Race and Gender in the Global Hispanophone: Venesa Miseres - Gender Battles: Latin American Women, War, and Feminism

Please join us for the upcoming Race and Gender in the Global Hispanophone talk with Vanesa Miseres (University of Notre Dame).

Professor Vanesa Miseres will be discussing her new book, Gender Battles: Latin American Women, War, and Feminism (University of Toronto Press, 2025). We encourage you to reaad the book prior to the event. The ebook is available through Stanford's library.

Book synopsis:

Gender Battles: Latin American Women, War, and Feminism by gender studies and Latin Americanist scholar Vanesa Miseres focuses on the overlooked voices of women who wrote about and participated in Latin American and global wars from the nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Moving beyond military narratives centred on men, the book highlights how women – as journalists, memoirists, and activists – shaped the discourse around war and gender.

Focusing on conflicts like the War of the Pacific, two world wars, and the Spanish Civil War, Gender Battles reveals how women of the region navigated nationalistic frameworks to express evolving feminist ideas and challenge social norms. Their writing and organizing captures war not only as a battlefield struggle but as a force that defines gender roles, political structures, national, and transnational identities.

More than witnesses, the women of Gender Battles reimagine the meaning of war itself: revealing its intimate connections to everyday life, personal autonomy, and global feminist movements. With an interdisciplinary approach, Miseres reforms our understanding of Latin American history and feminist thought, bringing to light a powerful legacy of Latin American women’s resilience, influence, and political intervention in times of conflict.

RSVP for the Vanesa Miseres event here.