Matthew Gutmann

Matthew Gutmann studies democracy and social change; poverty, inequality, and development; health and gender; ethnicity and race; and militarization in the Americas.

In Mexico City, he has done research on two major issues: one is changing male identities and practices with respect to fathering, sexuality, housework, alcohol, violence, and the cultural history of machismo (The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City, California 1996, 2006). And, the second research topic was popular politics as seen through participation in and abstention from elections, responses from "below" to the North American Free Trade Agreement and expressions of Mexican nationalism, as well as romantic notions of agency, resistance, and democracy (The Romance of Democracy: Compliant Defiance in Contemporary Mexico, California 2002). He also has done research in Oaxaca, Mexico, regarding men's reproductive health and sexuality through ethnographic fieldwork in two vasectomy clinics, a government AIDS clinic, and among indigenous midwives, doctors, and healers (Fixing Men: Sex, Birth Control, and AIDS in Mexico, California 2007).

Most of Gutmann's ethnographic research has been conducted in Mexico. He has also conducted collaborative research on/with UN Peacekeepers in Haiti and Lebanon. His current research projects include: (1) The Challenge of Internationalism; (2) Military Service and Democratic Citizenship in the Americas; (3) Inequality, Gender, and Health Care in the Americas; and (4) Area Studies: Anachronistic or Avant-Garde? He has a book written with Catherine Lutz in press with the University of California Press on the lives of six antiwar Iraq veterans, Breaking Ranks: Iraq Veterans Speak Out Against the War.