Desired States

"Desired States ...centrally engages with Latin American insights and concerns ...[with] extensive archival and ethnographic research in Chile and a mastery of the latest theoretical advances in feminist, queer, and cultural studies. Interdisciplinary scholarship is something that we academics talk a lot about but seldom do—and rarely do well. The apparent ease and success with which Frazier manages it is truly remarkable."

 

— Robert Buffington, co-editor of A Global History of Sexuality: The Modern Era

"Desired States aptly brings to focus Chilean nation-state histories of oligarchy, Catholicism, and populism through a lens of sexuality beyond the realm of individualized subjectivity. Frazier carefully stitches a composite lived archive of the grammar of gender and sexuality while analytically zooming into the affective links with the nation-state as potentially transformative, well beyond the Chilean example.”

— Valentina Napolitano, author of Migrant Hearts and the Atlantic Return: Transnationalism and the Roman Catholic Church

"Desired States provides a groundbreaking reading of the continuities of Chilean dictatorial ideology in private and domestic spheres, as well as of the ways in which masculinities shaped the country’s politics through the 20th century. The book redefines the relationship between gender and politics in ways that are not only paradigm-shifting for the study of Chile, but also suggestive and productive for Latin Americanists at large."

— Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, author of Screening Neoliberalism: Transforming Mexican Cinema 1988-2012

"Frazier is absolutely right that 'the state is not just a rational policy-generating apparatus.' Desire is complicated, ludic and motile. People support politicians for complicated reasons that often have nothing at all to do with policy, and political leaders self-consciously cultivate affective ties to their constituents in ways that cannot be accounted for merely in terms of charisma. How female political leaders pull this off presents interesting analytical challenges."

— Bulletin of Spanish Studies