Atlantic Crossings: Entangling the Study of Gender in Spain and its Empire

Eliga Gould has recently argued that, “it is difficult if not impossible to separate the entangled (and entangling) histories of colonial peripheries from the metropolitan histories of which they are an integral part.”  However, until recently, the histories of Spain and its empire were anything but “entangled.”  Latin Americanists have formulated their work around a paradigm that privileged the distinctiveness of the colonial setting over the connections between colony and metropole.  Even as the dominance of Spanish exceptionalism waned, peninsular historians migrated towards the frameworks of other continental historians rather than the studies of their colonial peers.

Recently, interest in transatlantic studies has provided a new forum for historiographic interchange. Scholars have begun to examine issues such as citizenship, state building, and scientific endeavors as the product of transatlantic interactions. At recent conferences, panels of Latin Americanists expressed renewed interest in the relationship between colonial ideas about race and identity and those on the peninsula, in particular, how Spanish legal and social discrimination against moriscos and conversos might have informed the creation of colonial racial hierarchies.  However, in terms of gender analysis, the gulf between the two groups of scholars has not diminished. Spanish historians have moved away from an emphasis on a rigid honor code towards an understanding of gender based on class and regional identity, while Latin Americanists have continued to assert the dominance of  an unyielding set of “Spanish” gender norms.  Moreover, there has been no examination of how the colonial experience may have altered gender expectations on the peninsula.  In this paper, I want to explore the historiographic interstices where Iberianists and colonial Latin Americanists might effectively employ each other’s work to formulate a revised understanding of gender norms that reconnects the evolving societies on both sides of the Iberian Atlantic.