The Family in Latin America: A Gender Approach

The paper examines recent transformations in Latin American families, emphasizing commonalities between different countries. Such changes are embedded in cultural and historical processes of change that provide the broad interpretational context within which to view the observed microsocial transformations in familial relations. These changes have affected household composition as well as the existing array of family types. The main transformations observed are illustrated by drawing from a selective set of work. We argue that changes in family life and the foundational relations in the family are in need of reconceptualization capable of capturing the new dimensions that have emerged, and reexamining the main theoretical and analytical schemes underlying the sociology of the family of the past decades. Among emerging approaches, we argue that the feminist view that adopts a critical and reflexive stance on past family research opens new vistas, as it seeks to study the family not merely as an institution, but as a nexus of organized social relations of a different order, including solidarity and conflict, power and authority, and rights and obligations. An important contribution of the feminist approach is to study relational asymmetries (between gender or generations) inherent in the unfolding of family life.