ABSTRACT
This chapter explores relations between scholarly concepts and social practices surrounding marriage, sexuality, and family in Bolivia, where poverty, political volatility, and United States interests have allowed international policies and development programs to make a powerful impact on everyday life. It presents ethnographic material from two groups of individuals who do not fit normative categories. The first is a group of households organized around women’s sibling, friendship, and intergenerational ties that are variously labeled “headless,” “woman-headed,” “incomplete,” or “broken” because the patriarchal heterosexual male is missing. The next is a group of men who are involved in webs of meaningful relations, including sexual intimacy with other men, and who are variously labeled “alone,” “detoured,” and “half-men” because they have not achieved the role of patriarchal heterosexual head of family. The chapter then provides a descriptive account of how exclusion from normative models is experienced in different ways according to gender, sexual orientation, and location in the nation.
