Motherly Women and Conquering Men: Gender Stereotypes and the Atlantic World

3 units

We give a lot of thought to gender and power today-who makes more money, who occupies leadership roles, who gets interrupted. But challenges to the idea that physical anatomy and one's position in the world are permanently linked are much older. Rather, when Portuguese and Spanish sailors began exploring the Atlantic Ocean in the 1400s, they discovered different visions of what it meant to be male and female. This course looks at the results of this exchange, assessing how European encounters with new ideas of gender and sexuality in Africa and the early Americas, 1400 to 1800, created new opportunities and entrenched expectations for both colonizers and colonized.