Sexuality, Gender and the
Colonial Encounter: Constructing the Amerindian
Colonialism did not impose
pre-colonial, European gender arrangements on the colonized. It imposed a new
gender systemÉ It introduced many genders and gender itself as a colonial concept
and mode of organization of relations of production, property relations,
cosmologies and ways of knowing.[1]
Mar’a Lugones
Columbus
himself wrote another letter that appears in Paesi, and it became one of the most
famous records from the early colonial period. In it Columbus describes the people of the Americas both in
contrast to, and in relation with Africans and uses highly sexualized and
gendered language. He compares
Amerindian people to the people of Guinea in West Africa distinguished only by
their straight hair. Columbus also
describes the people he encounters as cowardly, innocent, keenly intelligent,
cannibalistic and sexually deviant.
Columbus writes:
They are no more malformed than
the others, except that they have the custom of wearing their hair long
already mentioned, and arm and
protect themselves with plates of copper, of which they have much.[3]
This
allusion to an island inhabited by Amazon women is important. The Amazons of Greek myth, believed to
live in Africa and Asia, are described in those myths as Òa people who excelled
at warÉand if they ever had intercourse with men and gave birth to children,
they only raised the girls.Ó[4] They were also known for going to war
and killing many Greeks. Amazons
are further described as living in ends-of-the-earth locations. Such a description implicitly connotes
an external and subordinate position in the Greco imaginary, for it was
believed that the farther one was from the Mediterranean ÒheartlandÓ the more
degenerate oneÕs culture was.[5] In Greek society only men went to war,
and so ÒAmazons symbolize what in the polis is a normative masculinity.Ó[6]
Their
placement at the edge of the known world Òis a spatial expression of their reversal
of patriarchal culture: Amazons blur the categories that classify the domains
of male and female.Ó[7] They further represent a Òstructural
reversal of the paradigm of civilization and the organization of power.Ó[8] In other words, at the edges of the
known world, in this case what was believed to be the peripheral islands off
the coast of mainland China, the binaries of human/divine, human/animal, or
male/female are being reinterpreted in unique form. It is here that Columbus is locating what would become known
as the Caribbean. A close
examination of the discovery letters in Paesi, uniquely organized in an edited
volume, demonstrates the historical specificity of discursive gender formations
across geo-political divides.
Referencing
a universal patriarchy and/or a universal male/female difference to understand
the history of gendered discourse in racialized communities does not
suffice. Rather we need to examine
the unique way that masculinity and femininity were specifically constituted in
and between Europeans, Amerindians, Africans and Asians.
To do so,
it is helpful to consider early print erotica, as it is yet another genre that
was emerging vis-ˆ-vis the mechanical reproduction of the book. For example what is widely considered
the first book in the history of pornography, I Modi translated as ÒThe PositionsÓ by
Marcantonio Raimondi and Pietro Aretino, was printed in 1527.
Anonymous 16th Century Artist, I Modi, Position 10, Woodcut after Marcantonio Raimondi after Guilio Romano. In former Toscanini volume.
Private Collection, Geneva.
Early
erotic representations of European women, such as those found in I Modi, were a matter of judgment and
moral outrage, understood as a threat against the basic purity of Ògood women.Ó
[9]
Indeed,
the array of available images, from the religious to the erotic, created an
extremely limited repertoire of imagery about Euro-Christian women; the chaste
and the unchaste. However narrow,
the possibility of being a Ògood womanÓ was in fact present for western
European women, whereas in these foundational depictions of the Americas, being
a Ògood Indian womanÓ was not in the repertoire of possibilities.[10]
Hans Baldung Grier, Madonna and Child on a Grassy Bench. Woodcut c.1505-07.
The University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor.
The
imagined hypersexuality of women in the Americas was not attributed to the
behavior of a few, but rather, was written as constitutive of who they were as
a people. Furthermore, the
outrageous sexual romps and consumption of human flesh in the images about the
Americas was not perceived by Church authorities as an excess of Christian male sexuality, as in the case of
European erotica,[11]
but rather as truth-building depictions of a society in which women were
primary sexual aggressors.
Early
colonial print cultureÕs imaginary regarding women in the Americas as those who
perform the sexual roles normally attributed to European Christian men, at once
masculinized Amerindian women and effeminized Amerindian men, encapsulating the
people of the Americas as a gender role-reversed people specific to a
geographic location.
Simultaneously, the narratives implicitly demarcate heterosexuality
proper as the purview of those in GodÕs company: that is Christian Europeans.
Another
important aspect of these tales of Amazons and sexually licentious men and
women in the Americas were not only interpreted as a sign of human inferiority,
but also conversely, as narratives of a freer society. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Redicker
state in The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary
Atlantic that
these reports about the Americas, Òinflamed the collective imagination of
Europe, inspiring endless discussion—among statesmen, philosophers, and
writers, as well as the dispossessed.Ó[12] In addition to the idea that in the
Americas lived a people without property, work, masters, or kings, also lived
the idea that a people were more sexually liberated there. For some, these discovery narratives
invoked dreams of utopia.
In Imperial
Leather (1995),
Anne McClintock further argues that the Ò[K]nowledge of the unknown world was
mapped as a metaphysics of gender violence—not as the expanded
recognition of cultural difference—and was validated by the new
Enlightenment logic of private property and possessive individualism.Ó[13] To further
McClintockÕs point; gender itself, even in Europe, was under a significant
shift in the sixteenth-century. In
the wake of social unrest left by the decimation of populations effected by the
Black Plague (During the fourteenth-century about 30% - 40% of the ÒEuropeanÓ
population was wiped out), political authorities began deploying sexuality in
particular ways. For example, the
decriminalization of rape against peasant women became the social norm.[14] In the sixteenth-century, witch-hunts
were used to destroy the power of European women and to foster deep divisions
along gendered lines within the working class.[15] Land expropriation, enclosures and the
exploitation of peasants significantly rose during this period, beginning the
long process of relegating to the home European womenÕs contributions to
community life.[16] In other words, European colonistsÕ
deployment of sexuality and gendered discourse to define people in the Americas
was also being deployed in their European communities, albeit in a distinct
manner.
It is in
this context we can better understand the meaning and implications of
representing people in the Americas as gender deviant. Whether it was believed that people in
the Americas were utopian or cursed, both narratives could be interpreted as a
threat to the organization of power in sixteenth century Western Europe. Early woodcut images of the Americas
allow us to see the moment in which the mechanically produced image of the body
is posed as one of sexual difference, and writ large on the collectivity called
Òthe AmerindianÓ that has the potential to literally consume the European male
body: penis, limbs, torso and head included.