Joshyapplecider's Blog

I-N-D-E-P-E-N-D-E-N-T do you know what that mean?

joshyapplecider — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 18:17:32 +0000

The chapters in Gauderman’s book Women’s Lives in Colonial Quito on the work that women did in colonial society are fascinating. Throughout the book Gauderman argues that the notions of patriarchy that many posess don’t really apply to colonial Spanish American society. These chapters are especially convincing because she is able to demonstrate how mcuh women actively participated in the economic life of the times. In colonial Quito, women owned and operated small textile factories, owned and operated small grocery stores (pulperias), owned land, marketed goods in the street, loaned money, and owned slaves. Of course, race and class affected which women could do what. For example, Spanish women often owned pulperias but would pay lower class women and men (often mestizo) to operate them. Indigenous women, mestizas, and blacks were the ones who most often sold goods in the street. However, Gauderman shows that both Spanish women and non-Spanish women owned land and loaned money. In fact Gauderman says that women were often the people who kept actual money flowing through the economy. Women with even a little money would loan it out .

Gender and property in colonial Spanish America also played out in interesting ways. Married women had, to a large extent, complete control over their property even after marriage, unlike in colonial British America, where property automatically became the husband’s once the marriage took place. Women, then, remained financially independent after marriage. They could even loan their spouses money and sue if it wasn’t paid back!

Gauderman’s point in all of this is to point out how the bureaucratic decentralism practiced by the colonial government and the Spanish crown influenced colonial Spanish American society. In an effort to stop any one group from concentrating power, the crown created and encouraged competition and overlapping jurisdiction. In the same way, marriage became a space of competition and competing jurisdictions. To prevent the male patriarchs from gaining to much economic power, property was left to a great extent in the hands of women.

Getting Ratted Out to the Inquisition

joshyapplecider — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 14:58:31 +0000

One of the articles for this week, “Women, Religion, and Power” by Martha Few, utilized two cases of accusations of witchcraft and “superstition” from Inquisition records from colonial Guatemala to discuss the ways in which women used religion to exercise power over their own lives. These two women, Lorensa de Galves and Sebastiana de la Cruz, were reported to the Inquisition after witnesses to their rituals, one a mulatta slave and the other a Catholic priest, felt that their actions were heretical in nature. Lorensa used a ritual that involved spinning scissors in the air while invoking the twelve apostles to find out who stole several items of clothing. The mistress of the mulatta slave discovered this ritual and disrupted it. Sebastiana was accused of believing that her son was a son of god and had divine powers. Specifically she and several other people had knelt in front of him while he was on a cross wearing a crown of thorns. She also attributed to her son divine birth, saying that he had come from the sky.

Martha Few attributes to these actions great significance given their race, gender, and class status. She argues that their actions were about power and the ways in which women could appropriate religious imagery and language for their own uses. Sebastiana was a mulatta and a widow. She used Catholic imagery in the rituals she practiced with her son and others, but in a way not sanctioned by the Church and in fact fairly heretical. Lorensa was white and also a widow. Her “witchcraft” also used Catholic imagery(the twelve apostles) but for her own uses (to find the stolen articles of clothing; which apparently she was able to do!) Few links these actions to women’s acts of resistance to the social climate of the day. This is a novel interpretation in that both these things could just be interpreted as overly superstitious/slightly crazy women doing weird things (which is how witchcraft comes off to me!) Few is able to re-contextualize these, to show how they make sense in a world in which women (and especially widowed women) have to justify their non-traditional actions because they lack power and privilege.

Intersexed Individuals and Colonial Medical Knowledge

joshyapplecider — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 18:34:43 +0000

In Martha Few’s article “That Monster of Nature” she details the case of an intersexed person in late colonial Guatemala, Juana Aguilar, who was charged with double concubinage (unmarried living with a man and a woman). Juana is revealed to be intersexed, then described using the term hermaphrodite. A physician is called in to examine Juana after Juana has been examined by midwives and lay surgeons. This physician, Narciso Esparragosa, attempts to debunk the declaration that Juana is a hermaphrodite. Instead of being both “man and woman” Juana is “neither man nor woman”. He comes to this conclusion after examining Juana’s genitalia.

I thought that it was interesting that Esparragosa defines Juana as “neither man nor woman” which is of course what intersexed people are. Esparragosa has an oddly advanced attitude toward what we know as intersexuality. However, in other ways his attitude is very chauvinist. He believes, for example, that Juana’s enlarged clitoris would lead her to be more “lascivious” than a woman with a smaller clitoris. It was funny/sad/racist that he claims that “Egyptian” women typically have larger clitorises, and provides a justification for female genital mutilation. He claims it is a “necessity” to maintain honor. Esparragosa also assumes that there is some legitimate standard to judge what a nomral clitoris (and male genitalia) looks like. His arrogance is astonishing.

I really can’t imagine what it must have been like for Juana. They charge her with a crime, have her examined by any number of experts, and then hire Esparragosa to write a report about her. His report is published in a newspaper even. Also, during his examination he attempts to stimulate her to find out if she is able to have sex as a “man” which is really quite disturbing. Juana is even given a nickname “Juana La Larga” which means “Long Juana”. While all this is going on, I’m sure that she was struggling with her own feelings about her sexuality and gender. I’ve mentioned before the Argentinian film XXY about an intersexed individual Alex who also has a less than ideal interface with the medical establishment. I think I will never understand why people have a strong aversion to accepting that everything is a little more complicated and unknowable (especially something as complicated as sexuality and gender) than we would like to think.

A Church Dilemma? A Self-Created Dilemma Maybe

joshyapplecider — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 19:59:18 +0000

The Lavrin article we read this week, “Sexuality in Colonial Mexico: A Church Dilemma”, details the Catholic Churches rules and methods for enforcing a prescribed sexuality. The Church made rules for who one could have sex with, how one could perform that sex, and the crux of the first two, who one could marry. Sex was for married people, and married people were people who weren’t too closely related and whose parents didn’t object. The sex these married people had was pretty muc limited to procreative sex. In other words, the boring stuff. The Church uses the confessional and its discipline as the main tool to enforce these rules.

As Lavrin says, “There was always a gap between religious canons and the actual behavior of the people.”(48) Lavrin uses Church records to prove this explicitly. It makes me wonder then, why make rules no one can/will follow? Especially rules around something like sex, something so much more tied to really basic drives than say silver mining or something like that. The Church tried to create tight definitions around sex and gender that people persistently broke through. It seems like the solution would be to make rules that people agree upon, and that they can follow. The Church apparently didn’t think so, maybe because god gave them infallibility. It made both masturbation and non-marital sex a sin. People are going to do one or other, and yet they are both a sin. Makes absolutely no sense. It made being queer a sin, and yet us queers kept on sinning. Makes no sense. The Church apparently had little to no understanding of humanity, despite being composed entirely of humanity.

Loving, Honoring, and Obeying

joshyapplecider — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 19:50:18 +0000

The book we read for this week, To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico by Patricia Seed, pretty much blew away the majority of my preconceived notions about marriage in colonial Mexican society (to the extent that I had any!). Seed argues that until the late 17th century, marrying for love was the norm, and a norm protected vigorously by the Catholic Church. Seed’s book basically revealed to me that I had previously thought that people started marrying for love around about 1960.

Her argument centers around the changing conception of marriage following the Reformation in Europe in the 16th century. Marriage became, countering Luther’s doctrine that marriage was a civil affair, a holy sacrament. This meant that it had to be entered into freely, or it was worthless. The Church, then, had to defend marrying for love from parents/guardians who wanted marriage for gain. And it remained that way for several hundred years. What happened was that the world changed around the Church, and its ideas about marriage became antiquated and out of step. Marriage became again about social gain (at least for those who had anything to gain or lose). What Seed says happens is the birth of capitalism. As wealth for some increased, maintaining it became ever important. Cultural values around what gave people status changed (wealth and class status replaced virtue as the source of social standing). Marriage for love, without thought to the social consequences, became anathema. Parents went out of their way to make sure their children married the partner whose status/wealth matched/exceeded their own; and the Church became less able and less willing to do anything about it.

The bulk of Seed’s evidence comes from reading the cases of marriage disputes (where someone wishes to prevent another person from marrying) for the entirety of the colonial period in Mexico. What she learns is that the arguments that successfully prevent marriage changed. They started out being only things like too close relations, previous promises to marry, etc. Arguments like “they’re too poor” didn’t cut it. Eventually, however, challenges based on unequal social status (wealth, race) started to work. The actions taken by the Church to ensure marriages were free, and not coerced, changed as well. The Church, for a period of time, would perform secret marriages and offer protective custody. These practices became rarer and rarer even though the Church’s rhetoric stayed the same.

Seed’s approach included not only the aforementioned analysis of archival records, but also close readings of popular literature in Spain and religious texts about marriage put out by the Church. This approach enabled her to not only analize actual practice, but also to give the reader a sense of where the culture was at and what the rhetoric of the Church was. The discrepancies are quite interesting.

Women’s Lives in Colonial Spanish America

joshyapplecider — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 15:57:11 +0000

Its funny to me how much my conceptions prior to reading the Gauderman book (and other things this semester) were that life for women in colonial Spanish America was exactly the same as what I thought life was like for women in colonial North America. I had thought that they were downtrodden, with no rights, subject to tyrannical male authority from the husband on up. In hindsight maybe basing my opinions solely upon what I gleaned from a rather useless high school text and The Scarlet Letter maybe wasn’t the wisest choice. Regardless, Gauderman talks about how women (and children) were relatively independent in colonial society. Her argument is that the Spanish governing structure, bureaucratic de-centralism, operated at the level of government but also in the structuring of “colonial social and legal norms”. The logic was that absolute authority had to be checked at all levels, even within the family. So woman had to be able to contest the absolute authority of their husbands. They used the legal system, and to a lesser extent (and less successfully) the ecclesiastical courts, to contest the behavior of their husbands. It is really striking how litigious the Spanish were, especially when people today talk about how people will sue over anything, as if its something new. When one considers this, Spanish women weren’t as helpless as one might think they were.

Its interesting to me think about how cultures varied across Europe, and how different Spain was from, say, England. The English developed a different form of colonial government, had different laws concerning women and children (they had no legal rights and could not own property), different inheritance customs, than the Spanish did. Yet they’re both European, and until the mid 1500s had basically the same religion. It makes Europe seem much less homogeneous than I had previously thought. In prior weeks we’ve talked about how slavery varied in the Americas, depending on location and the en-slaver. The same thing I guess. My apparently uneducated mind is blown.

African Slavery and Slavery in the Americas

joshyapplecider — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 02:14:15 +0000

The Thornton article we read this week, “Slavery and African Social Structure”, was for me quite fascinating. My learning up to this point about slavery and slave-holding (what little that was) had up to this point been limited to learning about slavery in the United States. I guess I always knew that there was some form of slavery in Africa, but beyond that and the idea that it was somehow “different”, I didn’t know anything.

Thornton points out that slavery “functioned quite differently from the way it functioned in European societies.” He gives it’s origins as economic; with no land held in private hands, labor (other people’s as well as one’s own) became the only source of wealth (ultimately, of course, labor is the source of all wealth everywhere under capitalism). It was different from the slavery practiced by Europeans in that slaves were treated somewhat better and more was invested in them. I guess with less distance between themselves and their slaves, Africans felt more compelled to treat them somewhat decently.

Its hard at first to wrap my head around the idea that there were different forms of slavery. I think part of that comes from a resistance to believing that my ancestors or others of my peers, were part of such an ugly ugly system. Its easier to think that they were only doing something that might have been done in Africa, not doing something qualitatively worse. ”If the Africans did it to each other, we’re no worse than they are.”

But from a materialist perspective, it makes sense that institutions vary in accordance with the conditions under which they arrive. A pre-capitalist Africa would develop a different form of slavery than a European society, fresh from conquering a continent, would. Dr. Black mentioned in class that the development of capitalism as a world system was based in part on the enslavement of black Africans. Slavery in the Americas intensified the slave trade in Africa, as they both became part of this same system. Viewed this way, the European involvement in slavery is neither some sickness in European nor is it the same as in Africa. It was part of a qualitative evolution in the world economy.

Death by Murder

joshyapplecider — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 15:46:10 +0000

I’m going to analyze the final document, the note pinned to the body of Maria De Caravantes.

Origins: This document was written in Mixtec originally in 1684, which is a language of southern Mexico. In it, the author wishes to explain why he murdered his wife (she was stepping out on him) and also demand that the person his wife was stepping out on him with be brought to justice (for adultery, I guess). It is addressed to “all of you lords who are officials (justices), the lord lieutenant, or the lord alcalde mayor, or the Nudzahui (‘Mixtec’) officials.” Presumably they are the folks who could bring the other man to justice.

Motives: The author wants Domingo, the man his wife (he claims) was having sex with, to be brought to justice for having extramarital sex with his wife. He also wants to exonerate himself. He blames Domingo for the murder of his wife (although it was he himself who did it). He says “[b]ecause of him I have killed my wife.” He is trying to give a rationale for his actions.

Perspective: The author clearly feels pretty righteous about what he did. He refuses to take responsibility for it, and seems to think that murder is the appropriate punishment for adultery. He also places much confidence in the justices to whom he addressed the letter. He says “[y]ou will know lord lieutenant what to do, so that justice will be done.”

Text: The author recounts the several times he caught Domingo and his wife Maria together, and mentions the cape he tore off of Domingo as he was running away one of those times. He presents this as evidence that it was Domingo who was the man, and says that if he denies it, “[t]ake him to the rack, there e will confess.” In fact, he emphasizes in three different paragraphs that torture will make the truth come to light.

Information: This documents, to me, says that folks took adultery pretty seriously during this time period (not that I’m saying it isn’t serious). Serious enough to murder over, anyway. The author seems pretty confident Domingo will get his just reward as well. The law, then, probably also took adultery very seriously. He also, in the letter, mentions where he is hiding out, so he must be pretty confident about being exonerated for the killing. That says to me that probably honor killings like this might have been something fairly common, or at least not totally bizarre. Now, if someone left a note on the corpse the media would call him/her “the letter killer” or something. He also writes the cross several times, signifying that he is telling the truth. He must have put a lot of faith in that, presumably because it was such a serious thing to do, to swear to the truth. Or at least he believed that others would believe him because he drew a cross.

Intersexuality and Our Notions of Gender

joshyapplecider — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 17:09:26 +0000

Our discussion in class on Thursday on the South African athlete Caster Semenya, an intersexed person (although her subjective identity is that of a woman) really hammered home for me how everything we think about gender is binary. Man and woman are all that there is for most of us; group a or group b. The existence of intersexed people kind of blows that out of the water. The Intersex Society of North America (ISNA) says that an estimated 1 in 1500 to 1 in 2000 children are born intersexed in some way. That means that there are millions of intersexed people in the world. Millions of people who are biologically distinct from out notions of male and female are out there living their lives. Our thinking about gender, at least in the U.S., can’t encompass the existence of such folks. I guess that’s why so many children are surgically assigned gender shortly after being born. And the ISNA supports assigning gender early on, although not surgically, “depending on which of those genders the child is more likely to feel as she or he grows up”. For me this recalls the Argentinian film XXY, about an intersexed young person living in Uruguay. The mother of this person invites her friend and her friend’s plastic surgeon husband (and their son) to visit, secretly hoping to persuade her husband and her child to consider surgical gender assignment (previously the child had been taking hormones to retard male characteristics from manifesting). This backfires, with the child (called Alex, a gender neutral name) refusing to identify as either gender. The father of this child tells the plastic surgeon that he knew his child was perfect the way it was from the moment it was born (he uses “perfecta” the feminine adjective though. he mixes genders throughout the film when speaking about his child). Throughout the entire film I kept asking myself why the person would ever be made to choose. Why can’t someone deviate from that particular norm without some throwing a fit? What does an openly intersexed person threaten? What comes to mind is that it threatens the gender binary. Why preserve an artificial binary, one that so clearly doesn’t reflect humanity? I can’t see any good reason to preserve it. The human race won’t die out, cities won’t crumble. Is it so wrong to have to rethink about gender and about how gender is used in society based on this new understanding that our notions of gender are outmoded and outdated? When I think about the kind of society I’d like to see, it is one that is free of gender. If gender is something artificial, that in the case of intersexed people has meant that hundreds of thousands have their genitals mutilated, that has meant queer people have been persecuted, isn’t that something that needs to go? I, for one, could do without it.

Sinayuca was a class collaborator

joshyapplecider — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:54:20 +0000

This week we read an article about Eugenio Sinayuca, a kuraka from the same region (around Cuzco) as the famed rebel (rebel) Tupac Amaru. When Tupac Amaru stepped up to rebel against the (local, anyway) Spanish government, Sinayuca did not step up with him. And the reason he did not step up with him was not because he was a supporter of Spanish rule. In fact, he was resolutely anti-Spanish rule. He did not rebel due to petty personal politics. He was allied with a local corregidor, Antonio de Arraiga, and Tupac Amaru was an enemy of the said corregidor. Nevermind that this particular corregidor was famous for his abuses of the reparto. In addition, Tupac was allied with the local bishop, who had excommunicated Sinayuca because of his support for Arraiga. Sinayuca apparently valued his personal relationship (who was, again, a noted abuser of power) over the possibility of throwing off Spanish rule. He may have felt that the few communities he governed were better off in servitude and destitution by mita than possibly harmed fighting for their freedom. One wonders how many other class collaborators acted due to similarly petty reasons. Might the rebellion have succeeded if these corrupted betrayers of their own people had been braver? Of course we’ll never know.