The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late Colonial Mexico

Stoner, K. Lynn; Stern, Steve J.

doi:10.2307/970637

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“…Their focus, then, was not the judicial acts of the women involved in the disputes but rather the variable ethnic cultures of violence against women in Mexico. 22 More recent investigations based on native-language legal documents from colonial Oaxaca have begun to combine attention to local culture modo grosso with more specific attention to concepts of law itself. Following in a tradition of scholarship pioneered by Susan Kellogg's 1995 work on women and law among the colonial Mexica, these studies have begun to probe how indigenous concepts of disorder, passion, and amorous jealousy contained in legal testimony clashed or fused with Spanish concepts of crime and sin as well as hierarchies of rule.23 Such local knowledge, produced by what have been dubbed the "new philologists," can only be enhanced when the documents that reveal it are situated within a comparative history of legal culture.…”

Section: Historiography and Harmonymentioning

confidence: 99%

Felipa's Braid: Women, Culture, and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Oaxaca

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2014

Ethnohistory

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This article reassesses the notions of culture that are tied up with our understandings of gender and ethnicity in colonial Oaxaca. It examines the lawsuits indigenous women leveled against husbands and lovers in the eighteenth century to revisit some canonical scholarly claims about gender culture among the region's inhabitants. Traditional scholarship has approached such cases as evidence of women's assertion of agency in their relationships with husbands and lovers or as the ethnic defense of community against the Spanish colonial state. Such approaches sidestep the law itself as a subject of analysis. When compared to the legal activities of inhabitants elsewhere in the empire, we find women's engagement with Spanish justice in Oaxaca was reluctant at best and, at times, at odds with judges' notion of the law as beyond the control of the participants. But women's instrumental engagement with law was not wholly unique to the region. It followed patterns observable in other communities, including Spain. Thus, rather than look at these documents through an ethnic or gendered lens alone, one can also read them as evidence of Oaxacan women's dynamic participation in the creation of a broader imperial legal culture that pitted local peace against legal process.

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Section: Historiography and Harmonymentioning

confidence: 99%

Felipa's Braid: Women, Culture, and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Oaxaca

Premo

2014

Ethnohistory

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late Colonial Mexico

Cited by 1 publication

References 0 publications

Felipa's Braid: Women, Culture, and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Oaxaca

Felipa's Braid: Women, Culture, and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Oaxaca

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