Women, Sex, and Violence in Colonial Urban Spaces
Jacqueline Holler
Department of History/Women's Studies
University of Northern British Columbia
(Canada)
The urban milieu of early colonial Mexico is a perfect example of the contact zone, that social space “where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in high asymmetrical relations of power” (Pratt).
The colonial city was kaleidoscopic in its diversity and riven by intersecting axes of power and domination. It was also gendered space. My paper will explore women’s experiences of sex and violence in this colonial space. On one hand, the colonial city has been remembered as a site of violence in much colonial historiography, but I argue that urban architecture, witchcraft, and plebeian neighbourhood coalitions actually offered the possibility of significant interventions in women’s experience of spousal violence. Such coalitions were heterogeneous, and became spaces for social evaluation and for the real if ephemeral negotiation of hierarchy, domination, and violence.
If the urban plebeian community offered the situational protection of others in this way with regard to violence, it also offered the possibility of negotiating sexuality in ways that escaped authorized sexual ideologies. Much attention has been paid to the sexual victimization of women under colonialism, and to the ways in which colonial gender ideologies constructed women’s sexuality in line with caste and class stereotypes. Considerably less attention has been paid to instances in which women speak their desire—instances sometimes viewed as impossible to access (Lavrin) or, simply, impossible.
I argue that in urban centres in colonial Mexico, women participated in the fashioning of a new colonial sexual knowledge and practice suffused by race and class assumptions—a fashioning that took place largely in the gendered spaces of the street. The urban sexual milieu undoubtedly opened the door for the victimization of women, particularly colonized and poor ones. However, documents also allow us to access and remember the ways in which at least some women navigated the sexual contact zone of the colonial city as desiring subjects.
In sum, this essay aims at an examination of the myriad ways in which sex and spousal violence were forged and reforged in the gendered spaces of the colonial city. Though rooted in primary documents and secondary historical literature, the presentation will be aimed at an interdisciplinary audience and, it is hoped, will engage transhistorical questions about domination, negotiation, and desire in the lives of women. The presentation will also attempt to engage with the conference themes of remembering and forgetfulness by assessing the ways in which sex and violence in the lives of colonial women have been inscribed in historiography.
About Jacqueline Holler
Jacqueline Holler is Coordinator of Women's and Gender Studies Programs at the University of Northern British Columbia. She is author of _Escogidas Plantas: Nuns and Beatas in Mexico City, 1531--1601_ (Columbia University Press, 2005/2003) and articles on gender and women in early colonial Mexico.