Frontier Intimacies: Ayoreo Women and the Sexual Economy of the Paraguayan Chaco

Paola Canova's book "Frontier Intimacies" explores how Ayoreo women in Paraguay's Chaco region have reappropriated their sexual practices due to rapid cultural change brought by development, challenging traditional gender roles and ethics. She shows how the involvement of money in sexual encounters is not morally problematic but is constitutive of these encounters, exposing the fractured workings of frontier capitalism in spaces of rapid transformation.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 208 pages
Publication date: 20 October 2020
Publisher: University of Texas Press

The Ayoreo people of Paraguay's Chaco region had remained largely uncontacted by the outside world until the 1960s. However, as development encroached on their territory, the Ayoreo began to undergo rapid cultural transformation. In her book "Frontier Intimacies," Paola Canova explores one aspect of this change: the sexual practices of Ayoreo women, particularly the curajodie, or single women who engage in sex exchanges with non-Ayoreo men, often Mennonite settlers.

Canova weaves personal anecdotes into her extensive research to demonstrate how the advancement of economic and missionary frontiers has reconfigured gender roles, sexual ethics, and notions of desire in the region. She shows that Ayoreo women have reappropriated their sexual practices, approaching intimate liaisons on their terms and viewing the involvement of money as not inherently 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 that Ayoreo women expose the fractured workings of frontier capitalism in spaces of rapid transformation.

Through her captivating book, "Frontier Intimacies," Canova invites broader examination of the ways in which contemporary frontier economies are constructed and experienced. She provides a fresh perspective on the economic development of the Chaco region, highlighting the complexities and contradictions that arise in these spaces of rapid change.

Weight: 320g
Dimension: 153 x 227 x 24 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781477321485