| L a t i n A m e r i c a n S t u d i e s | Anthropology
Set in a Mennonite colony of Paraguay’s remote Chaco region, this book tracks the lives and contested practices of indigenous Ayoreo women who commodify their sexuality, exposing the fractured workings of frontier capitalism
FRONTIER INTIMACIES AYOREO WOMEN AND THE SEXUAL ECONOMY OF THE PARAGUAYAN CHACO
PAO L A C A N OVA
Frontier Intimacies
Ayoreo Women and the Sexual Economy of the Paraguayan Chaco PAO L A C A N OVA Until the 1960s, the Ayoreo people of Paraguay’s Chaco region had remained uncontacted by the world. But as development encroached on their territory, the Ayoreo began to experience rapid cultural change. Paola Canova looks at one aspect of this change in Frontier Intimacies: the sexual practices of Ayoreo women, specifically the curajodie, or single women who exchange sex for money or material goods with non-Ayoreo men, often Mennonite settlers. Weaving personal anecdotes into her extensive research, Canova shows how the advancement of economic and missionary frontiers has reconfigured gender roles, sexual ethics, and notions of desire in the region. Ayoreo women, she shows, have reappropriated their sexual practices, approaching intimate liaisons on their own terms and seeing the involvement of money not as morally problematic but as constitutive of sexual encounters. By using their sexuality to construct an intimate frontier operating according to their own logics, Canova reveals, Ayoreo women expose the fractured workings of frontier capitalism in spaces of rapid transformation. Inviting broader examination of the ways in which contemporary frontier economies are constructed and experienced, Frontier Intimacies brings a captivating new perspective to the economic development of the Chaco region.
PAOLA C A NOVA Austin, Texas Paola Canova is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin.
r e le as e dat e | o ct o be r 6 x 9 inches, 216 pages, 13 b&w photographs
ISBN 978-1-4773-2148-5 $29.95* | £23.99 | C$44.95 paperback
ISBN 978-1-4773-2147-8 $90.00* | £74.00 | C$103.95 hardcover
ISBN 978-1-4773-2150-8 $29.95* e-book U N I V E R S I T Y O F T E X A S P R E S S | FA L L 2 0 2 0
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