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 and Portuguese colonial worlds. This will entail thinking about gender and sexuality in the societies which "encountered" each other in the New World, and also thinking about how that encounter, as well as Atlantic slavery, produced new forms of gendered and sexual relations. Among the questions we'll consider: how was the conquest gendered? How did colonial society produce masculinities as well as femininities? What gendered forms of power were available to women? How did ethnicity and caste, as well as gender and class, determine people's sense of themselves and their "others?" What were normative and alternative sexual roles in the pre-modern Americas, and how did a European Catholic conquest affect these? Readings will include monographs and primary sources. Students will write an extended research essay in this class, and History majors may use it for their departmental seminar in consultation with the instructor.