Gender and Sexuality in Latin America

Edited by Cristina Motta and Macarena Sáez, Gender and Sexuality in Latin America: Cases and Decisions is an updated English version of a Spanish-language jurisprudence project. Rather than narrating legal progress as constitutions automatically delivering equality, it examines how courts define citizenship, family, health, property, violence, non-heteronormative families, and prejudice-based violence in concrete disputes.

Its feminist method dismantles the appearance of neutral judicial language. Equality, privacy, family, and protection can recognize the independent legal personhood of household members, or repackage patriarchal family, religious morality, and heterosexual norms as public interest. Including both exemplary rulings and cautionary failures turns case law from a victory list into an archive of how states produce gendered and sexual orders.

Placing property beside domestic violence, health beside citizenship, and women’s beside LGBTI rights is crucial. Bodily autonomy is not confined to intimacy: housing, land, care, marital status, and safety from police or private violence determine who can live as a full subject. Queer law is therefore not an appendix to feminism but a shared challenge to whom law recognizes as family and citizen.

The 2013 casebook captures a specific legal moment and cannot cover later changes around abortion, marriage equality, gender identity, and anti-“gender ideology” mobilization. Its judicial focus can overstate courts while backgrounding movements, enforcement gaps, and barriers faced by poor, racialized, Indigenous, and trans litigants. Decisions must be read alongside organizing and material outcomes.

For FemRes, the book teaches a discipline of comparison: not only whether an outcome is “progressive,” but what model of personhood, evidence, and family a court uses; who can litigate; and who remains unsafe after a formal victory. It presents Latin American feminist and queer movements as makers of jurisprudence, not interests waiting for legal rescue.