Gender, Sexuality, and Colonization in Latin America

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

In this seminar we will examine the historical construction of gendered and sexual roles in the Spanish colonial world. This will entail thinking about gender and sexuality in the societies which “encountered” each other in the New World (European, indigenous American, and African), and also thinking about how that encounter produced new forms of racialized gender and sexual relations. Among the questions we’ll consider: how was the conquest gendered? How did colonial society produce masculinities and femininities? What gendered forms of power were available to women? How did Atlantic slavery contribute to new racialized notions of gender? How did ethnicity and casta (a status attributed to mixed race peoples), as well as gender and class, determine people’s sense of themselves and their “others”? What were normative and non-normative sexual roles in the early modern Americas?