Mema's House, Mexico City: On Transvestites, Queens, and Machos (Worlds of Desire: The Chicago Series on Sexuality, Gender, and Culture)
The author, an intrepid Norwegian feminist sociologist researching gender construction, here presents a rich resource of interviews with and observations of a small community of transvestites and their hangers-on in one of the many impoverished suburbs of Mexico City. Prieur admits to her initial naivete and confesses that her access to information was sometimes limited by her status as a female foreigner from an "industrialized" country. Originally written as a Ph.D. dissertation, her work is methodologically rigorous, effectively describing the complexity of homosexuality in this particular Mexican subculture. From her small pool of interviewees, the author sometimes induces sociological generalities about Mexican male homosexuality and bisexuality that, one fears, border on stereotyping. The study is an extremely valuable contribution but should be read in tandem with Joseph M. Carrier's De los otros: Intimacy and Homosexuality among Mexican Men (Columbia Univ., 1995) and Latin American Male Homosexualities (Univ. of New Mexico, 1995). Recommended for academic libraries and gay/lesbian collections.?Eric Brandt, San FranciscoCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.