Despite a considerable amount of scholarship on gay and lesbian issues, very little academic attention has been focused on lesbians in Latin America. Juanita Diaz-Cotto, a professor of history, Women’s Studies, and Latin-American Studies at the State University of New York – Binghamton, says that she is only aware of one book on the issue. It was for this reason that Diaz-Cotto delivered a lecture in the Campus Center yesterday, titled, “Lesbian Activism and Latin-American Feminisms.”

“I wanted to put the information out there,” she said. “If anyone wants to write a doctoral or master’s thesis, this is new territory!”

The talk, which was part of the Stonewall Center’s Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgendered [GLBT] Lecture Series, began with a brief history of Latin-American feminism.

“There have been two waves of feminism there,” she said. “The first wave occurred at the turn of the century, for women to vote. They were concerned with suffrage.”

“The second wave emerged during the mid-1970s,” she added. “At this time, 18 of the 19 Latin-American countries had military dictatorships. Within these countries, though, anti-imperialist movements [began to spring up].”

Diaz-Cotto explained that feminists in these countries often became involved in these left-wing movements, only to become “disenchanted about men.”

“When you are organizing against imperialism,” she said, “guys will say, ‘Let’s overthrow this government, and afterwards, we’ll give you equal rights.'” She added that gender equality never occurred, even if the overthrows were successful.

“It hasn’t happened in Cuba,” she said. “It’s very hard to try to change sexism in only 40 years. The women think to themselves, ‘Here I am, helping the guys, and they won’t give me anything.’ So they form their own movements.”

Diaz-Cotto continued the lecture by describing Latin-American feminist conferences she had attended over the course of the past 20 years. She explained how the prominence of lesbian groups within the feminist movements had increased with time.

At one of the earliest Latin-American conferences, held in Colombia in 1980, no mention of gay issues was made. At one point, an attendee asked why little attention was being paid to the matter of lesbian rights. The organizers eventually agreed to take a stance against homophobia, but did so only by declaring “opposition to all oppressions”, rather than mentioning lesbians specifically.

At modern conferences, however, not only are lesbian issues addressed, but lesbians often have their own caucuses.

Diaz-Cotto concluded by showing a slide show of the conferences she’d attended.

The lecture room was filled to capacity as, Mitch Boucher, a graduate student in English who teaches a section of the course “Man and Women in Literature” with a focus on GLBT issues, instructed his class to attend.

“[This lecture] is relevant to what we’re going to be talking about with how one identifies as a lesbian, and how it differs through communities,” Boucher said. “It differs depending on where you live, and it differs across time.”