Deviant and Useful Citizens: The Cultural Production of the Female Body in Eighteenth-Century Peru

Abstract

This book examines how the Bourbon Reforms and Enlightenment ideas affected the attitudes of male administrators and intellectuals about women by studying their writings about the female body. The research crosses legal, religious, and scientific discourses and rests on legal documents as well as lesser known publications slighted by literary scholars and historians. The study’s originality comes from its exploration of the gendered meaning of neglected scientific writings. The writing is clear despite the complexity of the subject and should appeal to Andeanists, colonialists, and women and gender scholars.Each chapter deals with a specific manifestation of the female body. Micaela Bastidas, executed for treason in 1781, represents the political body; the drawings in Trujillo del Perú, the economically productive or commoditized body; the convent history written by Sor María de la Santísima Trinidad discusses the religious body; and the medicalized body emerges from the pages of Mercurio peruano. These writings reflected how most men and some women thought about women and how women’s bodies were classified as useful or deviant. While the theme of the body unifies the study, and the 1781 – 95 time frame links the stories together as contemporary events, each chapter could stand alone.At the heart of the text is how patriarchy adapted itself to the Age of Reason and to emerging civic domesticity, and how women’s bodies provided the canvas upon which notions of modernity and protonationalism were worked out by authors who represented the state. This book thus sits in the mainstream of North American historiography about Latin American gender and sexuality. The themes of class and race are also addressed. The work is solidly grounded in documentary evidence; it is a first attempt to analyze strategies of discourses that made women’s bodies dynamic symbols of social productivity.Three chapters explore protonationalism from the Peruvian point of view. The most dramatic event, the execution of Micaela Bastidas, comes first. Bastidas emerges as a powerful, arrogant woman who used violence, fear, intimidation, and the death penalty as political tools to control clients and subdue followers. Such deeds made her a “monster” to Spanish officials and even to supporters of Tupac Amaru. In letters to him she used the rhetoric of fear to prod him to act and questioned his manliness. Although during her trial she stated that she feared her husband, who had beaten her and who demanded blind obedience, this admission of female weakness did not save her. Was she executed for treason or because she was a deviant woman who violated the social roles imposed upon her by gender, race, and class? Although the more modern idea of the guillotine already existed, the crown preferred a ghastly method that taught potential rebels that they best shelve the idea of an independent Peru.Two chapters explore the ideas of creole intellectuals. The history of a convent written in 1745 by a Sor María Josefa chronicles the holiness of the founding members of the community by narrating the physical mortifications they practiced. The heroic sufferings, largely self-induced by unhealthy habits, turned the women into examples of perua-nidad; that makes this story unusual. Mercurio peruano editors and Sor María believed that these colonial women served as patriotic models of virtuous citizens and may have used the essay to raise funds to save the convent from bankruptcy. Medical articles from Mercurio peruano demonstrate contemporary interest in healthy populations. They focus on the biology of reproduction and explore female anatomy and embryology, asking a range of questions from how and why monsters or highly disfigured children are born to more mundane topics such as prenatal advice to pregnant women and monitoring the behavior of wet nurses. Contemporary reasoning and science located the problems in defective female organs or risky behaviors.The Royal Academy of History, established in 1712, promoted the writing of new types of natural and civil histories of the Americas to guide crown development projects. Trujillo del Perú demonstrates that Bishop Baltasar Martínez Compañón embraced the task of naturalist enthusiastically to produce a nine-volume pictorial history of his diocese. Meant to function as a museum diorama, it contained only watercolor drawings, maps, and so on. This visual encyclopedia of Trujillo includes 78 illustrations of women that are categorized to differentiate between ethnic groups in the areas of work and culture. The number of pictures representing each female population is based on its place in the social hierarchy. While many drawings of Spanish women appear, there is only one of a black woman, even though census data suggest the opposite. More unusual are the many illustrations of working women that document a gendered workplace and portray them as economically productive members of society and important to regional and imperial prosperity.