Feminist histories of labor have been central to scholarship on gender and sexuality in modern Latin America. Scholars have insisted that household divisions of labor and sexual power shape broader gender divisions of work and politics. Feminist insights have transformed Latin American studies paradigms for understanding the state, social movements, popular culture, histories of capitalism and socialism, and the politics of modernity. Even so, recent years have witnessed a notable decline in publications on Latin American women, gender, and sexuality. Much of the exciting new scholarship on histories of the environment, race, and migration has sidelined gender as a significant category of analysis and mode of organizing power. At the AHA-2020, this issue was the subject of the well-attended experimental session, “Where Did Gender and Sexuality Go? Conversations on Latin American History.”

In answer, this panel centers new scholarship from emerging fields and new research areas, including: Asian Latin American studies, histories of mass consumption, and the long durée of domestic service. Panelists explore how regimes of domestic power -- ideas of family and household divisions of labor—articulate gender and racial hierarchies from plantations to private bedrooms. Presentations include scholarship on masculinity and Chinese contract labor in nineteenth-century Peru; mass consumption and women’s labor in 1960s Chile; and intersectional historiographies of domestic service in Latin America as a whole. Participants hail from diverse backgrounds, expertise, and career-stage, including scholars from Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, and the United States; specialists on the Southern Cone, Peru, and Mexico; a finishing PhD. as well as mid-career and senior scholars.