Andeans and Spaniards in the Contact Zone: A Gendered Collision

Abstract

Although the Spanish invasion of the Andes has frequently been figured as a cultural collision, what remains less chronicled is that it was also a gender collision. For embedded within that confrontation between two vastly different worlds European and native American was an encounter between peoples who held dissimilar beliefs about what it meant to be a woman and what it meant to be a man. The purpose of this article is to: (1) explore how gender roles, gender relations, and sexuality varied in Inca and Spanish societies; and (2) to measure how the imposition of Spanish colonialism affected indigenous gender systems, resulting in significant changes in the societal positions of both women and men, but especially women, by the end of the sixteenth century.