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Crossing borders in transnational gender history*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 October 2011

Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, PO Box 413, Milwaukee, WI 53201, USA E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Transnational history and the history of gender and sexuality have both been concerned with the issue of borders and their crossing, but the two fields themselves have not intersected much in the past. This is beginning to change, and this article surveys recent scholarship that draws on both fields, highlighting work in six areas: movements for women’s and gay rights; diverse understandings of sexuality and gender; colonialism and imperialism; intermarriage; national identity and citizenship; and migration. This new research suggests ways in which the subject matter, theory, and methodology in transnational history and the history of gender and sexuality can interconnect: in the two fields’ mutual emphasis on intertwinings, relationships, movement, and hybridity; their interdisciplinarity and stress on multiple perspectives; and their calls for destabilization of binaries.

Keywords

colonialismgenderintermarriagesexualitytransnational
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , November 2011 , pp. 357 - 379
Copyright
Copyright © London School of Economics and Political Science 2011

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References

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20 In 2004–2006, I was on the Kelly prize committee; my thanks to Katherine French for providing me with the statistics for 2010 and 2011.

21 This includes a forum, edited by Karen Hagemann and María Teresa Fernández-Aceves, ‘Gendering trans/national historiographies: similarities and differences in comparison’, Journal of Women’s History, 19, 1, 2007, pp. 151–213.

22 Ulrike Strasser’s ‘A case of empire envy? German Jesuits meet an Asian mystic in Spanish America‘, Journal of Global History, 2, 1, 2007, pp. 23–40, does use gender as a category of analysis.

23 Mary Louise Roberts also notes this parallel in ‘The transnationalization of gender history’, History and Theory, 44, 3, 2005, p. 462.

24 Margot Canaday, ‘Thinking sex in the transnational turn: an introduction’, American Historical Review, 114, 5, 2009, p. 1251.

25 Dagmar Herzog, ‘Syncopated sex: transforming European sexual cultures’, American Historical Review, 114, 5, 2009, p. 1291. Ida Blom agrees with this assessment, in ‘Gender as an analytical tool in global history’, in Sogner, Sølvi, ed. Making sense of global history: the 19th International Congress of the Historical Sciences, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2001Google Scholar, pp. 71–86.

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39 Kozol, in ‘American Historical Review conversation’, p. 1445. Kozol’s own work does just what she calls for: Hesford, Wendy, and Kozol, Wendy, eds. Just advocacy? Women’s human rights, transnational feminisms, and the politics of representation, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005Google Scholar.

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46 Martin Nesvig, ‘The complicated terrain of Latin American homosexuality’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 81, 3–4, 2001, pp. 689–729, presents a good overview of this debate, as well as other issues. For other studies of sexuality and colonization in Latin America, see Carvajal, Federico Garza, Butterflies will burn: prosecuting sodomites in early modern Spain and Mexico, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2003Google Scholar; ‘Sexual encounters/sexual collisions: alternative sexualities in colonial Mesoamerica’, special issue, Ethnohistory, 54, 1, 2007, pp. 3–194; and the many works of Pete Sigal, including From moon goddesses to virgins: the colonization of Yucatecan Maya sexual desire, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2000; idem, Infamous desire: male homosexuality in colonial Latin America, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003; idem, ‘Latin America and the challenge of globalizing the history of sexuality’, American Historical Review, 114, 5, 2009, pp. 1340–53.

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On Spanish colonialism, see Martha Few, Women who live evil lives: gender, religion, and the politics of power in colonial Guatemala, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2002; Miroslava Chávez-García, Negotiating conquest: gender and power in California, 1770s to 1880s, Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2004; Karen Vieira Powers, Women in the crucible of conquest: the gendered genesis of Spanish American society, 1500–1600, Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2005.

On French imperialism, see Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda, eds., Domesticating the empire: race, gender and family life in French and Dutch colonialism, Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1997; Alice Conklin, A mission to civilize: the republican idea of empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997; Alice Bullard, Exile to paradise: savagery and civilization in Paris and the South Pacific, 1790–1900, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000; ‘Intersections of race and gender in French history’, special issue, French Historical Studies, 33, 3, 2010.

On British imperialism, see (among many) Anne McClintock, Imperial leather: race, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest, London: Routledge, 1995; Felicity Nussbaum, Torrid zones: maternity, sexuality, and empire in eighteenth-century English narratives, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995; Richard Phillips, Sex, politics, and empire: a postcolonial geography, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006; Angela Woollacott, Gender and empire, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

48 Giulia Calvi, ‘Global trends: gender studies in Europe and the US’, European History Quarterly, 40, 4, 2010, p. 645.

49 Claire C. Robertson and Nupur Chaudhuri, eds., ‘Revising the experiences of colonized women: beyond binaries’, special issue, Journal of Women’s History, 14, 4, 2003.

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54 The concept of ‘gender frontiers’ was first proposed by Kathleen Brown in Good wives, nasty wenches and anxious patriarchs: gender, race, and power in colonial Virginia, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Like so much else in gender history, the role of intermarriage in the creation of racial categories has been particularly well studied for North America: Kirsten Fischer, Suspect relations: sex, race, and resistance in colonial North Carolina, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001; Adele Perry, On the edge of empire: gender, race, and the making of British Columbia, 1849–1871, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001; Elise Lemire, ‘Miscegenation’: making race in America, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002; Nancy Shoemaker, A strange likeness: becoming red and white in eighteenth-century North America, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; Thomas N. Ingersoll, To intermix with our white brothers: Indian mixed bloods in the United States from earliest times to the Indian removal, Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2005; Peggy Pascoe, What comes naturally: miscegenation law and the making of race in America, New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

On gender, racial mixing, and national identity in Latin America, see Maria Elena Martinez, ‘The black blood of New Spain: limpieza de sangre, racial violence, and gendered power in early colonial Mexico’, William and Mary Quarterly, 61, 3, 2004, pp. 479–520; Susan Kellogg, ‘Depicting mestizaje: gendered images of ethnorace in colonial Mexican texts’, Journal of Women’s History, 12, 3, 2000, pp. 69–92; Magal M. Carrera, Imagining identity in New Spain: race, lineage, and the colonial body in portraiture and casta paintings, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2003.

55 Letter from Colbert to Intendant Jean Talon, 5 January 1666, quoted and translated in Saliha Belmessous, ‘Assimilation and racialism in seventeenth and eighteenth-century French colonial policy’, American Historical Review, 110, 2, April 2005, pp. 325, 326..

56 Quoted in Guillame Aubert, ‘“The blood of New France”: race and purity of the blood in the French Atlantic world’, William and Mary Quarterly, 61, 3, 2004, p. 449.

57 Ibid., p. 459.

58 Quoted in Jennifer M. Spear, ‘“They need wives”: métissage and the regulation of sexuality in French Louisiana, 1699–1730’, in Hodes, Martha, ed. Sex, love, race: crossing boundaries in North American history, New York: New York University Press, 1999, pp. 47, 48, 50Google Scholar. See also Spear’s book, Race, sex, and social order in early New Orleans, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

59 See my Christianity and sexuality in the early modern world: regulating desire, reforming practice, 2nd edition, London: Routledge, 2010.

60 See Blussé, Leonard, Bitter bonds: a colonial divorce drama of the seventeenth century, trans. Diane Webb, Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2002Google Scholar; Pickles, Katie, and Rutherdale, Myra, eds. Contact zones: aboriginal and settler women in Canada’s colonial past, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005Google Scholar; Sleeper-Smith, Susan, Indian women and French men: rethinking cultural encounter in the western Great Lakes, Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001Google Scholar; Barr, Juliana, Peace came in the form of a woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas borderlands, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007Google Scholar; Fur, Gunlög, A nation of women: gender and colonial encounters among the Delaware Indians, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Taylor, Jean Gelman, The social world of Batavia: European and Eurasian in Dutch Asia, 2nd edition, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009Google Scholar.

61 Quoted in Brooks, George E., Eurafricans in western Africa: commerce, social status, gender, and religious observance from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003, p. 214Google Scholar. Two other studies that examine gender in the Afro-Portuguese Atlantic are Sweet, James, Recreating Africa: culture, kinship and religion in the African–Portuguese world, 1441–1770, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003Google Scholar, and Matory, J. Lorand, Black Atlantic religion: tradition, transnationalism, and matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian candomblé, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005Google Scholar.

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80 Both Margot Canaday and Joanne Meyerowitz make this same point in the American Historical Review forum on transnational sexualities.

81 Gayatri Spivak, ‘Subaltern studies: deconstructing historiography’, in Landry, Donna, and MacLean, Gerald, eds. The Spivak reader: selected works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, London: Routledge, 1995Google Scholar, p. 214.