This is an extraordinary and deeply illuminating piece. Matthews' Sex and Love in Porfirian Mexico City is a powerful reminder that working-class people have always been agents in shaping their own sexual and romantic cultures often in resistance to the elite moral codes imposed upon them. It's refreshing to see a materialist analysis of sexuality that doesn't start in the 1960s, but instead grounds itself in the daily realities of survival, precarity, and resistance during an earlier stage of capitalist development.
This is an extraordinary and deeply illuminating piece. Matthews' Sex and Love in Porfirian Mexico City is a powerful reminder that working-class people have always been agents in shaping their own sexual and romantic cultures often in resistance to the elite moral codes imposed upon them. It's refreshing to see a materialist analysis of sexuality that doesn't start in the 1960s, but instead grounds itself in the daily realities of survival, precarity, and resistance during an earlier stage of capitalist development.