Liberal humanism, gender relations and social space: the case of the bar "Pluma blanca"

Abstract

This article is intended to argue how male participants describe and interpret their relationship to women and by so doing how they also tend to conceive of La cantina Pluma Blanca located in Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico, as a distinct occurring social space. In the first place, male participants put such a relationship into a humanist liberal frame while La Pluma Blanca is thus envisioned as a social space where gender-based restrictions are actually not present. In the second, when male interviewees place female sexual and physical attractiveness at the heart of their description simultaneously they outline discursively La Pluma Blanca as a social space structured in terms of gender patterns.