Readers of Global Gender Research will learn to compare and contrast feminist concerns globally, gain familiarity with the breadth of gender research, and understand the national contexts that produced it. This volume provides an in-depth comparative picture of the current state of feminist sociological gender and women's studies research in four regions of the world—Africa, Asia, Latin America/the Caribbean, and Europe—as represented by many countries. The introductory essay to each region explains how social science research on women and/or gender issues has been shaped by economics, politics, and culture, and by trends that are simultaneously local, regional, and global. It familiarizes readers with the wide range of salient issues, research methods, writing styles, and leading authors from around the globe. Each regional section includes several chapters on gender research in specific countries that represent the region's diversity and cover the major theoretical and empirical trends that have emerged over time, as well as the relationship of key research questions to feminist activism and women’s or gender studies. Next, the editors illustrate this new wave of gender scholarship with translated/reprinted samples of research articles from additional countries in the region, that cover a wide range of important global topics—such as work, sexuality, masculinities, childcare and family issues, religion, violence, law and gender policies. Finally, this volume provides scholars with extensive bibliographies and a listing of web sites for women’s and gender research centers in 85 countries.

Hers is one of eleven essays and four poems included in this volume in which Latina women of African descent share their stories. The authors included are from all over Latin America-Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Panama, Puerto Rico, Venezuela-and the United States. They write about the African diaspora and issues such as colonialism, oppression and disenfranchisement. Diva Moreira, a Brazilian, writes that she experienced racism and humiliation at a very young age. The worst experience, she remembers, was her mother's bosses' conviction that Diva didn't need to go to school after the fourth grade, "because blacks don't need to study more than that."

We Are Left without a Father Here is a transnational history of working people's struggles and a gendered analysis of populism and colonialism in mid-twentieth-century Puerto Rico. At its core are the thousands of agricultural workers who, at the behest of the Puerto Rican government, migrated to Michigan in 1950 to work in the state's sugar beet fields. The men expected to earn enough income to finally become successful breadwinners and fathers. To their dismay, the men encountered abysmal working conditions and pay. The migrant workers in Michigan and their wives in Puerto Rico soon exploded in protest. Chronicling the protests, the surprising alliances that they created, and the Puerto Rican government's response, Eileen J. Suárez Findlay explains that notions of fatherhood and domesticity were central to Puerto Rican populist politics. Patriarchal ideals shaped citizens' understandings of themselves, their relationship to Puerto Rican leaders and the state, as well as the meanings they ascribed to U.S. colonialism. Findlay argues that the motivations and strategies for transnational labor migrations, colonial policies, and worker solidarities are all deeply gendered.

Silencing Race provides a historical analysis of the construction of silences surrounding issues of racial inequality, violence, and discrimination in Puerto Rico. Examining the ongoing racialization of Puerto Rican workers, it explores the 'class-making' of race.

The geopolitical influence of the United States informs the processes of racialization in Puerto Rico, including the construction of black places. In Scripts of Blackness, Isar P. Godreau explores how Puerto Rican national discourses about race--created to overcome U.S. colonial power--simultaneously privilege whiteness, typecast blackness, and silence charges of racism. Based on an ethnographic study of the barrio of San Antón in the city of Ponce, Scripts of Blackness examines institutional and local representations of blackness as developing from a power-laden process that is inherently selective and political, not neutral or natural. Godreau traces the presumed benevolence or triviality of slavery in Puerto Rico, the favoring of a Spanish colonial whiteness (under a hispanophile discourse), and the insistence on a harmonious race mixture as discourses that thrive on a presumed contrast with the United States that also characterize Puerto Rico as morally superior. In so doing, she outlines the debates, social hierarchies, and colonial discourses that inform the racialization of San Antón and its residents as black. Mining ethnographic materials and anthropological and historical research, Scripts of Blackness provides powerful insights into the critical political, economic, and historical context behind the strategic deployment of blackness, whiteness, and racial mixture.

After the United States invaded Puerto Rico in 1898, the new unincorporated territory sought to define its future. Seeking to shape the next generation and generate popular support for colonial rule, U.S. officials looked to education as a key venue for promoting the benefits of Americanization. At the same time, public schools became a site where Puerto Rican teachers, parents, and students could formulate and advance their own projects for building citizenship. In Negotiating Empire, Solsiree del Moral demonstrates how these colonial intermediaries aimed for regeneration and progress through education. Rather than seeing U.S. empire in Puerto Rico during this period as a contest between two sharply polarized groups, del Moral views their interaction as a process of negotiation. Although educators and families rejected some tenets of Americanization, such as English-language instruction, they also redefined and appropriated others to their benefit to increase literacy and skills required for better occupations and social mobility. Pushing their citizenship-building vision through the schools, Puerto Ricans negotiated a different school project—one that was reformist yet radical, modern yet traditional, colonial yet nationalist.