gutmann and Jeffrey Lesser. Berkeley: University of California Press.
2014 “Sexualities in Latin America and the Caribbean,” in Oxford Bibliographies in Latin American Studies. Edited by Ben Vinson. New York: Oxford University Press.
2013 “Street Economies in the Urban Global South: Where Are They Heading and Where Are We Heading?,” in Street Economies: Cultural Politics in the Urban Global South. Edited by Karen Tranberg Hansen, Lynn Milgram, and Walter Little. Santa Fe: SAR Press.
2012 “Gender in Postcolonial Latin America,” in Oxford Bibliographies in Latin American Studies. Edited by Ben Vinson. New York: Oxford University Press.
2012 “Intimate Encounters: Sex and Power in Nicaraguan Tourism,” in Central America in the New Millennium: Living Transition and Reimagining Democracy. Edited by Ellen Moodie and Jennifer L. Burrell. Amsterdam: Berghahn Books.
2003 “Nicaragua,” in Women’s Issues in Central and South America. Edited by Amy Lind. Pp. 335-360. Westport, CN: Greenwood Publishing Group.
2001 “Market/places as Gendered Spaces: Market/women’s Studies Over Two Decades,” in Women Traders in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Mediating Identities, Marketing Wares. Edited by Linda J. Seligmann. Pp. 228-239. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.