12 - New Perspectives on Gender and Sexuality in Global Protestantism, 1500–1800

Summary

In the 1990s, scholarship increasingly focused on issues of gender and sexuality in Europe and the colonial Americas, though some studies were more global or comparative. New theoretical perspectives and new emphases have since developed, and this essay discusses four of these: First, the “emotional turn” which focuses on emotional communities, in which Protestants figure prominently, as well as emotional genealogies in other cultures. This allows for what global historians call “reciprocal comparison” where each case is viewed from the vantage point of the other. Second, processes of migration and movement that are part of the “spatial turn,” including the creation and critique of the “Atlantic World” as a site of interaction among gender cultures. Third, the “material turn,” which draws on material culture studies to assess the role of objects and the relationships between things and people in the wake of the Reformation and spread of Western Christianity. Fourth, the inclusion of a wider range of actors, including European women and indigenous people, in the processes Christian expansion and the transcultural exchange, blending, indigenization, and hybridity that resulted.