The Berdache of Early American Conquest Essay -- Spaniards Spanish His

The Berdache of Early American Conquest Methodological Introduction This paper attempts to link the facet of queer theory that explains gender and sexuality as culturally constructed identities, with the presence of the berdache in the New World at the time of the Spanish conquest. By analyzing the construction of gender and sexuality among the native peoples, in contrast to the ideologies of the Spanish, I found a clash arose which explained, in some sense, the incompatibility of the two cultures. The differences between the two cultures' gender construction established support for the very "un'natural'" or "in'essential'" nature of gender, sexuality, and the body as a means of self-identity. By realizing the issue of power and where it lies within individuals and societies, hierarchical social constructions are revealed to be connected with sexual roles. This dominant/subordinate relationship present in both cultures defines and substantiates the role that power plays in the cultural context. The use of queer theory to elucidate these complicated s ocial and sexual relationships helps to explain the way this power structure maps onto the native people's relationship with the berdache. This paper will show how the Spaniards mapped their conceptions of power and sexual relationships onto the natives. It will address this conception by carefully analyzing the presence of hermaphrodites in Theodore de Bry's copper etchings. By visualizing the berdache through the eyes of the Spaniard, the concept of sexualizing the foreign natives is revealed to be thickly imbedded in their own gender norms. This argument is two-fold. First, I will support the queer theory view of gender construction by using the native berdache as a... ...he with queer theory, the misconceptions of the Spaniards and the persecution of this particular group as "sodomites", becomes valuable in defining where specified roles of gender and sexuality are really established. Works Cited: Bucher, Bernadette. Icon and Conquest. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, (1981). Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Robert Hurley (ed). (New York, 1990). Klages, Mary. "Queer Theory" [http://www.colorado.edu/English/ENGL2012Klages /queertheory.html] (April 9, 1998). Kowalski-Wallace, Elizabeth (ed.). Encyclopedia of Feminist Literary Theory. Garland Publishing, Inc.: New York, (1997). Sedgewick, Eve Kosofsky. The Epistemology of the Closet. University of California Press: Berkeley, (1990). Trexler, Richard C. Sex and Conquest. Cornell University Press: Ithaca, (1995). Illustrations: